LSD has had a profound impact on the world around us – there are many articles about art in the pure sense, and how LSD has influenced this. In this article, we will take a look at great minds that have been directly, or indirectly influenced by LSD to create living artworks that have changed our world that, in many cases, come from changes in perception people have achieved through learning from LSD and other psychedelics of similar effect.
Trippy Art
There is a form of art that became known as trippy art that was inspired by Timothy Leary, providing artists with psychedelics such as LSD and allowing these people to create inspirational artworks. I think that enough people have covered these sorts of artworks in hundreds upon hundreds of articles. And this brings us to the rather important distinction between artworks that “are”, and artworks that “change your mind”.
I have a great appreciation for the deep movement in your heart and soul that a great image can create. These images transfer feelings, emotions, and capture moments in time that can transcend centuries. However, there is a certain power that visionary people have to harness to transcend the confines of an artistic “creation” to turn this into an artistic “catalyst”.
For me, looking at artworks in the traditional sense had often inspired emotions, and feelings that were amazing, but, at the end of the day, a painting, or fractal does not change the world. There is however an artform that does. And this is where I would encourage a psychonaut to direct their energy. Creating “mind art” that moves from the imagination, into reality, and transforms lives.
Here are my favourite Mind Artists – people who use the full canvas, their mind, technology, words, and communication tools to inspire us to transcend, reinvent and reconnect ourselves in new ways.
Iain M Banks
For me, painting a future world, in the head of a reader is the greatest form of art. My favourite author, Iain M. Banks spent a significant part of his formative years as a writer experimenting with various mind-opening substances, including LSD.
He painted a world with well-visualized disruptive technologies. Much like Asimov, banks painted a pathway to the future. In my early student career, I remember reading books in the Culture series while coming down from LSD, Mescaline, or Shrooms, and the visuals that blossomed influenced my life forever.
When a mind artist creates paintings in another person’s head, these paintings interact with the memories and experiences of that person, and, if that person is an inventor like me, they influence our path of technology development and the boundaries, or lack thereof that we place on our minds.
In many cases, physical boundaries that we experience on Earth now, are really technological limitations – LSD opens doors to allow us to see what we can achieve if we overcome these limitations, and gives us the sense of wonder we had as kids when anything was possible. This means that, in my experience as an inventor, LSD makes the impossible seem possible, and we then bring things from our imaginations into reality.
My Favourite Artists Influenced by People who took LSD or were possibly Influenced by LSD
Let us define an artist as somebody who takes something out of the imaginary world and brings it into our visible reality world. Hence an artist is a portal bringing things into the world where we can all share the experience. In this regard, for me the greatest and most inspiring artists I know right now, in our world are/were:
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs spoke regularly about how his imagination was shaped, and broadened by LSD experiences. If you have ever watched the numbers glow on your iPhone, and then remember that time you were in the bathroom and saw that a perfectly normal tile that you had never noticed, actually contained a universe of small white gears and mechanisms inside it, that glowed, you will understand how psychedelic the iPhone actually is!
Steve Jobs was an artist with technology. He created technological artworks that propelled the human state into a new way of interacting with the world – he helped, through his artworks and creations to move us into a new era of connectedness, artistic sharing, growth, and evolution.
The vision, drive, and ability to see something as revolutionary as the iPhone (ok maybe Douglas Adams saw it first in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and create the technology and software to breathe life into a living, interactive artwork that millions of people could customize their lives with is the ultimate form of art for me.
The creation of new realities begins with the right equipment – and all of us should know a little about the power of having our own creative equipment.
Elon Musk
This human (or is he) is an inspiration to people who wish to draw creations out of their imagination into the real world. The first Teslas were so far ahead of their time they may as well have been hallucinations that moved in the real world. The revolutionary Cybertruck, Semi, and all the other Teslas are a combination of aesthetic beauty (or in some cases lack thereof that is so bold it becomes beautiful in its sheer abhorrent lack of beauty) combined with strokes of technological colour that transform our world.
Building a rocket company that allowed a Tesla to be launched into space, and capturing one of the greatest and most iconic images of all time – an electric car with a Starman in it, headed for Mars with our beautiful planet behind it, and the words “Don’t Panic” from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the dashboard display is probably one of the greatest artistic imagination realizations of all time. Few people can harness as many great human minds, and wallets, towards achieving a more iconic artistic statement.
The media is in two minds about Elon Musk and LSD with some reports suggesting he encourages psychedelic experimentation, and others suggesting he does not. The important thing is that the drone ships upon which his spacecraft land are all named after Ian M Banks’s super AI “minds” and this shows that even if Elon Musk does not derive his creativity from LSD, his creativity has been seriously influenced by Banks, who did definitely see the possibilities of the imaginary worlds he created due to LSD. Sometimes, LSD may inspire one person, to inspire another through words into bringing living artworks into reality.
A Cautionary Tale for Inventors who Draw Inspiration from Psychedelics
Psychedelics allow us to see possibilities that we normally would filter out. Our mind is a filter that allows us to access a minimalist version of our world that our specific IQ and education can comprehend. This means that the more powerful your mind, the more distant it can become from the realities of others as you see more and more possibilities. It becomes really difficult to find people to fund these adventures, hence it is important to profit from small inspirations, before unleashing the big ones that you can fund on your own from the previous ones’ profits.
One of the most terrifying possibilities to any human being is normally failure. Hence, if we learn to embrace failure as a learning tool, then we can learn from the possibilities that psychedelics allow us to see.
In a world in which increasingly large numbers of realities can be realized with technology that is expanding rapidly, I believe that psychedelic experimentation will provide us with a useful interaction with increasingly powerful AI and computer technology. The thing about a human brain is that when it operates outside the realm of the “normal operating system” it does not crash – computers invariably do. This means that the only long-lasting advantage of our biological intelligence will be the extreme randomness of the malfunctions and interpretations of these malfunctions that a psychedelic experience allows. If we look at a computer system – if you move the parameters of the flow of electricity slightly out of specification the computer does not really come up with new ways of thinking. With a human mind, we do. This is our advantage, and we need to understand that as time goes on we will probably lose this advantage too.
