The Modern World
By Brian Wallace

I think that there was an explosion of thought that was occurring back in the latter 50s and early 60s. We're all aware of the Beat Movement, and the movement to take Eastern notions and Eastern philosophies and bring them to the West and try to make them relevant and germane to what was happening in the West. I think that people like Alan Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, are key individuals who deserve a lot of credit for the changing consciousness that seemed to occur in North America during that pivotal time.

As it relates to our current times, I think that with the 80s and with the 90s, I think we started to a certain extent to see a reversion back to the way things were in the 50s. I'd hate to see things take a turn back to how they were during a certain point in this country's history - where mechanistic psychology was popular, where the behavioral aptitudes of individuals in the workplace were key concerns, where things were very robotic and mechanistic. I think that, in current times, with advents of new forms of technology and with different strengths in our economy, I think that we can learn a lot from looking to the past and seeing what the great mystics and philosophers were coming up with and pulling that and finding ways of making that relevant to modern times.

I see a lot of parallels between the psychedelicists and the mystics of the 60s here in our country and the pioneers of high technology in today's time. I don't think it's a coincidence that the personal computer is, in a sense, an extension of the human nervous system as drugs were a catalyst to the nervous system back in the 60s. People like Timothy Leary, Alan Ginsberg, William Burrows, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, were key thinkers and writers and philosophers who spent time exploring what was happening in science and spending time exploring what was happening in religion, but they were also keenly aware of modern political problems, modern issues that were happening, not just in North America, but all over the world.

...I think that people banding together to come up with innovative ways of thinking about the world and changing the world is probably what's required...

A lot of people discarded the mystics and philosophers of the 60s as trying to regress into the past and trying to bring back some idyllic state that's an impossibility and I don't think that's really what the message was all about. The message I received from what I've read and what I've thought about is that there can be congruence between age-old notions that fall in the domain of mysticism and perhaps occultism with modern progress and with capitalistic innovation and with creativity in the workplace. That's evidenced by people dressing more casually in the workplace these days, taking time to become more involved in recreational activities, and really trying to enjoy life. I'm hoping that we just evolve as a species and evolve as a civilization and things move more into the arena of a balance between progress and recreation and spiritual edification.

I think that there's a part of humankind that disturbs me, and that's the element toward aggression and the propensity toward war and toward battle and toward creating evil and I think that some remedies, that some potentials for remedy, are occurring in a modern day new age movement, in the modern day consciousness movement, and in the modern day psychedelic movement. I don't think it's necessary to sign up on a full membership basis into one of these groups in order to make this thing happen, but I think that people banding together to come up with innovative ways of thinking about the world and changing the world is probably what's required if we are going to work toward creating a better world and making that happen.

Radio-V/Ethoschannel Index