Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

—Anais Nin

[American Dream]

“The sage speaks of what he sees”: War Games and the New Spirit of Capitalism



“At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening,” wrote Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995. “Once again, capitalism’s relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labour is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts.”i What is this something? For Barbrook and Cameron, it is nothing less than a new, postmodern orthodoxy for the information age: the fusion of the endless and internal imperialism of the invisible hand, colliding with the long-since passed countercultural longings of the 1960s. This faith, snaking out from within the technological laboratories of Silicon Valley and the endless wires of the global information infrastructure, is something that they identify as “The California Ideology.”

The California Ideology is a hippie ideology. It is infatuated with open systems, taking things not as individual parts but variations of a greater whole. It eschews the traditions of hierarchy and centralized command; it dresses down. It might experiment with acid and other psychotropic substances. It challenges the supremacy of the state. The California Ideology is also a yuppie ideology. It believes in markets and sees how the fluctuations of labor, production, and exchange connects every person in a symbiotic system. It bucks the trends of previous capitalist formations by asserting the role of the individual as an entrepreneur, thus resurrecting the tenets of the American Dream, the self-made man. It is cool, new, and full of energy. It too challenges the supremacy of the state, at least in its liberal-corporatist form, typified by the Fordist-Keynesian modes of production.

Continues at: http://deterritorialinvestigations.word ... apitalism/

[Hammer of Los]

...
We are safe az long as the wize sages keep on talkin'.
...

[American Dream]

Wise sages are in short supply in the following Burning Man experience:

Bad Acid and Weird Boobs: Why Burning Man Isn't Worth It

By Soren Bowie August 30, 2010

http://www.cracked.com/blog/bad-acid-we ... -worth-it/


Today marks the beginning of the Burning Man Festival in the wastelands of Nevada. Thousands of people will pour out into the desert, abandoning day jobs, relationships and social norms to dance around in one hundred degree heat wearing capes and glitter. For anyone unfamiliar with Burning Man, it's a weeklong event dedicated to self-expression, community reliance and sexual contact under the guise of spirituality. I know this because I went last year for the first and last time. I went seeking a utopian enclave of open-minded and accepting brothers and sisters, I followed rumors of a culture rising from the desert clay and supporting itself for seven days on nothing but love, understanding, and a little pharmaceutically induced introspection. Instead I found misguided, fat men in tie-died t-shirts with exposed genitals caked in dust. Suffice it to say, Burning Man let me down.



"Dude! I know it's your bike, I just need to borrow it, OK?"

I first discovered the festival a little over a year ago while accidentally dating a vegan. She explained, a little too aggressively I thought, that the tattoo on her lower back was a sigil she designed at the Burning Man Festival and not a poorly drawn target as I had suspected. I told her firmly that festivals built around ritual sacrifice were not something I condoned, and while never actually accusing her, I may have insinuated that she was a witch. The relationship didn't last long after that. Still, I grew curious about the desert party she was forever proselytizing. A week before it was set to start, I did a little research and discovered the true romance of Burning Man. It was a veritable mix tape of all my favorite things in life: art, adventure, music, sun, sex, magic, and on occasion, sex magic. I was in, full tilt.



Pictured: An apology for the first image.

I arrived late on a Tuesday night to what looked like the cultural remnants of a nuclear war. People ducked in and out of dirty tents or danced awkwardly in front of fires wearing patchwork Halloween costumes. If there was free love here, it didn't look like it was being passed out yet. A painted teenager on a tricycle skidded to a stop in front of me.

"Welcome home," he said.

"No," I told him, "my home is much nicer than this. There's a pool."

"It's what we say here. 'Welcome home.'"

"That's absurd," I argued. "Have you seen my house? It's outstanding."

He didn't seem to understand. He told me he loved me and handed me four tabs of acid before riding off into the night.

I put them in my shirt pocket and explored the grounds, strolling through drum circles and past art exhibits made of doll faces and hot glue. If art is designed to pose a question to the world, these seemed like asinine questions no one really wanted answers to. I finally stopped in front of a giant cloth-stitched vagina smeared in Vaseline. Anyone who felt inclined could walk through it, experiencing rebirth. The artist stood on hand watching heads crown and smiling proudly for his contribution to the world. I wanted to feel as strongly about anything as he did about giant vaginas.



This must have taken forever to build.

A group of 20-somethings floated by, the girls in the group wearing nothing but wings and underwear. One smiled at me and I undressed her with my eyes. It didn't take long.

"You're pretty naked," I announced.

"You're overdressed,' she said.

I looked down at my wing tips, my seersucker. It was possible in the darkness that she couldn't tell it was breathable cotton. A short, African American man pushed his way through the group and announced himself as the patriarch of the family.

"You're a family?"

"Yessir. It's all about family here. Would you like to join us?"

"Is there an initiation?"

"No."

"Then yes."

They were on their way to an Energy Touch Session which sounded promising. As we walked, they explained that everyone in the family had to choose a nickname, most of them sounded vaguely Native American. The short leader went by Hail. I requested Storm Shadow but they argued it sounded too threatening. We compromised with Rain Man.



Definitely a good name. Definitely.

We arrived at a massive tent filled with people lying on the floor caressing one another. I sat down and immediately felt hands on my neck. Hail insisted in a whisper that I touch someone.

Finally.

It wasn't what I had hoped. I suggested that if they didn't want me touching breasts and only breasts they really ought to put up some rules or something. I also learned that energy touching was just a fancy name for hard petting. At one point I worked a hand half way up the thigh of a particularly undressed woman, which, along with the heat of the tent, contributed to me sweating through my shirt entirely. I didn't remember the tabs of acid in my breast pocket until after I started to sense that my consciousness was at its purest form in my teeth. Also, I learned to control time.



Yahtaaaah!

I stepped outside to get some air and clear my head but after a certain point, I could no longer differentiate between what I was remembering from earlier in the night and what I was remembering from the future. I had been irresponsible with my power, I had ruined the linear order of events and broken history. I felt bad.

I read somewhere that a man suffering from severe dehydration in the desert will cry right before he dies. No one knows where the tears come from but they fall all the same. I thought of this standing outside the Energy Touch tent because I was crying and because I was pretty sure I was going to die.

The rest of the night was a violent sandstorm of memories, specifically the memory of the violent sandstorm. The wind picked up around 2:00 a.m. and I sat huddled in a Winnebago with my new family. I stared into the back of a metal spoon, trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy, and possibly even handsomeness because, while survival was my top priority, a deep corner of my mind held out hope that sleeping with one of my new sisters was still a possibility.



There is no spoon, there is no spoon.

After an hour or two the sound of sand hitting the windows was replaced by a duller, wetter sound.

"It's raining," said Hail. "It never rains." We all stopped to listen. It thudded on the top of the trailer and everyone turned to me.

"What?"

"It's you. You're the Rain Man."

I felt them staring. I sensed that they wanted to me to say something profound, to teach them all a lesson they could take back with them to the normal world. They needed to know they were in good hands, that I was responsible for this and that it was for their benefit. I opened my mouth and began:

"I'm going outside to stick my hand down the pants of Mother Nature." I stood and walked out into the desert. I didn't turn to see if anyone followed. It was the last thing I remember.

I woke up around 10:00 in the morning face down in the dust. Overweight men in sunhats sat around me drinking juice while their bare testicles dangled like turkey wattles off the aluminum edges of their lawn chairs. They looked at me disapprovingly.

"Your friends are gone, they left you," one of them told me.

I dusted myself off and looked around while feeling the sunburn on my face. The Winnebago was missing. The old men continued to stare. "You know, druggies like you are the problem with Burning Man," they said. "You're ruining it for the rest of us. Now get out of our camp."

I walked toward the center of the festival. My family had left me to die in the night. There was no loyalty here, no communal ideal. Everything looked duller and dirtier in the light of day. People still wore their revealing costumes from the night before but now I could see that they were just awkward and unattractive people taking conspicuous stabs at sexuality.



You can feel the embarrassment even through the glasses.

Filthy, naked kids ran around without supervision, digging into trashcans or collecting shattered glass and holding it up to the sun. Several of the women strutted around topless but their breasts, which should have been excited by new freedom, pouted and drooped in opposite directions, refusing contact with one another like they were in a fight.

I ran into one of my sisters from the night before and she explained that they had all gone out into the rain, that Hail had wandered into the desert and was struck by a rattlesnake. He had to be driven to a hospital and it didn't look good. She explained that the family dissolved after that and everyone was, "sort of doing their own thing now." I asked her if she still wanted to be my casual sister and do casual sister things. She declined.

It took me two hours to find my car and drive back to the main road. I was headed home. I felt sorry for Hail, another young, black man in American taken before his time by rattlesnakes. But everyone else I hated.

I realized in the light of day that free love wasn't what I had hoped. It was not a communal spiritual odyssey of open minds, exploring the sensual and discovering how beautiful life can be without rules and inhibitions. Free love was a dirty, confused child with sticky hands rooting through garbage. I was shocked that this event could sustain itself for seven days, let alone one night. I was over Burning Man.



"Go on then! We don't need your kind 'round here.

[American Dream]

It started off like this:





And soon became like this:

[Hammer of Los]

...

Make no mistake, watchers.

I WILL NOT be gagged.

I WILL NOT BE IMPRISONED!

i am a simple humble good kind law abiding old man with a limp and a stick who likes to read an' write philosophy to bring benefit to the whole planet.

FACT.

WE ARE THE FUCKING ILLUMINATI!

FACT.

XXX
...

[American Dream]

It almost goes without saying, but don't trust in these people for all your revelations about Life and the Universe:

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Close Encounters of the PSYOPS Kind Part III



This is part three of my UFO series. Parts one and two can be viewed here and here.

And now onto the intelligence links behind the Nine. While Andrija Puharich is generally portrayed as an accomplished scientist and inventor with heavy New Age leanings, he also has a very deep background, in the Peter Dale Scott sense.

"According to Jack Sarfatti, a physicist on the fringes of the Puharich-Geller-Whitmore events of the min-1970s, Puharich 'worked for Army Intelligence in the early fifties -which perhaps implies that his 'discharge' was a cover for continuing to operate in an apparently civilian capacity. It also appears that some of Puharich's medical inventions were originally developed as part of classified Army projects.

"In 1987, Puharich himself claimed that he had been part of a US Navy investigation called Project Penguin that researched psychic abilities back in 1948. He named the head of this project as Rexford Daniels, who lived close to his home in Glen Cove in the 1950s. According to writers Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, Daniels -who studied the effects of electromagnetic waves on human beings -became convinced, in the 1970s of the existence of some kind of intelligent force in the universe operating through electromagnetic frequencies and that 'human beings can mentally interact with it.'

"Ira Einhorn, Puharich's close associate in the 1970s, told us recently that, although Puharich had worked for the CIA during the 1950s, he was no longer doing so twenty years later. However, evidence points very much in the other direction. Puharich's relationship with intelligence agencies almost certainly did not end in the 1950s. Uri Geller told us at a meeting in his home near Reading in England in 1998 that: 'The CIA brought Puharich in to come and get me out of Israel.' Jack Sarfatti goes further, claiming: 'Puharich was Geller's case officer in America with money provided by Sir John Whitmore.' And according to James Hurtak, via his Academy For Future Sciences, Puharich 'worked with the US intelligence community.' By implication this was during the early 1970s when he, Hurtak, was also working with him.

"We know Puharich was working with the CIA on experiments with various techniques for inducing altered states of consciousness, which is another way of saying he worked on the potential of mind control. We also know, at least up to a point, that Geller worked for them -they wanted to know how he could use his mind to influence inanimate objects and see distant locations -in other words, to test his remote-viewing abilities. Were the Nine somehow part of a CIA mind-control experiment?"
(The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince, pgs. 206-207)



Further, Puharich was deeply involved in hypnosis.

"...his [Puharich] personal training in hypnosis to the level of master hypnotist, at which stage are revealed such mysteries as the 'instant command technique' so often used, and arguably abused, by stage hypnotists...

"Writer Stuart Holroyd later (rather worryingly) described hypnosis as 'a routine procedure in Puharich's investigation of pyschics', which raises some ethical questions about his methods. The altered state of consciousness known as hypnosis is by no means fully understood, but it is well known that entranced subjects are notoriously eager to please their hypnotists by creating fantasies that comply with his or her own predilections or agendas. Hypnotist and subject can soon become partners in a strange and wild dance in which sometimes one person leads and sometimes the other, although it is usually the hypnotist who calls the tune."
(ibid, pgs. 169-170)



Hypnosis can have far more sinister implications than Picknett and Prince address. Two prior blogs I wrote on hypnosis address some of these implications here and here. In the case of the Nine, many of Puharich's 'findings' occurred while the subject was under hypnosis. Continuing with Picknett and Prince:

"From the accounts of contact with the Nine, it is obvious that Puharich steered his 'contactees' very much in the direction that he wanted them to go. When he first hypnotized Uri Geller, who then began to speak of extraterrestrials, it was Puharich who asked whether or not they were the 'Nine Principles' spoken of by Dr Vinod twenty years before. Perhaps not surprisingly, the answer was yes...

"...Similarly, when Puharich put Bobby Horne into a hypnotic trance and he began to speak the words of an extraterrestrial intelligence called Corean, Puharich suggested to him that it was really the Nine, and the 'entity' immediately agreed. In fact, one of Puharich's close colleagues during this time, Ira Einhorn... confirmed Puharich's determination to turn all psychic communication into contact with the Nine, and that he was 'humanly directing' the pattern of the channelling."
(ibid, pg. 216)

Puharich even went so far as to experiment on children in a hypnotic state in an attempt to induce extraterrestrial contact.

"Consider, for example, Puharich's Geller Kids or Space Kids, whom he tested and trained during the 1970s. There were twenty of them, the youngest nine and the oldest in their late teens, culled from seven different countries and taken to what became jokingly known as Puharich's 'Turkey Farm' at Ossining in order to develop their psychic potential. As we have seen, Puharich trained them in remote viewing, but target locations he set them were significant: they were military or intelligence interest and included the Pentagon, the Kremlin and even the White House. It seems clear that there was an official element to these experiments, as they were being carried out at exactly the same time (1975-8) that defense and intelligence agencies were studying remote viewing in adults. We can speculate that the Ossining establishment was chosen for the children's project because it was a conveniently 'civilian' location: questions would certainly have been asked if youngsters had been experimented on inside military facilities.

"The Ossining programme had even more disturbing elements: Puharich experimented on the children in order to contact extraterrestrial intelligences. As with Geller and Bobby Horne, he regularly hypnotized his young subjects, apparently in the belief that their powers did indeed come from 'aliens'. As Steven Levy wrote: 'The Kids describe strange cities with science-fiction trappings and claim to be messengers from these distant civilisations.'

"Given Puharich's obsession with extraterrestrial influence, not to mention his indiscriminate use of the most powerful sort of hypnosis, it would be strange if the Space Kids had not come up with such descriptions. But was Puharich simply releasing memories of real events, or was he in fact implanting them? In either case, his use of hypnosis, in what were clearly uncontrolled conditions, on children as young as nine, is extremely disquieting."
(ibid, pg. 226)



Puharich's 'Space Kids' make for some interesting implications. One of the main arguments for the existence of the Nine is that to many individuals have encountered them without direct contact from Puharich. On the other hand, what if other groups of children were 'programmed' earlier in much the same fashion Puharich is described as doing above, with the good doctor then using certain 'triggers' to bring back these memories? Consider, for instance, a strange experience Dr. Jack Sarfatti had as a child.

"Jack Sarfatti, on the other hand, had been a gifted child who won a scholarship to Cornell to study physics in 1956, when he was only seventeen years old. In 1953, however, and during the same year as Puharich and the Round Table were in contact with The Nine, Sarfatti had been getting strange phone calls at home. Much later, Puharich's book, URI, brought it all back. Sarfatti's mother began reading the book -which contains a description of the Round Table seances with the Dr. Vinod who channled The Nine -and suddenly recognized the symptoms. She brought the circumstances to her son's attention and the memory of the strange phone calls came back in full force.

"Sarfatti had been getting calls from someone speaking in a strange, metallic voice stating that it was the voice of a computer aboard a spacecraft hovering over the earth. These calls went on for a while, and would cause the young Sarfatti to wander around dazed. Evidently, the memory of the calls receded into his unconscious as he pursued his career in nuclear physics, and only the book by Puharich about Uri Geller brought it all back. The Nine claimed to be aboard a spacecraft, hovering over the earth, called Spectra. Sarfatti himself seemed selected at a very early age for something of importance. He was being tutored in a separate program for gifted children by a founder of American MENSA, Walter Breen, in a program that was funded (at least in part) by the Sandia Corporation. Some of this extracurricular training included lectures on patriotism and anti-Communism: heady stuff for a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. It would be Breen who would recommend Sarfatti for the Cornell scholarship."
(Sinister Forces Book Two, Peter Levenda, pg. 244)



Essentially Sarfatti began receiving these phone calls at the same time as he was being groomed for his future career in nuclear physics. The possibility that the phone calls could have been related to his time in the MENSA program was not lost on Sarfatti.

"Given this background, it is tempting to speculate that Sarfatti was part of a sinister, X-Files-type experiment in 'programming' children as part of some long-term government project. Sarfatti himself acknowledges the possibility, but thinks too much remains unexplained by this scenario. Tellingly, in a question-and-answer session on the Internet in March 1998 with one Mark Thornally, when asked whether Walter Breen could have stage-managed the phone calls and computer voice, Sarfatti admitted that he could, then volunteered: 'Andrija Puharich, who was in the Army at that time I think, would have been able to do it."
(The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince, pg. 244)

Is it possible that individuals like Sarfatti and Geller were experimented on as children by Puharich, or someone in the same line, in a fashion similar to the Space Kids? Was it mere chance that Sarfatti, Geller, Robert Anton Wilson, Jacques Vallee, Saul Paul Sirag, and many more were brought together in a loose collective that Ira Einhorn dubbed the 'psychic mafia' around Puharich in the 1970s or was it some how arranged through years of subtle conditioning? And was this simply the work of human agencies, or was there something else at play?


Vallee


Robert Anton Wilson


Puharich and Pope

Sarfatti takes a wise stance. I have read a lot of material on the Nine and am relatively convinced that some kind of nonhuman intelligence is at play in this whole affair. On the other hand, the obsession Puharich and others have had with making this intelligence into some kind of extraterrestrial being is most curious. As previously stated, the entity or entities calling themselves the Nine did not claim to be extraterrestrial until several years after initial contact. Is it possible that the expectations of Puharich and others heavily involved in the early stages, such as Arthur Young, for the intelligence to be extraterrestrial factor in to this direction? Or did human agencies opt to portray this intelligence as extraterrestrial for their own purposes?

One final point I would like to consider in the strange saga of the Nine is the role various 'human potential centers' have played in spreading their mystic amongst the academics, and the patrons behind these centers.



"A further integral part of this movement was the Institute of Neotic Science at Palo Alto, which was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in March 1973, and is 'dedicated to research and education in the processes of human consciousness to help achieve a new understanding and expanded awareness among all people... They were heavily involved in the psi testing of the 1970s, partly funding the Geller experiments at SRI and, until the CIA came clean about their involvement in the remote-viewing experiments in the mid-1990s, it was the Institute of Noetic Science that claimed to have funded the initial programme. At the very least, this shows that the Institute allowed itself to be used as a cover for the CIA, and perhaps even as a conduit for the funding of the agency's more controversial experiments.

"Arthur Young's highly influential Institute for the Study of Consciousness at Berkeley, founded in 1972, also provided a forum for some of the most daring thinkers of the day. It was here that Richard Hoagland had his meeting with Paul Shay of SRI, and also where he gave his first lecture about Cydonia in 1984. Later he was to acknowledge Arthur Young's personnel influence...

"Institutions and foundations only succeed because of the individuals who breathe life into them. One of the key figures on this scene was avant-garde physicist Jack Sarfatti, the first director of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute, which was funded by Werner Erhard and money covertly channelled through from the Pentagon. His seminars were attended by Stanislas Grof, Russell Targ, Timothy Leary, physicist Saul Paul Sirag (who became director after Sarfatti), Robert Anton Wilson, Fritjof Capra, and Ira Einhorn, who was Sarfatti's literary agent.

"The work carried out by this interlinked network of organizations was imaginative and innovative, presenting a serious challenge to the previous arrogant certainties of the scientific world. It was undertaken in a genuine pioneering spirit, largely born of the idealism of the youth culture of the 1960s and a desire to change the world for the better. However, a dark shadow was cast over this early idyllic promise by the involvement of the Pentagon, CIA and other security and intelligence agencies, who soon realised that the breakthroughs of these idealists had great potential in their own spheres, such as remote viewing. And they did not fail to note that research into altered states of consciousness, including the use of LSD and other drugs, also had darker applications in the various techniques of mind control. So often this research was encouraged and funded -although often covertly, through other channels -by organizations such as the CIA and the Pentagon. One of the pioneers of LSD and consciousness research, John C. Lilly, worked at the Esalen Institute for several years, as well as for the CIA, but only on the condition that his research remained unclassified. This made things difficult for him professionally, because nearly all other researchers in the field were also working on classified projects, so he was unable to share data with them or vice versa.

"Another case of behind-the-scenes agendas in this milieu involved Dr Brendan O'Regan, research director of Edgar Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences and a consultant for SRI, as well as research director for the scientist-philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller. O'Regan arranged the experiments into the strange talents of Uri Geller at Birkbeck College, London in 1975 and was also closely involved with the Puharich-Whitmore circle surrounding the Nine. And, since O'Regan's death in 1992, Jack Sarfatti has claimed that he was also working with the CIA at this time, writing:

"I was then [1973] simply a young inexperienced 'naive idiot' in a very very sophisticated and successful covert psychological warfare operation run by the late Brendan O'Regan of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the late Harold Chipman who was the CIA station chief responsible for all mind-control research in the Bay Area in the 70s."
(ibid, pgs. 235-237)

http://visupview.blogspot.com/2011/07/c ... -part.html

[American Dream]

Burning Man and safer sex / Free your mind, but watch out for crabs

Violet Blue, Special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, August 23, 2007

Making the e-mail rounds a few weeks ago -- and sent to me by more than one high-profile local sex educator -- was a snarky list of ways to "enjoy Burning Man at home." The list included many observations about the experience, like:

Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.

Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.

Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.

Get so drunk you can't recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for five hours.

Have a 3 a.m. soul-baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you're hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.

Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don't go to a doctor.

Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.

[American Dream]

Delusions of Normality: An interview with J.P. Harpignies

LM: Like a sizable majority of Americans, you dabbled with drugs over the years. Did your experiences with consciousness-altering substances change your vision of society? And if so, do you regret what you came to discover?

JP: I did a lot of drugs (far too many) from my late adolescence to my mid to late-ish twenties. Now I crave lucidity and vitality above all, so none of them interest me anymore, except psychedelics, which I place in a totally different category. The psychedelic experience was a major shaper of my worldview. My ecological awareness, while not created by that experience, was certainly radically heightened by it. I felt a visceral craving for green and wild places and a powerful revulsion at paved over landscapes. It also heightened my impatience with the trivial and superficial and made me focus on the deepest essence of people and situations. Those things have stayed with me.

I regret that I did too many drugs when I was too young and didn’t know enough about what I was doing. The most interesting drugs are good at temporarily dissolving rigid ego structures, but if your ego is not yet fully formed, that’s probably not a good idea. And I had many bad experiences as well as a few ecstatic and revelatory ones. I have since learned much more about how other cultures have long used mind-altering plants, but it’s harder to engage with these substances as the body ages. Also, no matter how much one knows and how much preparation one has, these are still unpredictable, trickster energies. I think they are fascinating, and I think much more serious research of all types should be done with them, but I personally think they are not designed for most people and they should only be used sparingly and carefully even by those few who are equipped to handle them. They can be deeply healing in some situations for some people, and they can be, in the most experienced hands, an occasionally authentic form of knowledge acquisition, but in general they are certainly not cure-alls or magical potions that can lead to ultimate truth or to solving social problems.

Note: for an interesting discussion on the risks and rewards of psychedelics, I recommend an essay online at : www.erowid.org

http://levitatingmonkey.com/delusions-o ... arpignies/

[American Dream]

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/downward-facing-drones/

Downward-Facing Drones

By CHARLOTTE SHANE



For all the flexibility of mind and spirit it’s supposed to bestow, yoga in America is a resolutely orthodox endeavor

The self-improvement yoga promises is not an achievement of the body but rather achievement through the body. At least, that’s the party line. “Yoga chitta vritti nirodhah,” reads the first of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, an ancient document that serves as contemporary yoga’s ur-text, though very few self-described yogis have read it. The Sanskrit phrase can be approximately translated as “yoga is the calming of the mind’s fluctuations,” and it’s often quoted in classes as the ultimate purpose for the poses—headstand, warrior, downward facing dog—that have largely become synonymous with the broader spiritual practice. Through assuming these shapes, you pause your usual internal monologue, or at least become aware of it. You establish control over your mind by manipulating your body.

Given yoga’s ubiquity in the United States, the many schools of study, and the entirely unregulated nature of the countless teacher-training opportunities available, there’s much variety in classes. But as with any cultural phenomenon, it is subject to trends. Physical practice, or asana, is supposed to be only one component of the eight limbs of yoga, but few yoga teachers go beyond lip service in emphasizing the nonphysical limbs: a chirpy nod to satya (truth) here, a vegan-promoting appeal for ahimsa (nonviolence) there.

Most Americans are familiar with yoga primarily as a form of exercise, and while they may be suspicious of its tinge of Eastern religion, taking a class at their workplace or local gym is likely to dispel any fears they may have about being paganized. Many 50-minute fitness-center classes don’t allow for much more than a few sun salutations and a shoulder stand. Yoga studios are a bit more willing to tolerate motional and metaphysical commentary from instructors, but even the teachers I’ve found who use sutras as a jumping-off point at the start of a class almost always relate those sutras to the physical movement instead of letting them stand alone as guideposts that might be considered apart from the accompanying acrobatics.

I came to yoga initially because I was tight. In the first class I took, at my local YMCA, the instructor—a personal trainer—taught from a book open in front of her on the floor. A radiant woman with a mean forward fold told me her hamstrings were once as unforgiving as mine, but yoga changed that. With a promised miracle in mind, I’d dipped in and out of classes for years, but I didn’t fall in love with it until I met a teacher whose charisma made it impossible for me not come to class. She had boundless energy and genuine tenderness, and she delivered aphorisms in a low, sincere voice: words about softening, self-love, forgiveness, strength. Every second in her classes felt full of honesty and kindness. Some of the most beautiful moments of my life occurred on the floor there as I lay still and silent in my own sweat. In her hands, yoga generated moments of insight in a safe space. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s easy to believe that asana could be a direct channel to a more authentic self. It’s a possibility I was not alone in chasing; most diehard yogis—you know they’re fairly diehard if they describe themselves as such—believe they are becoming better people first and better bodies second, even if the body is all they focus on.

How asana will transform you can be articulated in many different ways. Some teachers and books say you’ll recognize the limits of your body, the potential of your body, the strength of your body as well as its fragility. Some stress that you can learn to love your body, be grateful for your body, to forgive your body and, by extension, yourself. Balance poses will teach you humility and humor. In backbends, you embrace openness and vulnerability. Inversions prove your courage. And so on. That’s what makes it yoga rather than mere exercise. If I heard a yoga teacher say, “This is movement and nothing more,” as though they were teaching the equivalent of a step aerobics class, I would be shocked.

In spite of this, almost everyone I met practicing and eventually teaching yoga came to it expecting physical results, not spiritual journeys. They wanted more flexibility or to lose weight, or they were following up a doctor’s suggestion that it might alleviate health problems. Occasionally, middle-aged men would tell me they were interested in stress relief, but no one ever told me they came to yoga for a higher level of awareness or to become a better person. From day one, the vast majority of people arrive on the mat expecting exercise. The spiritual portion they can take or leave, turn off or on, as their own interest dictates.

***

Even outside the yoga community, the ideal of a “yoga body” is familiar to the point of banality. We all see this body promoted in ads for varieties of workout clothing, hear it referenced in controversies about form-hugging spandex pants, and deployed as visual shorthand for a healthy lifestyle in food commercials. Among serious practitioners, discussions about the constant promotion of a light-skinned, young, very slim, and very agile body—in everything from magazines to studio websites—almost always involve a loud chorus defending such images as “inspirational,” eliding the more honest assessment of “aspirational.” Why should we not be “inspired” on our paths to use our body for spiritual growth? As revered yoga teacher B.K.S. Iyengar famously said, “It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity.”

One of contemporary yoga’s more pervasive catchphrases is to take your yoga with you “off the mat”: the courage you discover when you lift your legs over your head in a forearm stand can be drawn on outside class to confront a co-worker who’s been spreading rumors or to talk financial problems with your spouse. (There is no equivalent saying to indicate you might access something already familiar; you don’t bring your yoga “onto the mat.”) The body is what comes first, otherwise what comes after won’t come at all. To transcend your physical self, you must master it.

It’s not surprising, then, that this institutionalized obsession with the body can have troubling manifestations in individuals. Some fixate on certain poses to the detriment of their health. I’ve met many yoga devotees with hamstring attachment pain, a symptom of an overaggressive pursuit of deep forward folds. Some adopt strict behaviors the medical community labels disordered, such as excessive exercising and highly restricted eating. Some are on constant “cleanses,” consuming almost all their calories in liquid form, moving from one regimen to another. Others also undergo protracted periods of gluten-free and vegan eating in the name of detoxifying, and all this while working their body strenuously for several hours a day through increasingly demanding postures.

When the body is the only tool for internal betterment, pictures of accomplished bodies are a useful, if not necessary, aid in the self-improvement quest. These images tell us that a mastered mind looks like both feet in the air; a slim thigh resting on an upper arm; a pretty, smiling face hovering above the ground. Yoga is full of naturally flexible, arguably overly flexible women, who receive validation for touching their face to their knees in a forward fold even if collapsing into themselves in that way requires little effort. Teachers readily employ such students to illustrate poses for those who are far less flexible, or simply praise flexible students for their genetic gifts. During my teacher training, a man with decades of experience in instruction repeatedly did this, calling upon the loosest woman among us to serve as models because of how easily they could plop into full splits. For all the assertions that no one can ever truly master a pose or that it doesn’t matter if you ever achieve the most advanced variations, most classes are not led so noncompetitively.

For all the flexibility of mind and spirit it’s supposed to bestow upon those who embrace it, yoga in America is a resolutely orthodox endeavor. By “doing yoga” with your body, you yourself will become yogic: peaceful, wise, measured. This promise is offered to all with no exceptions; it is supposed to hold true for everyone who arrives on their mat because the movements are presumed to bring it about almost indiscriminately. With your mind’s fluctuations calmed, you access a level of excellence that non-yogis cannot. You become a morally superior specimen. Yoga teacher and philosopher Matthew Remski articulates this when he writes, “My heart clings to [the idea]—substantiated by the literature of hatha yoga, by the way—that there must be some resonance between a person’s embodied creativity and their intersubjective empathy.” In other words, if your body is inflexible, your mind must also be limited.

I’ve heard particularly devout practioners claim that yoga, if it were even more widely practiced than it already is, would eliminate murder and soothe tensions between nations. It’s common knowledge among yoga devotees that if only politicians did yoga, civility would be restored to our government. (It’s less commonly known that Congressional gyms already offer regular yoga classes.)

Speculations like this might seem too facile to be worth criticizing, but they’re a symptom of prizing the body as a foolproof thoroughfare to one’s heart. Though Americans may treat sports heroes as gods and resist acknowledging their obvious flaws, rarely does a form of exercise itself convey the philosophy that physical prowess leads to holiness.

For those who are able-bodied and fairly fit, physical exertion as a shortcut to moral enlightenment is an easy sell. As long as you show up for a few ultra-toning hot-yoga sessions several times a week, there’s no need to make any sacrifices or changes to your current lifestyle. You can drive the eight-tenths of a mile to class alone in your SUV, side-eye the women who asks you to move your mat over, and treat yourself to Lululemon afterward without ever surrendering yoga’s holy glow.

***

The muddiness of “physical exercise equals spiritual tool” framework complicates the standard to which yoga instructors are held. Should teachers be immersed in spiritual teachings, or does the physical study bestow that knowledge automatically? Should any practical knowledge of anatomy and preventing injuries be included in any teacher-training curriculum, or is it enough to study the sutras and let the asana instruction guide teachers in keeping students from overexerting? If asana is a path to enlightenment, wouldn’t the wisdom it bestows include an ability to self-regulate and an inability to make serious mistakes that cause damage to others?

Yoga therapist and yoga therapy are phrases that anyone can apply to themselves in advertising, with impunity. Most teachers push back aggressively against state attempts to regulate training programs or license yoga instructors, as is done with forms of body work like massage or physical therapy. In a 2009 New York Times article, one New York City teacher claimed regulation would “destroy the essence of yoga.” In an article in Yoga Journal on local regulations, a Texas teacher claimed that yoga, which is estimated to be a more than $10 billion a year business, was “more of an art form than an industry.”

One of my fellow teacher trainees admitted she didn’t want to learn about anatomy because she worried it would demystify her intuition-based style. She’d already been through one 800-hour teacher training that apparently couldn’t spare any of those hours for learning how most human bodies are fit together. Plenty of yoga teachers regularly revere and center on the body without having an understanding of it on an academic level. The view of “Western science” as a contaminant also plays into this resistance.

Those who teach anatomy for yoga are not in consensus over whether knowledge of anatomy is enough to make physical practice safer; instead they point to a climate that allows mindful choices and sensitive attention to each individual’s abilities. And in some ways, the anatomy debate dances around the larger issue of how well instructing students as its own precise skill is imparted in most trainings. With or without an anatomy portion, many teacher trainings are better understood as protracted workshops designed to deepen one’s personal practice. (The topic of instructor responsibility and conduct is primarily addressed in the context of adjustments—should you ask before touching a student’s body or just go for it?) This is logical. If you believe personal practice is the path to understanding in the most radical, encompassing sense of the word, why bother with particulars of how to lead?

Since almost all yoga classes are focused so intently on the body, discussions about what happens beyond the flesh are curtailed to platitudinous soundbites about nonattachment and letting go of judgments. In this environment in recent years, the yoga world has seen several “sex scandals”: John Friend, the former head of Anusara, was revealed to be using his influence to have sex with his students and employees (who were often one and the same.) Bikram Choudhury, the bombastic founder of the intensely proprietary Bikram yoga, faced several lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct. Cameron Shayne, founder of martial arts and yoga fusion Budokan, wrote an ill-conceived post arguing against discouraging “hot” sexual relationships between yoga teachers and their students. Nobody in the American yoga community was surprised by these developments. Shocking Bikram scandal should shock no one, read one appropriate headline.

As is made clear by Shayne’s shamelessly amoral letter, the many apologists who rushed to pardon Friend’s improprieties, and the numerous Bikram students who ignore their unhappiness with his misogyny to further augment his considerable profits, “nonattachment” too often translates into the dismissal or excuse of any yogi’s unethical behavior, no matter how calculatedly selfish. All these men are still teaching yoga, still earning money, and still enjoying the adulation of many “followers.” We continue to believe in yoga’s emotionally curative powers even as we observe many people adept at asana act in appalling ways. And we use “nonattachment” as a way to brush aside criticisms of the sexism and racism that plague American yoga while remaining deeply attached to a faith in asana.

All these news stories point to the same truth: In the U.S., yoga often begets a toxic culture that encourages, if not outright rewards, dangerously inflated egos and chronic irresponsibility. Bikram’s style of yoga, speculated Benjamin Lorr in the Daily Beast, does “not so much attract narcissists as breed them.” But the extreme particulars of Bikram yoga—the heated room, the unchanging sequence—are not so different from many other schools, and the teachings are the same: These poses are the pathway to self-knowledge; you are your own best resource; you are divine.

While this is a message of life-changing empowerment for individuals who have struggled with a sense of worthlessness and desperation, it’s injecting an ego speedball into those already convinced of their own superiority. An assortment of fancy poses becomes one more exhibit in their collection of evidence that they’re someone very special.

***

After years of immersing myself in yoga, I quit. It happened slowly. First I cut back on teaching classes, then I stopped teaching altogether, and then I quit attending.

After several years of intense practice, I became concerned about my increasing eagerness to look impressive and strong in classes, to show off my body’s capability instead of attending to the more nuanced aspects of asana, to hold certain poses for competition’s sake, to actually enjoy the inability of others to do what I was doing. During this period, more than one teacher used the oblique shaming tactic of “Don’t let your fear control you” to try to turn me, literally, upside down in a handstand or forearm stand, poses I loved but was reluctant to perform in open classes because of the inevitable ego flare that came with it.

The common “fear” simplification is only one of the many one-size-fits-all ideas about what emotional experience particular yoga poses are supposed to evoke: We store negative emotions in our hips, twists are calming, and so on. Once, during a teacher workshop, I asked something about twists that are aggravating. (I was thinking of standing twists in particular: Reverse triangle, for instance, is a very unpopular pose because of how challenging it is.) The entire room almost gasped. One woman looked at me with such horror, it was as if I’d confessed to murdering babies.

The environments I found myself in weren’t supportive of the vulnerability and constant introspection yoga can provoke, if allowed to. Yoga studios were full of drama: Cliques formed around the showiest and most attractive teachers, gossip spread about sexual misconduct, and some studios made petty accusations that other studios wrote fake Yelp! reviews of competitors. An studio owner once wrote me a bizarre email that made it clear she didn’t realize I was already one of her instructors. Against this neurotic backdrop, it was hard to access and provide the warm attentiveness I thought my students deserved.

The best outcome of my yoga was not stronger arms or looser hamstrings but a greater propensity for self-awareness. I came to yoga a naturally inquisitive person. The instructors who knew how to direct that curiosity into my own moods and attitudes and experience as a body gave me a powerful tool for discerning unhealthy situations and responding appropriately. In other words, yoga gifted me with the ability to recognize why I needed to leave yoga.

It’s okay to feel bored in a handstand instead of afraid, and it’s okay to be angry in a twist instead of soothed. Why dictate these fickle eruptions of the mind when the goal is to quiet them altogether? If we could work harder to clear away the superficiality, the orthodoxy, and the contradictions of contemporary yoga, its true value would be more accessible. The first lesson? Yoga might start with the body, but that shouldn’t be where it ends.

[BrandonD]

Wise sages are in short supply in the following Burning Man experience:

Bad Acid and Weird Boobs: Why Burning Man Isn't Worth It

By Soren Bowie August 30, 2010

http://www.cracked.com/blog/bad-acid-we ... -worth-it/


Today marks the beginning of the Burning Man Festival in the wastelands of Nevada. Thousands of people will pour out into the desert, abandoning day jobs, relationships and social norms to dance around in one hundred degree heat wearing capes and glitter. For anyone unfamiliar with Burning Man, it's a weeklong event dedicated to self-expression, community reliance and sexual contact under the guise of spirituality. I know this because I went last year for the first and last time. I went seeking a utopian enclave of open-minded and accepting brothers and sisters, I followed rumors of a culture rising from the desert clay and supporting itself for seven days on nothing but love, understanding, and a little pharmaceutically induced introspection. Instead I found misguided, fat men in tie-died t-shirts with exposed genitals caked in dust. Suffice it to say, Burning Man let me down.
(snip)
I realized in the light of day that free love wasn't what I had hoped. It was not a communal spiritual odyssey of open minds, exploring the sensual and discovering how beautiful life can be without rules and inhibitions. Free love was a dirty, confused child with sticky hands rooting through garbage. I was shocked that this event could sustain itself for seven days, let alone one night. I was over Burning Man.



"Go on then! We don't need your kind 'round here.

Never been to Burning Man, have no interest in going, but I gotta say that out of all the unsavory characters the author described in this article, I liked him the least.

[American Dream]

History’s most magnificent goddesses: 30,000 years in the making.

http://mini-girlz.tumblr.com/post/83944 ... enjoy-this

[American Dream]

Mary Herrera


http://propelledbyfire.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/1024/

[American Dream]

The Church of the Huge, Throbbing Member!





http://gorightly.wordpress.com/2009/11/ ... ng-member/

[American Dream]

Don’t Give Up. Michael Franti.