These 41 minutes of readings are taken from two passages of
The Psychedelic Experience, periodically interrupted by ringing bells. The first of these,
"Going Out," is, according to the liner notes, "to be listened to at the very beginning of the session, just before and after the time when the going out begins, i.e., when the psychedelic begins to take effect." The second,
"Coming Back," is "to be listened to toward the last third of the session, when the ego is beginning to reassert itself." It doesn't say so in the reading itself, and only in passing in the extensive liner notes, but the narration is specifically intended to accompany an LSD trip, even if it is based on
The Tibetan Book of the Dead. There are various ways of evaluating this recording, long after LSD has ceased to be an exotic novelty in popular culture. The first is to dismiss this as an over-solemn relic of the '60s, treating the ego-smashing liberation of an acid trip with undue reverence. The second might to be find sense and serenity in its even-tempered guides through states of mind too often ignored or unexplored by materialistic mainstream society. There's some validity to both viewpoints, but as a
spoken word recording, this has some mundane shortcomings. The sound quality is muffled, as if it was recorded on an early-'60s standard home tape machine rather than in a professional recording studio. Sometimes you can hear the readers walking back and forth and turning pages, or even what seems like the sounds of a passing truck or distant barking dog. That might seem like nitpicking, but considering that this appears to have been genuinely intended as a companion to actual psychedelic experiences, it seems like more care should have been taken to make the recording as clear and as free from such extraneous distracting noise as possible. Incidentally, the most famous words within these readings, "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream," appear almost verbatim in the lyrics of
the Beatles'
"Tomorrow Never Knows." ~ Richie Unterberger
