Word: lsd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LSD, but LSD culture, is treated in movies like The Trip, with Peter Fonda, or Wild in the Streets, in which everyone over thirty is deported to campus and given LSD. The drug gets a boost from Skiddoo, in which Jackie Gleason goes out into the world to spread love after inadvertantly licking LSD off something handed him by a draft card burner...
There's a good deal of unnecessary confusion about what the acid experience is. It is not a fundamentally sensory experience. What LSD does to the way the mind hears music or the way it records visual images in relatively unimportant. People who go into tremendous hallucinations on LSD are probably having pretty low level, physically-rather-mentally-oriented trips. (Research has suggested that LSD might inhibit the flow of the chemical which replenishes the visual cortex of the brain, and thereby wears out the image receptors and causes hallucination. But, if this is the case or something like...
...significant effect of LSD is the way in which it makes you experience the self. The acid tripper achieves a level of consciousness of a self quite separate from what he knows to be his ego. He thinks he can communicate to people, animals, and objects on a level of pure consciousness. At the time of highest revelation he is totally apart from the problems, and constructs of his won ego and understands the whole universe to be ordered by a common benign, tingling consciousness that is aware of how each person's ego got to define his desires...
...acid literature and acid thought are really only those ideas that deal with high level revelation, mysticism, telepathy, and transcendence of the ego. The LSD experience should not be confused with, for example, the stream-of-consciousness way of representing the way we experience the regular world. It would be confusing to call, let's say, James Joyce an acid tripper...
There are a number of people whose work is very much what the acid experience is about. We will call these guys the acid trippers. Some of them (like Hesse and McLuhan) have never taken LSD, but have explained the ideas the are very helpful in trying to understand what the acid experience is like. Most of the others' writings are directly influenced by their experience with acid...