Expansions of Collective Consciousness – The 1950s

In this decade, alarmed by advances of the Soviet space program, the United States established NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Space exploration vastly expanded human knowledge, but also became an arena of Cold War competition, hand-in-hand with military armaments competition. The first birth control pill was introduced, making the management of contraception easier for millions, and opening up possibilities for exploring sexual experience beyond reproduction. Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double helix of DNA, the fundamental molecular code of life. Crick later stated that ingestion of LSD sparked some of his creative insights. The polio vaccine, developed by microbiologist Jonas Salk, was declared safe for use. Just three years prior, polio had stricken over 50, 000 Americans. Louis Leakey found the oldest hominid skull in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, suggesting that human evolution began on the continent of Africa, not Asia as previously believed.
Key books emblematic of the spirit of the 1950s: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain; Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot; Arthur Miller's The Crucible; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; Allen Ginsberg’s Beat classic Howl; Jack Kerouac's On the Road; Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago; John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.
In the psychedelics sub-culture, the therapeutic applications of consciousness-expanding drugs such as LSD were further developed, especially in the treatment of addictions and compulsions, which involve states of contracted, fixated consciousness. By the end of the decade there were about a half-dozen alcoholism treatment centers in North America, which used LSD at the core of the program. Another significant application area for psychedelic drugs was in facilitating the creative and artistic processes, as in the work of psychiatrist Oscar Janiger in Los Angeles, who collected art work produced or inspired in psychedelic states of mind. The eminent English philosopher and writer Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell appear in 1950. In these books Huxley describes his experiences with mescaline as genuinely mystical, a “gratuitous grace,” thus lending his enormous authority for the serious consideration of the potential spiritual significance of psychedelics.
For the psychedelic culture, the decade of the 1950s involved the finding of its roots in the shamanic traditions. Robert Gordon Wasson, the conservative New England banker who virtually founded the field of ethnomycology (the relationship between fungi and culture), rediscovered the sacred mushroom ceremony of the ancient Aztecs, which had been kept alive in remote mountain hamlets in Oaxaca, Mexico. Wasson participated in a ceremony with the magic psilocybe mushroom, conducted by an illiterate curandera and visionary poetic genius named Maria Sabina. Wasson wrote an account of his experience, suggesting that a psychoactive plant-based visionary experience may be at the original core of every religion, publishing his account, with photographs, in LIFE magazine in 1957. His account in LIFE triggers a movement in which tens of thousands North Americans and Europeans start experimenting with hallucinogenic mushrooms, at first wild and then also cultivated. Also in the 1950s, two separate Brazilian rubber tappers start urban churches (Santo Daime and Uniao de Vegetal) in which the Amazonian shamanic entheogen ayahuasca is the central sacrament, initiating a grass-roots religious revitalization movement that now has thousands of adherents worldwide.
Thus, in this decade, the psychedelic subculture moved into seeing these substances as adjuncts to psychiatry in the treatment of addictions and other psychopathologies. Consciousness expansion, it was found, could facilitate creativity and artistic expression; and it could also facilitate mystical and spiritual visions, with the appropriate set and setting. A culture that discovered a powerful tool for exploring the mind and aiding in psychological problem solution, found its roots in the animistic, shamanic traditions of indigenous cultures, and recognized its highest expression in the spiritual mystical dimensions of human existence.