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(via Catalina Beach Resort Hotel - Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa Mexico)
The Zihuatanejo Project was an intentional community created during the summers of 1962 and 1963 by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert under the umbrella of their nonprofit group, the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). The community was located in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and took up residence at the Catalina Hotel. The idea for the community was based on the fictional story from Aldous Huxley’s 1962 novel, ‘Island.’ Immigration officials were tipped off to the project when the Mexican media began reporting stories about an ‘LSD Paradise.’ In the summer of 1963, after only six weeks the Mexican authorities shut the community down.
More than 5,000 people applied to the IFIF in the hopes of joining the project in Zihuatanejo. Out of this pool of applicants, a small, select group of people were chosen. Amenities cost $200 a month per person, including food and lodging in bungalows near a secluded beach. Fishermen supplied a bounty of fresh fish from the bay. Leary and 35 guests rented the Catalina Hotel for a month using the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ as a guide book for LSD sessions, while Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert helped manage the group. Group LSD sessions began in the morning with the consumption of liquid LSD, with a dosage of 100 to 500 micrograms ingested by participating individuals; the experience would usually last until late afternoon.
Life Magazine, 13 May 1957
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Then, ninety minutes into the experience, Huxley felt himself pass through a screen, at least that’s what it seemed like, and suddenly he was seeing “what Adam had seen on the morning of creation.” It was as though, born myopic, he had just put on his first pair of glasses. The colors, the shapes, the sensuous mysteriousness of his flannel trousers. Later Aldous would pun that he had seen “eternity in a flower, infinity in four chair legs, and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers.”
He kept murmuring, “This is how one ought to see.”
Mescaline, Huxley decided, intensified the visual at the expense of the temporal and spatial. There was a pronounced loss of will, which gradually expanded into a loss of ego. And as the ego relinquished its grip, all sorts of useless data, biologically speaking, began to seep into the mind.
From the house, with its suddenly cubist furniture, they wandered into the garden. For the first time Huxley felt the presence of paranoia, and beyond that, madness. “If you started the wrong way,” he told Osmond, “everything that happened would be proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn’t draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot.”
“So you think you know where madness lies?” Osmond asked.
“Yes.”
“And you couldn’t control it?”
“No, I couldn’t control it,” Huxley said. “If one began with fear and hate as the major premise, one would have to go on to the conclusion.”
But then the shadow passed. From the garden they moved to the street, where a large blue automobile touched off gales of laughter. Fat and self-satisfied, it seemed to Huxley that the car was a self-portrait of twentieth-century man; for the rest of the day he giggled whenever he saw one. Aldous was having a wonderful time. After years of theorizing that each of us carries a reservoir of untapped vision and inspiration, he had suddenly stumbled across it at the advanced age of fifty-eight.
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The Swedish Language Council has nuked a word from its list of new terms for 2012 at Google’s request, according to a report from The Local. As of Tuesday, the council has removed the word ogooglebar (ungoogleable) from its list of new words for the year after Google objected to its definition.
Each year, the Swedish Language Council selects a handful of new words to highlight with the goal of advancing and cultivating the Swedish Language. In December, one of the words selected was ogooglebar, meaning a thing or person that does not produce relevant results when typed into a search engine.
Google took exception to the broad inclusion of “search engines” in the definition, and wanted the word to be defined only as things or people unsearchable on Google specifically. Rather than quibble with Google over the definition or bend to its request, the council removed the term from its list, while noting that this didn’t necessarily mean it would be removed from the language itself.
The Swedish Language Council was first established in 1944, and according to The Local, this is the first time it has removed a word from its annual list.
” — Google forces a new Swedish word out of (official) existence | Ars Technica (via new-aesthetic)(via new-aesthetic)
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Conny Groenewegen RTW Fall 2013
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