Turn Off Your Mind

A narrative account of the mystic sixties usually isn't my idea of exciting bedside reading or a harrowing page turner. However, Gary Lachman's Turn Off Your Mind manages to surprise you in more ways than one.

First let me start with the negative... Lachman has a tendency of drowning his paragraphs with sentences. Long and wordy, sometimes, you as the reader, feel like you're getting lost in the shuffle of facts and narrations. You begin to notice several instances where Lachman could have alleviated the reader by breaking the paragraph, but instead, he opted to slide from one event to the next in a single contraption. Lachman also has a tendency to produce relatively long sentences structured in a sometimes confusing way. Maybe he's spent too much time in England, or is so excited about his writing that he drones on in glee (which would be justified in this case), but a few more commas or semi-colons, and he would have reduced much of the strain on his audience.

With that said, let me just state one thing: if you are interested in the occult in any way, you must buy this book - more than that, you must READ this book. Lachman, despite my few complaints, manages to weave an intricate web of occult influence for an era that is dramatically affecting the youth of today. Turn Off Your Mind might be an account of the "mystic sixties," but every figure that he discusses holds great influence in the shaping of the youth of the modern era. This book is invaluable. At first - before reading this book - I was skeptical of Lachman because of quoted harsh words I had read of his reactions to Aleister Crowley. After reading his tome, I must say: harsh words indeed. Lachman doesn't pull a single punch. Leary, Watts, Huxley, Lennon, Jagger - nobody leaves without a no-holds-barred interrogation into their professional AND personal lives. Lachman brings the myth back down to Earth and shows you the real heart and soul of the man behind it. Oftentimes we place our heroes way above ourselves into an archetypal demi-god role and we forget just how all-to-human these figureheads really are. Lachman shows us.

On occasion, I was made to wonder whether Lachman was letting too much of his own bias enter into his reflections. I'm sure some bias leaked in, but he does his best to maintain nothing more than a factual narrative account. As an example, despite admitting how he finds Anton LaVey's philosophy "revolting," LaVey is actually one of the few figures that come out of Lachman's book looking better than when they came in. Lachman does his best when keeping things short. He throws fact after fact at you about the daily lives and influences of major thinkers, and then quickly connects them to yet other thinkers, and so forth. His account of the Beatles and their trek with the Maharishi is laughingly serious. We see how manipulative gurus can truly be. His longest accounts focus on Timothy Leary and Charles Manson. In Leary, you discover many instances of wreckless abandon and wanton disregard for moderation. In Manson, you find a shallow manipulator who literally scared Beach Boy Dennis Wilson out of his own home.

Lachman's work is something that you really can't show appreciation for by writing a glowing review. It's not something that can be communicated in an awe-inspiring way. Turn Off Your Mind must be read. Read it from cover to cover like it was a textbook requirement in a Pop Culture class - and indeed it should be. Colin Wilson is often given credit for adding credibility to the esoteric with his existential examination of it in The Occult. Lachman's book is just as revolutionary, except his adheres to an examination through popular culture, which is a more relative philosophy.

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