Francis Berger
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Jim Morrison and the Spiritual Backfire

3/12/2019

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I turned my back on the Catholic Church and Catholicism when I was sixteen. The drift had started a couple of years earlier when I refused the sacrament of Confirmation. My rejection of the Church and the Catholic faith had nothing to do with creeping atheism, but rather my growing discomfort with the increasingly visible hypocrisies I was seeing all around me. Put succinctly, by failing to live up to its own tenets and dogma, I felt the Church had let me down, and I had no desire to be confirmed into the folds of what I considered a corrupt institution.
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Though I had rejected my Catholic faith, I still believed in God and still possessed some form of spiritual yearning. I began seeking alternative approaches to the divine, and because I was sixteen, popular music was one of the first places I looked. The Doors was the first band to pique my interest in this regard. In one respect, the rock band was simply one of dozens that had exploded onto the scene at the height of the flower-power/hippie/sexual revolution era of the late-sixties. What set The Doors apart for me was the dark charisma of the band's lead singer, Jim Morrison.

Though I liked the band’s music, I felt a greater attraction to Morrison’s shamanistic persona and mystical lyrics. I immediately investigated the origin of the band’s name and discovered it had its source in a line from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
 
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Aldous Huxley took the title for his book The Doors of Perception, which details his attempt at psychedelic consciousness expansion via mescaline, from this line. In turn, Jim Morrison reduced the phrase even further by naming his rock-and-roll band The Doors after Huxley's book. At the age of sixteen, I considered all of this to be profound, and thus began my nearly three-year obsession with the life and work of James Douglas Morrison.

Looking back at it now, I realize what had fascinated me about Morrison was the dark spirituality he seemed to epitomize. Having turned my back on Catholicism, I was searching for another route toward the spiritual and, as silly as it sounds now, I was hopeful Jim Morrison could provide such a route.

In Morrison, I saw a kindred spirit who had an innate interest in consciousness. Like me, he had been a shy, sensitive youth drawn to poetry and literature. Like me, he sensed there was more to life than the material and had a keen interest in peak experiences and creative transcendence within which he believed the secret to life could be discovered. While other bands and singers of the era sang of incense and peppermints, Morrison crooned about breaking through the other side. His persona represented a raw, intense form of unbridled yearning for greater consciousness and experience that found no solace within conventional spiritual frameworks.

After reading No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, I regarded Morrison as an incarnated version of one of The Doors’ own songs - a wild child, full of grace, who offered the potential to be the savior of the human race. According to the biography, Morrison detested his lionization as a rock star and regarded his rocket ride to fame as a trap, one that kept him from pursuing his true calling as a poet and visionary. I took Morrison’s lack of interest in his eventual fame and material success as proof of the man’s dedication to higher things.

While the rest of his bandmates simply wanted to put on a show, Morrison aspired to elevate the crowd into a mass trance of transcendence with himself at the helm as the grand shaman. He began to mock his own celebrity altering the charismatic appearance that had made him a star. He grew a beard, gained weight, and began performing lewd and unpredictable antics on stage. Caught in a monster of his own making, he sought escape through alcohol and drugs, and his overindulgence eventually resulted in his premature death at the tender age of twenty-seven.

Convinced Morrison had been on to something, I spent a little over two years researching his life and work. I analyzed the lyrics to every Doors song, read every poem Morrison had written, and scoured countless secondary sources written by people ranging from his family members and associates to hardcore fans and academics. In 1990, I even made a pilgrimage to Mr. Mojo Risin’s grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in France.

What did I discover after my exhaustive research?

Well, nothing good.

The more I waded in Jim Morrison’s life, the more I realized he had been, at best, a minor mystic, but even that may a generous overestimation. In the end, I concluded Jim Morrison had been merely an intelligent and sensitive young man – an unexceptional poetic talent bolstered by exceptional charisma and stage presence who, rather tragically, happened to be in the right place doing the right thing when the tumultuous wave that was the 1960s deluged the world.

It did not take me long to realize that Morrison’s inherent spirituality was, at its core, quite base and material. Though he shared some brilliant observations during interviews and in some snippets of his poems and songs, Morrison’s spiritual insights rarely rose above the physical plane. Excess paved the road to wisdom, mystical experiences were the result of sex or drugs, and doors stood between the known and the unknown, but Morrison himself could offer no explicit revelation about what the unknown encompassed. Morrison obsessed with breaking through to the other side, but had been utterly indifferent to what the other side might actually contain.

Having written the above, I do believe Morrison possessed some level of spiritual intuition and occasional, non-drug induced moments of heightened awareness or consciousness, but I surmise he had no proper channels into which to funnel these. Rejecting Christianity, and every other religious tradition for that matter, Morrison directed his inherent, malformed spiritual energies in the only direction available to him – the tempestuous, chaotic, hedonistic 1960s counterculture he ironically professed to loathe.

The meeting of these two forces proved to be short-lived and fatal. When his divine spark encountered the noxious, combustible fumes of 1960s, it resulted in a horrendous and tragic spiritual backfire. Embracing the sexual revolution and drug culture with open arms, Morrison embarked on a truly spectacular and pointless five-year journey of self-destruction that culminated in his mysterious death in a Paris hotel room in 1971.  

 
My interest in Jim Morrison waned after I turned nineteen. I continued my wayward spiritual quest in the works of Colin Wilson and P.D. Ouspensky and let Jim Morrison fade into the background. Though I still enjoy some of The Doors’ music whenever it comes on, I rarely think about the band or their tragic lead singer these days. I am certain my exposure to The Doors and Morrison was harmful to some degree, but with the exception of a few youthful drinking binges, I knew better than to follow Morrison down the paved road of excess in the hope of finding wisdom. Even as a teenager, I was averse to the idea of consciousness expansion through chemical means, and though I had turned away from the Catholic Church, it did not take me long to understand that the rock-and-roll, Lizard King shamanism Morrison offered was spiritual dead end that offered nothing more than an excuse for destructive, hedonistic indulgence.

Whenever I do think about Jim Morrison these days, it is from a speculative perspective. I imagine Jim Morrison would have made a formidable Christian had he chosen the path, and I wonder why he had seen no appeal in Christianity. Christ’s gift – the one and only true way to the other side - offers exactly what Morrison had longed for during life. All the right ingredients had been in place. Yet Morrison adhered to a hedonistic and rebellious worldview instead, which led to him a true Roman wilderness of pain, suffering, and early death. Though he had annagramatized his name to Mr Mojo Risin in the song L.A. Woman, Morrison had shown no real interest at the prospect of rising after death.

Sadly, his desire to break on through to the other side ended with a spiritual thud. I say this not from a position of judgmental scorn, but rather with a saddened heart. Say what you will about the man (and this despite the ample conspiracy theories about his being an agent of the establishment), I consider Jim Morrison to have been misguided rather than evil, and I cannot help but wonder what might have been had he seen the light in his own lifetime. 

In 1990, his father had a flat stone placed on Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise. The bronze plaque on the stone contains the following inscription in Greek: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ.


This translates as "true to his own spirit" or "according to his own daemon.”

The second translation is more fitting in my opinion. It captures the tragedy of Jim Morrison and the lost spiritual potential he epitomized, a potential to which he himself was utterly oblivious as this short interview snippet, recorded less than a year before his death, clearly demonstrates.
15 Comments
Bruce Charlton
3/12/2019 21:08:23

I've never been a fan of JM or the Doors (and they didn't make much impact on my age group in England) - but I have noticed that the hardcore conspiracy theorists have him included as part of the 'PSYOPS' theory of the sixties counterculture; based on the 'coincidence' of so many like JM coming from high level military families, and congregating in particular parts of California.

I don't think the idea is that people like JM were 'in on' the conspiracy - but that they were selected, promoted, and used by it. And that they were themselves subjected to various mind control interventions.

I find the argument of this conspiracy confusing - I'm not sure what the conspiracy is alleged to be achieving - but I am sure that a good bit of the popular music scene has-been and is 'used' as a manipulation by the Establishment to pursue their agenda (which we would regard as strategically evil).

If there is any truth in this (and I suppose the prediction could be tested) if JM *had* become seriously Christian, that would have been an end of him as a mass popular musician.

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Francis Berger
3/13/2019 10:28:40

It is very likely that the Establishment harnessed the perniciousness of pop music in the sixties; goodness knows, they certainly do it now. Morrison could very well have been a part of that, and he likely only possessed at best indirect knowledge of his role in the strategic evil (as you mention).

The Morrison family is a peculiar one. Jim's father was a rear admiral and was commander of US naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which launched the US into the Vietnam War. Many have claimed the Tonkin incident was a false flag operation. In any case, when you consider the immense influence (mostly negative) this father and son each separately had on American society and the world, it's enough to make your head spin.







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palintropos
3/12/2019 23:24:35

Thanks for the interesting article. One day the 60s may be considered on a historical scale of the bizarre and fantastic a 9 or 10.

When my wife and I visited Pere Lachaise once the French guide ended his tour at Morrison's grave. To my surprise he was more or less obsessed and I believe had even written something himself about Morrison.

Another American star of the period, or starlet, who died in Paris under mysterious circumstances was the actress Jean Seberg, from Marshalltown, Iowa. Her life was another cautionary tale written in day glow colors. At age 18, she won a nationwide contest for the lead in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan. She was then taken up by Francois Truffaut for a leading role in the iconic Cinema Nouveau classic Breathless. Besides getting mixed up with some Black Panthers Seberg also married wild man Romain Gary – who shot himself in 1980. I think before Seberg Gary was involved with Jane Fonda.

In the 60s (some of) those whom the gods smiled on streaked across the sky into spectacular flame-outs that make #metoo and all the rest of it tame by comparison.

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Francis Berger
3/13/2019 10:30:44

Thanks for the comment. Why have I never heard of Jean Seberg before now? I certainly have some huge blind spots in my pop culture knowledge.

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palintropos
3/13/2019 15:44:53

She was emblematic. Pop stars, like all successful artists, poets, maybe even writers, hold up a mirror to their patrons. The patron gazes into the mirror and sees a more intense, purer version of himself. There is a kind of yearning, as you eloquently describe. As you evolved you needed other heroes and gods to admire in other mirrors. But, the mirror is still a kind of illusion which the artist projects onto the patron who must actively and willfully want this illusion. All art is a kind of lie but great art illuminates our ability to discern a truth.

"The profane multitude I hate, and only consecrate my strange poems to those searching spirits whom learning hath made noble and nobility sacred."

Francis Berger
3/13/2019 16:23:51

@ palintropos

That was well put.

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William Wildblood link
3/16/2019 13:24:42

Really good article, Francis. You sum it up very well. I too was a fan of the Doors in my late teens and still think Jim Morrison had one of the best voices in the rock genre. But there was a darkness and even despair to the music that eventually put me off and I think you are right that this came from the confusion in his soul. He was someone who aspired to higher things but was not able to shake off the shackles of his lower nature, a very common failings of the whole of the '60s counterculture. It's the desire for higher consciousness without the will to make the sacrifices this demands. "We want the world and we want it now."

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Francis Berger
3/16/2019 15:34:56

Thank you, William. It is good to hear another ex-Doors fan say that. I think you have to have been a fan of Jim Morrison to sense the soul confusion, as you put it. There was a part of Morrison that seemed to aspire to something higher, but he really did go about it in a misguided and, ultimately, tragic way.

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Paul
5/22/2020 14:56:30

There had always been a strange allure about Morrison in the spiritual sense. Many of lyrics he penned show it: waiting for the sun (son), Jesus, save us!, and in general I think he did recognize that Jesus is the Savior of the World. He also made clear the hypocrisy of the same world: Calling on the dogs, this is the strangest life I’ve ever known.

Sadly, Morrison didn’t appear to trust in the Lord, but indulged in alcohol to what appeared as an attempt of escapism. He left for Paris at the end. Let’s only hope that he truly called on the Lord during his solitude there.

As Charles Spurgeon states, one has to simply “look” to Christ to be saved as quoted in the book of Isaiah. Morrison did more seeking than the average person. Jesus said, if you seek, you will find. We’ll never know where Morrison currently lies, but I’ll say, he made an impact on my life then and even today.

Thanks for your article.

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Francis Berger
5/22/2020 19:11:12

@ Paul - "Let’s only hope that he truly called on the Lord during his solitude there."

That was well said. And you are right - Morrison was definitely a seeker. I do hope he called on the Lord when the time came, Thanks for the comment.

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mojo risin
3/16/2021 22:54:55

An avid Doors fan and musician -- I have to applaud Mr Jim Morrison for the sheer talent he had. I do find it sad that Morrison didn't truly call out to our Savior. I do truly believe the Lord put him here for a reason, even if he didn't know the reason himself.

I will echo this quote:

@ Paul - "Let’s only hope that he truly called on the Lord during his solitude there."

Morrison is from the likes of which we probably will never see again -- a vocal range and sound like no other.

May we hope that we can see him again in Heaven, and rejoice together!

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Joe
5/25/2022 02:10:59

Unless a person repents and believes and trusts only in Jesus Christ, then their lifetime of sin no matter how small or great will go unpaid for and they cannot be saved. For Jesus Christ came to save the world, not condemn it. No Church or institution can forgive you your sins and give you eternal life, only Jesus Christ can do this for you. For by grace you are saved through faith in God's only Son, Christ Jesus.

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Francis Berger
5/25/2022 09:29:17

@ Joe - No disagreement here.

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bert
7/31/2022 17:48:05

Great read. Respect. Thank you

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liana link
10/6/2022 11:34:22

thanks for info

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