Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Lachman's opus on what he terms the dark side of the 1960's is breath-taking in the scope of material he addresses and the seemingly disparate personages and movements that he ties together. However, he often seems like a conspiracy-obsessed Christofascist driven to reducing everything to Charles Manson and Satanism. Drawing a (albeit convuluted) line from gurus like Alan Watts to 60's villians like Manson and Anton LaVey is at the very least misleading, and what's worse, smacks of libel. If you approach the material with advance knowledge of Lachman's flaming prejudices and sensationalistic tendencies, Turn Off Your Mind can be an interesting review of the counter-cults of the era, much in the same way Michael Howard's Occult Conspiracy is an interesting yet flawed overview of the role of secret societies in world events.

I'm not quite sure an author who's immersed himself so deeply in esoteric subjects as Lachman tries so hard to play to the kind of ignorant hysterical prejudice we take for granted from people like Pat Robertson. Is he trying to sell books by slapping the "satanist" label on any religious philosophy that is even slightly unorthodox? Or is there some strange agenda to shepherd the earnest yet naive seeker into the dark side by tying unlikely figures like John Lennon and Jack Kerouac to Beezelbub? There are considerable leaps of logic and assumptions lept to that aren't backed up by evidence, but even so anyone interested in the subjects covered will be entertained and occasionally edified. There remains an opportunity to tackle the topics that Lachman cover in Turn Off Your Mind in a more constructive and responsible fashion. That is unless you believe that Tolkien and Casteneda lead inevitably to Nazi Satanism, as Lachman seems to conclude in the final chapter of the book.

"Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream" are the first words John Lennon read in 1966 when he opened The Psychedelic Experience, a sleek, black volume by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner (New York: University Press, 1964). The Beatle Lennon inserted the concept into his song "Tomorrow Never Knows" for the transitional Beatles' album Revolver released later that year. Lennon listened to a recording of himself reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead when he wrote that song while tripping on LSD. The first lyrics are:

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void,
It is shining, it is shining.

I was eighteen and a Beatles' fan when Revolver appeared. I listened to it and that song over and over when it came out but I had little experience with the burgeoning occult movement and mystical drug cultures that inspired it. I had only a vague idea of what Lennon was singing about but I knew it had something to do with drugs. That changed dramatically in following years. I began "experimenting" with some drugs and sought out exotic spirituality too. For many of us coming of age in the sixties the Beatles were guideposts. John Lennon and George Harrison especially seemed to be on the cutting edge of popular fashion in everything from hairstyle to spiritual philosophies. In college I became an art student among the hippie milieu. We were reading Hesse, Jung, Camus, McLuhan, Heinlein, Rimbaud, Tolkien, Marcusse, Mailer, Yogananda and Blake. Some of us went deeper and darker. We read Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Crowley, Gurdjieff, Hubbard, and even LaVey.

Despite the Vietnam War, there was an incredible romanticism and idealism if not rebelliousness alive on campuses across America and Europe then. It culminated in the now infamous `summer of love' in 1967. But the bright sunshine of Aquarius waned quickly. Woodstock notwithstanding, Charles Manson and his drugged-up, murderous Family became the image of all that was decadent in hippie culture by 1969. The sixties were over. However, as Gary Lachman writes on pages 392-93 of Turn Off Your Mind, "Manson didn't `kill the sixties' as some have suggested. They committed suicide, ODed on excess, high expectations, and a belief that in getting rid of all repression--what I've called `giving away to strange forces--some pure, natural soul would emerge. They were wrong."

At age 18 Gary (Valentine) Lachman was a founding member and songwriter for the punk-rock group Blondie. He was born in 1955 in New Jersey. Just out of high school he went to New York to be a poet. Eventually he moved to London in 1996 where he yet resides. His early contacts with the music industry during the 70s placed him in the midst of many significant persons who were "there" during the 60s `revolution.' In another book, Lachman mentions his serious dalliance for several years with a Gurdjieff group. After two years with Blondie Lachman continued as a musician with other bands including Iggy Pop but music eventually gave way to his career as a journalist and writer. He is a literary critic for many publications including The Fortean Times. Lachman is the latest among astute commentators on the modern occult revival and New Age sects in the genre of James Webb (The Occult Establishment, The Harmonious Circle), Bruce Campbell (Ancient Wisdom Revived), Peter Washington (Madame Blavatsky's Baboon) and especially Colin Wilson (The Occult). Turn Off Your Mind is an early work in a series by Lachman that includes In Search of P.D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjeff (2006) and Rudolf Steiner (2007), both of which I recommend.

In this book Lachman plunges into his topic with the story of Charles Manson. He describes how the hippie "wizard" was able to maneuver among famous people and manipulate followers using ideas he gleaned from Scientology, The Process Church of the Final Judgment and years of incarceration. From there we revisit the Woodstock and Altamont music festivals that were seminal events in 1969. Lachman then discusses the roots of the sixties occult revival in 19th century figures like Madame Blavatsky and Eliphas Levi. Lachman revisits these themes and personalities throughout the book.

Lachman exposes occult influences in the lives and writings of significant sixties heroes including Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Aleister Crowley (whose face made it onto the cover of the Beatle's Sergeant Pepper album). He especially credits The Occult by Colin Wilson (who wrote the introduction to Lachman's 2003 Secret History of Consciousness) and The Morning of the Magicians by Bergier and Pauwels as particularly influential in his personal grasp of just what was going on in the mystic sixties. More characters he covers in depth are H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Watts and the Beats, Tim Leary, L. Ron Hubbard and Anton LaVey who founded the Church of Satan. The book also offers insight into the mystical pursuits and substance abuse that affected the Beatles, Marianne Faithful, Rolling Stones, Doors, Beach Boys and so many others.

Less well known but influential characters include the mystical artist and writer Brion Gysin whose "cut-up" approach to writing revived an interest in Surrealism and influenced Beat writers like William Burroughs. The Beats aimed for "elimination of the rational ego." There was Aldous Huxley's friend, the "sociopathic English con man" Michael Hollingshead whose "mayonnaise jar containing water, powdered sugar, and roughly 5,000 hits of LSD" gave Timothy Leary, Paul McCartney, singer-songwriter Donovan, and countless others their first doses of acid. When they finally had enough of the schemer, Leary and Alpert dismissed Hollingshead from the Harvard LSD project. In retaliation Hollingshead threatened to reveal Alpert's homosexuality.

And there was the Solar Lodge of the OTO (a spin off of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientalis cult) founded by Jean Brayton and her husband Richard, a philosophy professor at University of Southern California. The Braytons "sought absolute control over their devotees" by what some writers called "acid fascism." The Brayton's ran afoul of the law around the time of the Manson murders in 1969 when visitors to their Colorado center found a small boy chained to the ground in a crate in 110-degree heat. He had been there for days. Jean Brayton devised the punishment because the boy inadvertantly set fire to their house thus burning rare Crowley manuscripts. The Braytons were thought by the FBI to be connected to Manson.

I most appreciated Lachman's ability to ferret out the back-story to many songs, personalities and communes that influenced the mystic sixties. For example, Leary based his esoteric community International Federation of Internal Freedom on Aldous Huxley's last novel Island (1961) which "depicts a psychedelic Pacific island paradise threatened by the incursion of Western materialism" (p.177). In the spirit of Jung's synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) that Lachman says inspired many sixties' notions of be here now, I read Island just prior to reading Turn Off Your Mind. The IFIF eventually found a home in 1962 in Zihuatanejo, Mexico where Leary and a company of several dozen followers experimented with their LSD based religion. Huxley's Island provided a blueprint. Residents of Huxley's Pala limit mechanization, control overpopulation by training young males in yogic retention of semen during pre-marital sex, and practice ritual ecstasy with moksha medicine based on Huxley's personal experience of mescaline. Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism combine to form the utopian religion of the Palanese who disdain theistic faiths, especially Christianity.

Lachman points out that parrots throughout Pala randomly shout "attention" to remind residents to remain in the eternal present and to continually assess consciousness. In that spirit Be Here Now is the title of Richard Alpert's seminal hippie manual that he wrote as Ram Dass in 1971. Alpert, Leary's colleague at Harvard and co-champion of LSD, synthesized the LSD experience with ideas that with Leary and Metzner at IFIF he gleaned from Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. They added Gurdjieff's `Work' rituals to IFIF programs. "Gurdjieff would bellow "Stop!" without warning" (p.184) at his Parisian commune, the Prieuré, where cult members would have to stop in whatever position they were and hold it till let go by Gurdjieff. That meant while holding a hot cup, lifting a shovel of dirt, or with mouth open in the midst of speech. Leary and company would ring a bell four times an hour when each participant would stop, then immediately write down their thoughts and location. Lachman does not point out that `stop everything now' at the sound of a bell is also one of the exercises during a thirty-day retreat in the training of a Catholic Jesuit since the 16th century. Leary, a sensationally lapsed Catholic, was `trained' at a strict Jesuit college.

That is one general weakness I find in Lachman's finely written narrative. It is his lack of attention to thematic Christian influences on the sixties that I think were pervasive as a subtext for the hippie revolution through `peace and love.' Sixties rebels identified with Jesus who also stood up large against "the establishment." Many communal experiments that had roots in the sixties emulated the primitive Christian rule to "share all things in common" or at least they tried to. Lachman's concentration on the anti-establishment, reactionary themes of that era might account for this oversight. He was after all writing about the "dark side."

Or, perhaps Lachman's personal philosophy of consciousness bends orthodox Christianity to fit a modernist paradigm that retrofits Christ into Gnostic and neo-occult notions. Christian Science, the Rosicrucian movement and Anthroposophy are examples. As to the latter movement, he writes favorably if fairly about Rudolf Steiner in his recent book by that title. Furthermore, in Turn Off the author positively entertains the legends that Jesus traveled and lived in India and England: "Christ spent time in India. Those feet...may have walked in England's mountain green..." (p. 80). If you are interested in his personal philosophy, read A Secret History of Consciousness by Lachman (2003). No matter what you choose to read by Lachman, you will be thoroughly entertained if not enlightened by this fine writer. I highly (no pun intended) recommend Turn Off Your Mind.

*** I guess there will be spoilers***

This book is wierd. My girlfriend bought it before it was advertised on disinfo and on other web site. She found it by mistake (withou really looking for it), bought it and it turned out to be a really good book. She read it and got me real interested in it when she told me about anecdotes on Anton Lavey, that Process church, the Manson family.

Tunr off your mind is filled with so much information for somebody who is not an expert but is really interested in the fields of music, litterature, and wierdness. The good thing about this book (and I guess its like that for alot of other books) is that it makes you want to go get information on other things like the movies, the music and the litterature it talks about. It really opens some kind of door to other things.

My only little criticism would be some small incoherence or small contradiction. **Spoilers** Like sometimes the author refers to books as "usaly found in any Hippes bookshelves" and later on stating that the hippies did not read a lot. Also ive found the ending to be a little dissapoinment. I wont go into any details but it makes you question the purpose of the book. Maybe I just got offended when it spoke badly about Morning of the magicians and it tuned me off really a little.

I've always had a very secretive interest in mysticism and visionary states of consciousness. I've also been a big fan of Blondie. So when I discovered that a former member of Blondie has written books on mysticism and altered states of consciousness I almost freaked. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed by this book. Gary Lachman does not appear to really know anything about mysticism. This entire book is written from the perspective of a serious occultist. Everything he writes about is related back to either G.I. Gurdjieff or Aleister Crowley or Charles Manson. It is a sustained misinterpretation of the spiritual reality, a sort of spiritual psychosis, completely lacking in real insight.

It is ironic that the author is familiar with the Theosophical Society but focuses on Helena Blavatsky instead of George Russell (aka A.E.) whose book "The Candle Of Vision: Inner Worlds Of The Imagination" shows an extraordinary understanding of miraculous states of consciousness which can make real magic happen in the subjective realm of the mind.

On the other hand, this book is a great reference tool for researching all the mystic and psychedelic influences of the sixties which probably have had a greater influence on you than you might care to acknowledge. It should also be noted that a mystical experience is always interpreted through the religious framework of the mystic's culture. Therefore Gary Lachman's perception of a mystical experience could be due to a bad 60's vibe!

The author of this book clearly has problems with making his own mind work. The problems are myriad, but I will outline the most glaring ones.

1.He makes an a priori assumption in the existance of supernatural forces and assumes they were at work in the events he describes. He never questions the existance of the supernatural or even looks for more mundane explanations for any of the things he describes.

2.He is excessively vague. He never sets up any real central premise. He talks about "dark forces" and the like, but never really gives a clear definition of what these "dark forces" are, where they come from, what they have to do with anything, etc. The "strange forces" Lachman is fond of attributing every single detail and incident too are never second guessed, and he assumes they are responsible for all, even while he denies the reader any information on what these "forces" are.

3.The lack of any central premise other than an expose of the "dark side" of the sixties makes this book read more like a trivia book of sixties counterculture figures than anything else. Which brings me to problem four.

4.Lackmans complete lack of any sort of premise or argument has the effect of, halfway or so in to the book, making you wonder why you're reading it. Yes, this and that bit of little known trivia may get a few laughs at a dinner party, but without anything to tie all of this together, it seems fragmented and meaningless, and a better formated would be a book of one liner "did you know?" bits of info, without any pretentions to the book having any sort of point.

5.Lachman is neither a skeptic nor anything resembling a responsible, reputable journallist. Much of what he presents as evidence for the "dark side" of things is little more than anecdotal stories. Did Anton Lavey really get a human leg from a university medical student? Well, that can be verified. LAchman could contact that university, check their records, see if any body parts were signed out at that time or if any went missing, but I suspect that Lachman knew fact checking would rob him of the sensationallism that this book if packed with.

6.Lachman further engages in questionable practices when it comes to trying to weave some of this together. He tries to connect various figures and ideas, but his links are tenuous, and he often engages in simple, reprehensible, guilty by association.

7.His conclusion offers not only any clarity as to what any of this information has to do with anything, or if it is even relevant to anything current, much less how it would be relevant, but no solution either. Lachman seemingly disapproves of people getting involved in these "dark" things, etc. but he offers nothing better. He offers no alternative, and offers no compelling argument as to why much of the things he singles out for criticism or bad, and much of this seems to be Lachmans own personal superstition.

This book is not poorly argued. Rather, it seems to have no specific argument, and is little more than a lot of guilt by association, superstition, and tenuous links between unimportant people (now honestly, have Crowley, Learly, lavey, etc. had any effect on ANYTHING beyond rock music?).

Lachman comes off as some cryptotheocrat. His tone is little, if no, different from that of right wing televangelists and scaremongers who have no substantive argument. But at least those morons can say they oppose something on the basis of their flimsy religion, while Lachman doesn't even have that going for him. His attacks on rock music and pop culture fads make him sound like a stodgy conservative alarmist, while his singling out of Eastern religions makes him seem so xenophobic I was expecting him to start attacking Chinese Take Out and accusing it of harboring darkness.

And the subject matter alone is subject to scrutiny; he goes after what amounts of pop culture fads, rock music, and minority religions, and not only does he do so with little substance, but he fails to demonstrate why these things are important enough to warrant criticism in the first place. Lachman seems to know little about comparative and world religion, and I expect that knowledgeable scholars, intellectuals, and followers of Eastern religions and new age religions would find his book replete with errors, exagerrations, and stereotypes of the sort you would find in a b horror film.

Lachman simply couldn't argue his way out of a paper bag.

Anyone who would classify the Tibetan Book of the Dead as the occult either hasn't read it or (mostly likely) didn't understand it. If you want to find out for yourself, I'd recommend Tsogyal Rinpoches the Book of Living and Dying