Most of the producers of psychedelic art have taken drugs and use their hallucinatory visions they experienced as guides for their work. For Brooklyn chemistry professor Dr. Gerald Oster, a single trip on LSD was all it took to launch him on an art career. "It made a fabulous impression," he recalls. What struck him particularly was the "stunning magnificence of phosphenes," those dancing dots, swirls, radial lines and other luminous images that one can see when the eyes are closed or the fingers are pressed against the lids. To convey " the spirit of this marvelous internal visual phenomenon," Dr. Oster began to make paintings whose geometric and spiral patterns incorporate the effects of visual bounce, blur and pull familiar to Op art. In addition, the patterns are painted in phosphorescent colors which glow in the dark like phosphenes and even change shapes and their brightness diminishes. In the photograph at the right, Dr. Oster is shown superimposed upon one of his paintings, pressing his eyelids to stimulate the phosphenes whose agitated motions are suggested by the painted patterns that emanate from their creator.

The way things have been going, psychedelic art was bound to come about. It is a logical merging of routes that art has been traveling for half a century. The Dadaist helped set the course during World War I. Their anarchical performances—simultaneous screaming of poetry and banding of drums, an orgy of gymnastics amid a conglomeration of masks, marionettes and junk drove audiences wild. The the prime source of psychedelic art are the innovations of recent years: the "Combines" made by Robert Rauschenberg, who urged paintings with radios, lights, an electric fan: Allan Kaprow's "Happenings," freewheeling "environments" involving lights, taped sounds, textures and human antics: Op art, with its illusionistic vibrations; and the mechanized construction of kinetic art.

In fact, just about everything going today is apt to be grist for the psychedelic art mill. The USCO group, in particular, shifts effortlessly from multichannel audio hookups to woven rugs, from "proving out" Marshall McLuhan's theories on media to projecting Hindu philosophies. Their art is concerned both with tuning in on "divine geometry" and showing people "in a concentrated way what's going on around them all the time."

Many psychedelic artist first gained recognition and employment in discotheques, which they decked out with flashing slides, movies and strobes. USCO's first big commision was to supply The World with 2,000 slides and 2 1/2 hours of 16 mm films and to build the control console which operates the projection equipment. Psychedelic artists Jackie Cassen, Rudi Stern and James Morisset have all done work for the Cheetah in New York.

Psychedelic discotheques naturally play host to psychedelic rock 'n' roll. Many of today's song lyrics allude to "acid" (LSD) and to pot. In fact, some songs have been kept off the radio stations which worry they might encourage the use of drugs. But true "acid rock" goes deeper psychedelically than just lyrics. It employs a monotonous, harshly amplified drone sound which can act as a a psychedelic stimulus. In the midst of a routine rock 'n' roll number, for instance, the players may focus on a note pattern which is repeated again and again, louder and louder, until it becomes a single unvarying sound. The listeners ears may ring long after the passage has ended.

Oriental music is a strong influence on psychedelic rock 'n' roll. It has given birth to "raga rock," derived from the ragas—India's ancient melodic forms—that Ravi Shankar plays on the sitar. The Byrds have tuned up their 12-string electric guitars to produce the haunting tones of a sitar. George Harrison has actually used the Indian instrument in two of the Beatles' new albums, Rubber Soul and Revolver. Similarly, the Rolling Stones have used a sitar in Paint It Black. The spread of "raga rock" has had curious results. Ravi Shankar, long considered one of the world's most esoteric performers, now finds himself a pop hero. This year one of his records was reissued just for the popmarket, and after his last London concert he was asked to appear on a TV teen show.

Psychedelic specialty shops are springing up on both coasts. The first of its kind was San Francisco's Psychedelic Shop, which offers eye-jarring silk-screen prints, Oriental jazz, poetry magazines and free Captain Marvel comics. New York City has the Head Shop which offers psychedelic art posters, bright-colored paper-weights and diffraction jewelry—silvery disks that radiate colors of the spectrum and which can be worn as cufflinks earrings or pasted on the forehead like a third eye.

Peacock feathers, diffraction disks, paperwights, bvuttons with the slogan "Psychedelicize Suburbia" have one thing in common—the circular shape of a mandala—a form that symbolizes the universe to Hindus, Buddhist and now to psychedelics. One of them has called the mandala "a meditation machine." Psychedelics are seeing mandalas everywhere. One filmmaker is going about New York City filming manhole covers which he sees as perfect mandalas

To a tuned-in mind, almost anything can have psychedelic import. Paisley patterns, for example, are considered extremely psychedelic. "Be careful when you walk on an Oriental carpet," cautions psychedelic apostle Dr. TImothy Leary, "because you're stepping on somebody's psychedelic vision."