Acid Test

I'm here to talk about LSD Now you see what is uh... Let me speak specifically for a moment I said the subject of this is LSD LSD is one such chemical That does produce this curious effect Of making you aware of the polarity of things It does lots of other things And when the national magazines try to illustrate the effects of these chemicals with various photographs They come on with blurred photographs If uh... You wanted some sort of appropriate illustration For a Life magazine article on the effects of LSD Uh... You would have one very simple solution You would publish the most gorgeous color reproductions of Persian miniatures And of Moorish arabesques, and of the illuminations of Celtic manuscripts That would give you the story But there would be one thing very difficult to put across in pictures Because the people who looked at them if they didn't get the point of view wouldn't see it And that is what I will call the sensation as well as the intellectual understanding of polarity That the inside and the outside The subjective and the objective The self and the other Go together It isn't that what goes on outside is so powerful that it pushes around And controls what goes on inside Equally so, it isn't that what goes on inside is so strong that It often succeeds in pushing around what goes on outside This is not something that arrived in the world from somewhere else all together But confronts an alien reality What you are Is the universe, and in fact, the works, what there is, and always has been And always will be forever and ever Performing an act called "John Doe" And this is such a subversion of common sense But is at fact, matter of fact, something, if you stop to think about it, that is completely obvious