PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE"
Distributed by EAST BAY MEDIA CENTER
Berkeley Video and Film Festival
Berkeley Citizen
All Rights Reserved

In 1965, The San Francisco international Film Festival, presented a prestigious "The Zellerbach Award" for this 18 minute film. Even though LSD was still legal when Willis and Millay received this award, the subsequent political war on "psychedelic drugs" caused this film to be hidden away in a closet ( literally )for over thirty years. Later, Dr. Charles Brush felt the film should be saved, and gave Millay a generous grant so she could have the film transferred from 16mm to video. When the East Bay Media Center in Berkeley, CA, chose to archive all of the films that Allen Willis had produced over the years, Allen Willis assigned his rights in our film to EBMC. This gentle psychedelic vision, that recorded a historical moment in time, finally came out of the closet.

This is how it happened: In 1963, Millay had a Peyote experience that changed her life completely, and she wanted to share the excitement of those extraordinary visions by creating a film. She was teaching art at the time in a small rural high school and was preparing a lesson about the relationship between the colors in pigment and the colors in light. Remembering Dr. Aldous Huxley's description of the intensity of the colors he experienced ( in his book "Doors of Perception" ), she felt it necessary for her to experience this as well, in order to understand color better for teaching her students. She didn't know that the famous and well-respected Huxley evoked such visions by taking an illegal "drug." As an "old-maid-teacher" at the time, it would have been unthinkable for her to even consider taking a "drug." Fortunately, grandfather Peyote was more than kind, and showed her the colors of auras, magnetic fields -the wave form nature of energy. After that, she asked Allen Willis, an old friend and professional filmmaker at KQED- TV in San Francisco, to help her with the film.

When they had worked together in the silkscreen process business ( 1949-57 ), they had discussed the idea of filming abstract images. Allen agreed, and they agreed to split the cost.

In 1964, when Drs. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert ( Ram Dass ) came to Esalen to talk about their LSD research at Harvard, Millay attended the session. They had published a book to be used as a guide for LSD sessions, called, THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Even though this book had been translated from information written thousands of years ago, Millay found it described her own Peyote visions, and realized her visions were not just "hallucinations," but descriptions of something very basic in our shared human consciousness.

Millay asked Leary if he would like to see some of the abstract images that she and Willis had already created. Leary was delighted and agreed they could use the title of their Tibetan guidebook for their short film. Millay and Willis had timed the blending of their images to a recording by the famous Indian musician Ravi Shankar. In 1964, he gave a live concert in San Francisco. This gave Millay an opportunity to show a few of these images to him. She asked him if he would be willing to create the sound track when the film was finished the following year. In August 1965, Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha came to Now York.

A very small group of people from different cultures and disciplines gathered in a small recording studio for the event. Our mixed group included a Harvard professor, an lslamic drummer, a Hindu sitar player ( playing lslamic Music ), a Jewish sound engineer, a millionaire from upstate New York ( who paid for the sound studio time ), and Millay, an art teacher raised on a farm in the desert of the Great Basin. We were experiencing, across cultural barriers, something natural to all of human consciousness.

As Shankar was recording the music, Leary watched the whole film for the first time, and decided he needed to record a new introduction for it. With Leary's new voice over the introduction, Ralph Metzner's instructions for the ego death experience from their book, and Shankar's music, we submitted it to the Film Festival where it won a prize.

However, Leary's concept of the spiritual way to conduct a peaceful, meditative, guided session for the exploration of our' deeper selves was soon overshadowed when Kesey and Owsley decided to put acid in the kool-aid for the "Acid Test." The excitement of "Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n'Roll" grew rapidly. "Psychedelic" no longer meant "Mind-expanding," the media and advertisers commonly used the term to mean only bright colors, loud music and tie-dyed T.shirts. Leary was arrested and given a 3O-year prison sentence for holding less than 1,/2 ounce of marijuana.

Millay could no longer teach school in the small community, be- cause even though the film was rnostly abstract images dancing to North Indian Classical music - without sex or violence - the title was enough to evoke a negative reaction because of the raging government propaganda.

The legality of LSD became a pawn during the bitter governor's race in CA between incumbent democrat Pat Brown and republican Ronald Reagan. The Reagan's ignorant - but politically successful-war against all psychedelics and marijuana became his battle cry all the way to the White House, aided by corruption between the FDA and Big Pharm.

However, this film records the original intent when we hear Leary's voice, still fresh and relevant, speak these words: "Psychedelic means'mind-expanding.' A psychedelic experience is a voyage inside*a trip into the countless galaxies of your own nervous system. ... to lead us into new dimensions of space, time and identity".

The continued use of the term "hallucination" to dismiss the wisdom revealed in these visionary experiences has limited for many years - not only the study of mind, but also the study of the multidimensional nature of human consciousness. In this primitive film, we can share a small glimpse of those visions, some of which seem to be common to all humanity, since they were described in detail in Sanskrit thousands of years ago to guide the spirits of those who were leaving their bodies and might be overwhelmed by the unfamiliar experiences they could encounter in the multidimensional bardos of nonlocal spacetime.