The following article by Bertie Cairns is taken from the January 1999 issue of Wax - a UK Dance music magazine. The article is reproduced in whole.

'TUNE IN, DROP OUT and SHAG IF YOU WANT'

BERTIE CAIRNS gets an exclusive interview with Brian Barritt. He was the late Timothy Leary's best mate and he's a psychedelic evangelist who believes acid can change your life. Now he's written a book called 'The Road of Excess' which explains the different levels of tripping. You can have brilliant sex at level 5, but by level 7, the need for physical intercourse vanishes entirely...

In 1962, Brian Barritt turned on in a spectacular way. He injected six 250 microgram trips. He was soon distributing LSD on sugar cubes before it was criminalised. He also spent time in Maidstone prison for importing cannabis and travelled across the globe sampling as many psychoactive delights as possible.

He was a foil and confidante to Dr Timothy Leary; the LSD guru and President Nixon's most dangerous man in the world. Brian was with him during his exile in Algeria and Switzerland and co-wrote 'Confessions of a Hope Fiend'. He was also involved with the acid-fuelled Krautrock electronic movement in Germany, where he collaborated with Leary and Ash Ra Tempel, creating the album '7up'. He has now written a psychedelic autobiography called 'The Road of Excess'.

Brian is a psychedelic evangelist - he makes tripping sound like paradise.

'LSD will change your life. It is important stuff. I don't want people to be pressured to take it. But I want it available for everybody, and they'll find their own way to it or not - it doesn't need advertising. Take all the notoriety from it. Make it out front. If you want to investigate your own mind, then you can. If you don't, then you won't."

On the surface, Brian could be the best advertisement against LSD that the government could find. He has spent most of his life taking large quantities of drugs, and hanging out with strange people. He is not rich, living in a boxy flat near Clapham Junction. He stoops slightly, is a shuffly figure, with bedraggled grey hair, and it feels like his piercing blue eyes look at you from somewhere else. But unfortunately for anti-drugs propagandists, Brian has had a pretty good time nonetheless.

"My life has been absolutely wonderful! I can't remember the bad bits," he says with a smile.

In Dr Leary's famous words, Brian turned on, tuned in and dropped out. These days, to be accused of dropping out is an insult, but from a psychedelic angle, Brian sees it as, "a vastly heroic act. To drop out from your conditioning is quite something. The mythical hero, and this is written in everyone's subconscious, has to go beyond the bounds of the known world. That is, beyond his conditioning. He has to reach knowledge and he has to come all the way back so that the information is of some use to the other people. Stepping outside his conditioning is his first heroic act."

If you only drop out when you take LSD, why are governments scared of drugs? Brian is in no doubt that the authorities are scared of losing control.

"They want charge of your mind and you want charge of your own mind."

There is an argument, however, that says drugs are a form of public control. Marx famously calls religion the opium of the people, because it gives false contentment and pacifies.

Brian has an answer for this: "You can manipulate with coke and smack, but the establishment is terrified of having something they can't control. They tried it in the early fifties, manipulating with acid, but it was a total failure. Everyone wants to control LSD. But you can only work out how to give people a good or a bad trip."

One of the reasons that Brian connected so well with Leary was that he had worked out a theory of consciousness that lined up with the good doctor's own psychic map. Both believed that acid revealed seven states of consciousness and the drug propelled the user through all of them, whereas most other drugs just hit lower levels. Brian's descriptions are artistic representations of what each level feels like, where Leary's are more scientific.

Level 1: barbiturates or large doses of booze - barely conscious

Level 2: alcohol - emotional stupor

Level 3: coke - social and ego enhancing

Level 4: cannabis mixed with alcohol - sensual

Level 5: cannabis, MDMA - The Land of Incredible Goodies

Level 6: mescaline or mushrooms - The land of the Giant Suns

Level 7: LSD - Lunetime

For Brian, coming up on a trip is, "the psychedelic elevator" which happens over the first 45 minutes. Coming down is like a ball bouncing, lower each time. The drug seems to have worn off and then it rises up to a less exalted state than the previous high. Leary and Brian both believed that the first four levels are linked to the ego and are accessed by most people every day. The higher levels can only be reached with psychedelics (or long spells of spiritual practice) and are about letting go of the ego.

Brian expands on the basic psychic navigation map. At level 5 (that's quite wasted) consciousness withdraws slightly from the senses, you can watch yourself touching something. This state Brian calls the Land of Incredible Goodies, probably because everything feels fresh and new with all the senses experienced as if they were original and unexplored. Leary called it the psychosomatic level, where people are part in telepathic contact. Eventually you get the senses overlapping. You start seeing sound and that acts as a doorway into the next level.

"This is what Leary called the neurological level," explains Brian, "or my Land of the Giant Suns. I call it this because the sun is the centre of the solar system and on this level, everything seems to be happening from the centre of every thought you get. They burst from the centre."

At this level, Brian says you can follow a time line, and this is what clairvoyants do. You can go to the end of a time line and look back, seeing yourself studying it.

"The doorway into the Lunetime, or level 7, is a spiral. Here time is simultaneous. Images do not burst from the centre, they are overlays - though they retain their own individuality (like a pack of cards). You can see a person born and die at the same moment. It is all time - time stretched.

"With Leary, we had the time train, which always pulls into the platform now - wherever it is. You can go back to your animal heritage and stop at a particular point and that becomes now. So you have a modern brain in an animal body."

Brian described how you feel the huge booming power of the animal controlled by a modern brain, which is, essentially, what shamans refer to when they talk of their power animals.

This all sounded very complicated to me and most people who trip talk of the confusion, rather than the clarity. But Brian was adamant that, "it is easy enough to do. You just study your subject and talk about it with your mate. Stick a good representation of whatever on the wall and drop some acid - sooner or later it will zoom in on your interest."

Brian believes that, if you have taken enough LSD, you have no option but to go to those higher levels.

"Unless they have some strange kink that sends them off on some weird angle, they'll come along with the most pleasurable vibe around," he explains, "which is the way of least resistance. Everybody is programmed to have a great time."

But, what about those bad trips where the acid is good but the experience is terrifyingly awful?

"Everyone has degrees of ecstatic tolerance," he patiently explains, "so, when people can't take any more, they peel off and find an excuse for doing so. Some people clutch back to the ego for reassurance."

Taking half a trip is very different from necking ten. Do you still reach the same levels of consciousness? How much do you need for the full cycle? Brian's response was unambiguous. "Just take plenty! If you chip it you don't go right up, so you don't get the whole picture and come down slightly disorientated. If you have a good trip in good circumstances you see the whole situation outlined before you - and then you come down and remember the wholeness, and see it happening until you are back in your body. I'd rather have a hash cookie than chip it."

DMT is much touted as the ultimate psychedelic experience. It is also known as Business Man's Lunch because it lasts only for a few minutes. Brian, however, doesn't like it.

"You see next to nothing of interest. You haven't got time to analyse anything, which is a total drag. I like to walk around and explore the levels, and make it joyous, otherwise it is like knocking back booze." For him, tripping is less about getting totally faced and more about exploring his new world.

He feels that coming down off each trip is a rebirth. "At about the time of the sun rising, you are reborn in the morning like Ra rising, Horus reborn. You wash the old life away (we used to refer to the sun as the end of God's joint which he smoked all day!). At this time, a key word sometimes appears of some consequence that works for you magically."

Before we delve into the depths of LSD mysticism, let's return to the sensual pleasures. Sex. It will come as no surprise that if all your neurons are firing off like the fourth of July, sex will be an extreme experience - if you can manage it.

So is there anything better than sex on acid?

"On Level 7, you don't need sex, you're too integrated with each other," he replied. "You can't make physical sex above level 5. You're already sexually combined and telepathic on level 6, like part of this huge neurological computer."

However, Brian found at level 5 that sex was quite entertaining. "I once made love to this black chick called Bobby out in the country with these African masks on. Fucking on acid. You become the mask. The mask takes you over.

Brian then reveals a little secret. "Also, if a man keeps an image in his head at the point of ejaculation on acid, you project that image, firing it into the subconscious of your partner. The female at that altitude is the 'all woman', she is the every living thing, the DNA, the goddess. If the goddess hears you, she will ask everything in nature to conspire to grant you your request."

One of Leary and Brian's most involved pieces of mythologising began with their first trip together in the Algerian desert. They happened, by chance, to be in the same area that occultist Aleister Crowley and the poet Victor Neuburg had been tripping on half a century before. While high, Brian had visions of Dr John Dee's 16th century alchemical manuscript that Crowley had used in his mescaline trip. It was an intense experience.

"We felt we were representative of the same force, but whether we were incarnations of these people or not I don't know, it didn't seem to matter."

Brian sees Leary's position as more than just a re- incarnation of other explorers of the mind or the guru of LSD.

"When Tim lost his ego on a trip, he was an amalgamation of all the people on acid who were thinking of him at that time. Leary was gone, he was an astral image - no one took a trip without Leary coming into it."

He feels that Leary might have become an archetype - an image that is planted into the collective consciousness of humanity. Brian and Tim connected from the outset. They shared similar experiences but saw the world from contrasting, if complementary, angles. Leary the scientist and Barritt the artist/poet were like two halves of the same object - night and day, yin and yang. Their thoughts on LSD, their psychic mind maps, expressed the same ideas in different ways.

Leary was a man of many contradictions. Born into a wealthy Irish family and trained at the elite West Point military training academy, he was a rebel from the start. He was sent to coventry (no one speaks to you) for drinking too much. He exclaimed to Brian, "I was sent to coventry!" Brian replied: "I was born there!" Brian had also spent time in the army. He was court-martialled for sleeping while on duty in Cyprus and spent time in a military prison.

Brian compares Leary to Galileo, a scientist with the establishment looking down the wrong end of the telescope and pronouncing him a heretic. "LSD is vastly more important than that invention," he says, "it is a ten dimensional telescope."

This multi-dimensional telescope was turned on to music, when Brian and Leary hooked up with Rolf Ulrich Kaiser, described by Julian Cope as "Krautrock's First Great Conceptualist". English music in the early seventies failed to inspire Brian. But the pre-techno, electronic German sound opened a whole realm of magical musical follies.

"We were interested in it solely for it solely for its tripping possibilities," admitted Brian. "Pink Floyd sounded very earthly and warm and comforting compared to the places we were going. We were way out in the stratosphere. Not many rhythms or words. All the bloody experts came to make tripping music. We hired a studio for a weekend and gave them anything we could think of to make them feel on top of the world. Everybody took acid. At some time everyone came together and made an electronic jam."

There was suddenly a virtue in playing monotonous sounds - which even the Criminal Justice Act recognised with its draconian banning of repetitive beats.

And it was acid house that saved Brian after the psychedelic drought of the eighties. Once again, tripping was popular, and people were intent on making music for people to trip to and lose themselves in a communal web of Ecstasy. For him, dance culture has been a good thing for the world. It is, "a natural pleasure, healthy, energy flows through the body. If you get a crowd of people who have lost their egos and are well into the music, you can have a wonderful time. It has a similar feel to free festivals except outside, the vibe can be dissipated. Inside it comes straight back at you, until at about 3am it all goes vroom!"

Now, in between writing, Brian finds perfect places for dropping plenty of acid. "I look for a paradise to trip in. This is a great occupation. I stay in England in order to get experiences down. I don't need any more input. I'd like to do a travel book on various paradises to trip in."

He gets that distant sound in his voice as he is transported back to his most recent experience of heaven.

"The thermal baths in Switzerland, full moon, the stars, the mountains, tripped out your skull, get out the steaming hot water, roll in the snow and then leap back in there!"

It's OK for some!

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