There, out near the horizon, where ocean turns to sky, it seems to hover, glistening in the sunlight. Island, that place where dreams merge with reality and the psychedelic experience finds roots. Now a group named after Aldous Huxley's last novel has been formed. Let me tell you about where the Island Group is going and about the vision that started it.

Thirty years ago, Aldous Huxley published his utopian Island, a novel synthesizing the ideas collected throughout his lifetime into a portrait of the tropical island Pala, a psychedelic paradise on earth. Island was intended to be the antidote to the distopian Brave New World, a warning to humanity about the possibilities of authoritarian mind control which Huxley had issued in the 'Thirties. The polar cultures portrayed in Island and Brave New World are a perfect metaphor for the dilemma that we psychedelic explorers confront. We find ourselves reacting with frustration and anguish to the violent Brave New World Order we live in and and, at the same time, yearning for a more sane society based on the insights we have gained from our mind journeys. The Island Group was formed to act as midwife in the birthing of a new psychedelic culture.

The idea for The Island Group began, appropriately enough, as a mushroom vision. I was an undergraduate in psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), at the time. I had already graduated from my role as hippie, which had ended the year before after a visit to Europe. In Switzerland, in July, 1976, I had lunch with Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, in a small cafe on the Rhine River. A little over a year later, at UCSC, before a very large crowd, I introduced chemist Alexander Shulgin who, in turn, turned the meeting over Hofmann. The setting was Cowell Auditorium, which was filled with about 600 people while 4,000 people gathered around the perimeter, listening to Hofmann relate the story of his discovery of LSD on outdoor loudspeakers. Fire marshals had to order the crowd away from a large glass window, against which they had pressed dangerously.

Hofmann's visit to Santa Cruz was the catalyst for the first psychedelic conference in a decade. Counter-culture heroes of mine -- Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner, Allen Ginzberg, Stephen Gaskin -- mingled with psychologists and psychiatrists who had conducted research during the previous two decade, including Oscar Janiger, Myron Stoloroff, William McGlothlin, and others. My dream of creating a common ground where psychedelicists could gather had been realized.

For me, the "LSD -- A Generation Later" conference, as I named it, was the most intense work of my life up until that time. The day after the conclusion of the conference, some of the principles were to get together for a brunch. That morning, a friend offered me some of an extraction he had made from psilocybin mushrooms. I decided to opt for these instead of the VIP lunch. Our resultant journey led us to the the beach, where we walked out on rocks along the surf.

I had just finished reading two book, Intelligence Agents by Timothy Leary and Island by Huxley. In Intelligence Agents, Leary talks in global terms about the importance of spin. Civilization on our planet, he declares, moves from east to west. The further west we go, the more into the future we travel. Go west young man, Leary said. I looked westward.

Island described an ideal society on a tropical island in the South Seas. In my bemushroomed state, the ideas began to merge. If I went further west, I would reach an island, I would travel into the future, toward an utopian psychedelic society. "What would be a better way to spend the rest of my life than making this vision happen?" I asked myself. I also knew that this dream could not happen overnight. No ''Sixties style" dreaming about instant nirvana and overnight revolution for this graduate of Hippie 101. But I would carefully and systematically work toward the realization of my Island vision.

It wasn't until thirteen years later that I began The Island Group. In that time I had finished a Masters in Psychology, almost completed a Ph.D., suffered through a drug bust, and started a software catalog company, Mindware. I wrote the following Island "manifesto" and passed it around on a one page flyer:

The Island Group is a free association of individuals dedicated to the creation of a psychedelic culture. Aldous Huxley was a conneseur of new ideas. In the generation since Island was written, there has been a steady stream of innovations that Huxley would have savored, including:

• new psychedelic compounds with more precise effects
• experimental forms of relationship and community
• intelligence enhancement
• the "new physics"
• life extension
• nanotechnology
• the increasingly friendly computer-human interface
• virtual reality and multimedia
• chaos theory
• techno- shamanism
• a transpersonal psychology based on the mystical experience
• consciousness-changing technologies, including "brain" machines

You can see, by the partial list I composed, that a lot has happened in those 30 years since Island. And the rate of change will only accelerate as we step into the new Millenium. So Island Group began with the creation of a salon -- a weekly gathering where these new ideas can be presented and discussed. For the past year and a half, I have had these salons in my home. The results have been exciting. and we believe that the small group can serve as the crucible for change in our culture. We hope that other salons will spring up based on our model -- so that we can begin teaching and learning from each other.

The Island Group's crowning achievement to date was co-sponsorship of The Bridge Conference at Stanford University. In the tradition of the LSD--A Generation Later Conference, we brought together the finest minds of the psychedelic movement for two days of panels and seminars. Dan Joy reports on the conference in this issue.

Our next step will be the formation of a non-profit foundation. The purpose of this Island Foundation will be to give grants for research into methods of consciousness change, including psychedelics. I have been told repeatedly by a scientists working in pharmacology and psychology that the only obstacle to research with psychedelics now is money. A funding source would allow research to begin in this country and perhaps elsewhere.

That "elsewhere" is part of our long range dream. To create a psychedelic culture, you need an environment relatively uninfluenced by national governments and not subject to the approval or under political control of the present society. Such a birthing ground might be found in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps on an actual island, maybe on a man-made island. Even more far out is the idea of a founding a Island space habitat. Well, I can dream, can't I?

And before your eyes you find the last part in the Island's program. Island Views is your new idea information source. Unabashedly psychedelic in nature, we will continue to keep you poised on the breaking wave of change. So I hope you will join us in our Island adventure.