The pull of the dark side, death, evil, whatever you call it, is strong. I was listening on Apple Music, for old time’s sake, to the Jerry Garcia solo albums. Beautiful and dark. Jerry was drawn towards the dark. He sang about his own coming death. Not just Jerry, but the Stones, even the Beatles and Dylan, from time to time, couldn’t help being seduced.
We are all so drawn, I think. There is something seductive, beautiful in its own way, of the rebellion against the light. It is difficult to resist. It is the original sin. It is ISIS.
On my one and only ayahuasca journey, I experienced a vision of ultimate evil. It was like an infinite wall of images of absolute horror, death, and evil. My immediate reaction was shock and fear.
When I was able to gather myself and draw back, I was suddenly struck by how incredibly beautiful the vision was, in spite of being an avalanche of horror. As soon as that happened, it all changed, to the most heavenly vision imaginable. Beauty and love without end.
There is a raging cosmic war being waged for possession of our human souls. We ignore the reality of this war at our ultimate peril.
Greetings from Tucson.
As you know, Garcia’s often-dark lyrics were mostly written by Robert Hunter, but Garcia whole-heartedly embraced them in musical expression that was indeed beautiful.
When the Hunter/Garcia songs and the Dead’s use of American symbols were criticized by some as being “un-American”, Garcia replied that the Grateful Dead were as American as apple pie and lynch mobs, reflecting the same sort of contrast between beauty and darkness.
I suspect that Jerry Garcia was not particularly concerned about the “war being waged for possession of our human souls”, which is usually associated with myths about the struggle between God and the devil. It could very well turn out that a large portion of the human species simply created God in their own image. resulting in a God and host of associated stories that are just as neurotic as the creators themselves, and which could lead to a very brief period of existence for the human species as a whole. Humans have not been around for that long, relatively speaking.