Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Yeah, I was just a bit too busy/tired to dig very deep but there are several sites I've seen critical of Tibetan Buddhism(s) that seem to be run by people who have been truly hurt by cult abuses. Others smell like Chinese State propaganda efforts. What I wonder about sometimes- and I can't identify any particulars here- is (as happens in various ways on the Internet) whether/where deeply hurt people are being co-opted by organized efforts pursuing some sort of propaganda agenda. That said, I know that abuses are real- and not uncommon. It's the very broad brushstrokes that get my hackles up.

[liminalOyster]

This is the research site on Dzogchen in global historical contexts I was trying to find for you awhile back. It's hard to even describe but it's worth some really dedicated hours of diggin: Okar Research.

[American Dream]

An Invasion Of Privacy: Peter Gabriel Interviewed

So we've only been talking for a short amount of time and we've already talked about native Ethiopian and Apache civilization and I guess that anyone who has even a passing knowledge about you, knows that you have these interests in ancient and distant cultures but at the same time you're also interested in very cutting edge technology and this isn't a new thing. Didn't it look at one point in the late 1970s that you were going to be the first professional musician in space?

PG: Yeah, that was a strange story. I had these fan letters from a guy involved in the Stanford Research Institute, who used to run lots of interesting programmes. One of them involved experiments with extra sensory perception [ESP] when the US Government were worried that the Russians were attempting to "will" people to death and to discover secrets by remote viewing. So they thought they'd better spend some money on ESP research. This guy said you'd really like my boss Peter Schwartz, who was then involved in running a thing called the Global Business Network. He was a trained astrophysicist who had become a research consultant. NASA had this programme to produce a film to try and popularize the idea of the Space Shuttle and space travel, and all of this was being funded by a very wealthy Iranian. They were going to train two teams and the team who made it would include a writer, a musician, a poet and a painter and we were going to go up in the Shuttle and then write, sing or paint about our experiences. He asked if I would be interested, and I said, 'Yeah.' Who wouldn't be? But then when the Shah was deposed in Iran this guy's money was seized and the project was shelved. So my dreams of becoming Britain's first astronaut came to a crashing halt.

Dr. Michael A. Aquino, cofounder of the more secretive and elitist
Temple of Set, developed a Promethean proposal for Space Migration,
called "Project Atlantis", with Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane.

http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id792/pg2/


This Scroll of Set article (1994), by Dr. Michael A. Aquino, hints
at the Magical Link between Jefferson Starship and the film
Stargate.

MA: Dr. Jones, have you seen the film _Stargate_?

HJ: No, I'm afraid I don?t get to the movies very much. What
was it about?

Kantner: It was a somewhat fictionalized account of a project I did
for the U.S. Space Command at Cheyenne Mountain two
years ago. It was supposed to be hush-hush, under wraps,
all that sort of thing. I guess it didn?t turn out to be that
well-kept a secret, did it?

~snip~

Kantner: Well, the Stanford Research Institute down in Palo Alto
asked me to participate in some discussions. I thought it
was all civilian academic. Turned out that two of the
people in the white coats wore blue ones underneath. So
then in 1991 I was asked to come out to Colorado Springs.
It was supposed to be a seminar sort of thing at the Air Force
Academy, but when I got there, they took me up to the
mountain, and then things got weird. Michael was there;
he knows.

~see the band Sunfighter's (a Kantner band) album that i think is
called 'blows to the empire'...what was that stargate conspiracy
about again?~

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20 ... mg.aol.com

From: http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl%40list ... 85226.html

[American Dream]

Buddhists, Occultists and Secret Societies in Early Bolshevik Russia: an interview with Andrei Znamenski

Andrei Znamenski is the author of Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia, published by Quest Books. Shambhala, a mythical, heaven-type land in Tibetan Buddhism, was created during a period of conflict between Buddhists and Muslims in Asia, and appears to have been partly modeled on Islamic doctrine. As Znamenski himself points out, the Buddhists had no conception of a paradise before this. Shambhala, which originally had both spiritual and martial qualities, may also have been modeled on the Islamic idea of the inner and outer Jihad. With Shambhala, though, the martial side eventually disappeared, and the myth entered the Western imagination with a number of later nineteenth and early twentieth century occult and mystical movements. In 1933, British author James Hilton popularized the notion of Shambhala, which he renamed Shangri-La. In Red Shambhala — the first and only authoritative book on the subject – Znamenski explores the origins of the Shambhala myth, as well its appropriation by Western occult movements, spiritualists, Bolsheviks, and the “bloody baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.

AZ: Let me first give you a few ideas about how Red Shambhala came about. When I was writing my previous book, The Beauty of the Primitive, about shamanism and the Western imagination, I stumbled upon some interesting information that in the Soviet Union of the 1920s there was a secret lab where Soviet secret police was conducting experiments with Buddhist lamas, shamans, hypnotists, and all kinds of spiritual experts. The goal was to use this knowledge to spearhead the cause of communism.

Then I found information that this lab was part of so-called Special Section of the Soviet secret police. The head of the Special Section was Gleb Bokii. This hereditary aristocrat, whose ancestor had been granted nobility by the Ivan the Terrible, was an interesting man. First of all, Bokii was one of the spearheads of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and afterwards became one of the leaders of the secret police in Red Russia. An active member of the Marxist underground, he spent much of his life before 1917 in czarist prisons and exile. At the same time, he dabbled in occult knowledge and mysticism. In the early 1920s, he stumbled upon a writer and occultist named Alexander Barchenko and became close friends with him. Eventually, Bokii put Barchenko in charge of that secret lab.

Barchenko was very much interested in the Agartha legend – a Western occult myth about a legendary country that exists underground and preserves high knowledge. French occult writer Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, who popularized this legend and whom Barchenko held in a high esteem, argued that this mystic country was located somewhere in Inner Asia. Later, when in 1918 Barchenko learned from Mongol and Tibetan visitors to Bolshevik Russia about the Shambhala legend – a story about the Tibetan-Buddhist spiritual paradise and abode of high wisdom – he came to conclusion that the legendary underground land and the mythological country from the Tibetan-Buddhist tradition, is the same thing. In fact, in his talks he frequently used expression Shambhala-Agartha. Bokii with whom Barchenko shared this knowledge became very much excited and together they began planning an expedition to Tibet to access this country and to use its “ancient science” to help the cause of Communism. This emphasis on science was not an accidental remark. Both Barchenko and Bokii thought about their occult quest as an attempt to locate some hard scientific knowledge (mind-bending techniques, mental waves, the sound effect of mantras and so on) that was hidden in the heart of Asia and needed to be unlocked.

PoS: You mentioned Shambhala. This is a Tibetan Buddhist legend, but it entered into Western culture with Theosophy and other New Age and esoteric movements. Can you tell me a bit about it?

AZ: To make a long story short, Shambhala was a Buddhist prophecy that had emerged in the Early Middle Ages. When Muslims had advanced into Afghanistan and Northern India, they dislodged the Buddhists from these areas, and they had to find a safe haven somewhere. So they came up with a spiritual resistance prophecy that was identified with a land, a utopian land, a kind of a Buddhist paradise, where the members of this faith would be free to live and worship without been harassed by the “barbarians” whom Sanskrit sources called “Mlecca people” or, in other words, the people of Mecca. The legend claimed that somewhere in the North there was a mysterious country, a land of plenty where people lived 900 years, where they were rich and had houses where roofs were clad in gold, and where nobody suffered, and of course, where the Buddhist religion existed in its pure form and so forth.

In original Buddhism there was no concept of Paradise. This concept emerged as a result of encounters with the Muslim world. The prophecy also claimed that when the true faith (read Buddhism) would be in danger, the king of Shambhala named Rudra Chakrin would come with a huge army and crash the enemies of the faith. So, it is a concept of a holy war, pure and simple. Many people are not aware that such concept existed in Tibetan Buddhism. The Shambhala prophecy lingered on, and in modern time was sometimes engaged, when the Mongol-Tibetan world felt threatened by outsiders. At the same time, Shambhala was also understood as an internal war against one’s own inner demons. It was an aspiration for a spiritual perfection. In the course of time, the former, the holy war part, gradually disappeared and the latter one became more relevant.

Let’s go back to Bokii and Barchenko. The 1920s in Soviet Russia was a very interesting time, when some Bolsheviks and their fellow-travelers were involved in a lot of social and cultural experiments. The Red dictatorship hadn’t established itself firmly yet, so there still remained some outlets where people could express themselves artistically and culturally: Avant-garde art, nudism, naturism, feminism, some spirituality practices and communes. Barchenko himself set up a society called the United Labor Brotherhood, modeled after George Gurdjieff’s brotherhood. The goal was to use sacred knowledge to promote communal lifestyle based on high moral standards and spirituality and eventually make people nobler.

When I was learning all this information, I completed my first book. Then I decided to dig in further to find out what it was all about. Eventually I discovered that some other Russian writers had written about it. One St. Petersburg writer, Alexandre Andreyev, had written about the Bolshevik quest for Shambhala. So I read his book, and I also went to the archives in Moscow. I also found some interesting documents in the Moscow Archive of Socio-Political History about how some Buddhist communities in the early Soviet Union, in the 1920s, tried to find a common language with the Bolsheviks, and how the Bolsheviks had tried to use the Buddhists to spearhead the communist cause in Mongolia, Tibet, and Western China.

Incidentally, the Communist International (or Comintern), which was an organization created by the Bolsheviks to promote the gospel of Communism all over the earth, established a special Mongol-Tibetan Section that was assigned to channel the Marxist secular prophecy to the masses of Inner Asia by using indigenous prophecies and traditional culture.

One of the interesting figures here was Agvan Dorzhiev, a tutor for the thirteenth Dalai Lama – the predecessor of the present day Dalai Lama. Dorzhiev became a Tibetan ambassador in Soviet Russia. He tried to build bridges between Red Russia and Tibet. The assumption was that Soviet Russia would be able to guarantee the independence of Tibet. And the theological justification for this was the Shambhala legend, which said that in a time of trouble salvation would come from the north.

Then I found information about this crazy, bloody White baron, who tried to hijack Mongolia in 1920 – Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. There are some interesting documents, showing that he also wanted to use the Shambhala prophesy to spearhead his own cause. For example, when the Bolsheviks seized the papers of his Asian Cavalry Division, they found a detailed translation of the Shambhala prophecy into Russian. Obviously, the baron might have been toying somehow with as an idea that he could act as that Rudra Chakrin, the legendary king of Shambhala, who was coming to save the Buddhist world from infidels.

And of course I found out that Russian painter and émigré in the USA Nicholas Roerich was also attracted to this legend, in the same way. In fact, Roerich, who was well familiar with Dorzhiev and Ungern activities, was afraid to come too late to use this potent prophecy. Hence, he rushed to Inner Asia in 1923.

PoS: Why do you think so many people were interested in this legend at that time? Was there something that had sparked this internationally?

AZ: The more I think about it the more I realize that it was about the time itself – the 1920s and the 1930s. Remember that German word zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. That is what it was all about. At first, there was such horrible disaster as the First World War. Then the Great Depression came. People had this feeling that the whole world was coming to an end. In such times, both the populace and the elites naturally rush to entrust their fate to various ideological and political saviors (for example, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and Roosevelt), who promise welfare and security for everybody. That is why we have all those dictatorships growing all over the world at that time. If you look at a map of the world from the 1920s to the 1940s, you may count on your fingers those few countries that remained more or less democratic: England, Sweden, and the United States. By the way, even the United States under FDR clearly moved toward centralized state. If it had not been for those checks and balances in the US Government, FDR, a power-hungry Machiavellian, would have taken advantage of the crisis situation and with all his prices and wages regulations and back-to-land philosophy would have produced something resembling Italian fascism.

So I think longing for the “great father” was a way to resolve the crisis. Among the people of that time there was an expectation that a savior should come – a Stalin-type figure, or a Hitler-like prophet, or FDR-type person – benevolent and wise enlightened master. The people wanted to find a sort of master key – the ultimate solution to resolve all the problems in the world. So these dominant sentiments certainly affected the fringe figures we are talking about here: Roerich, Dorzhiev, Bokii and Barchenko, and Ungern. Prophesies from the world of Tibetan Buddhism responded to their spiritual and ideological expectations. After all, they were people of their time.

PoS: I thought that after the October Revolution that the Bolsheviks pretty much had their way, but it was a lot freer and they weren’t able to regulate people as much, then?

AZ: Yes and no. See, some writers and scholars who peddled the 1920s as some sort of humane period in the history of Bolshevism were to some extent driven by the idea to save the idea of Socialism that was crumbling in the 1970s and the 1980s. Some of these writers even hinted that the 1920s was a lost alternative – a trajectory that, if followed, could have led to “socialism with a human face” and all that stuff. But the real reason why there was a temporary liberalization was because the Bolsheviks at first had tried to impose so-called “war communism” – they had tried a cavalier attack by canceling money, destroying the banking system, trade, and putting the entire society in barracks. And it ruined the entire economy. So Lenin made it clear to his comrades: we might lose the entire country. He literally begged his comrades to temporarily make a strategic retreat. So the Bolsheviks willy-nilly stopped confiscating grain from peasants and restored some market at least for peasants to work freely on their homesteads, which eventually helped to feed the starving country. They also opened limited outlets to private enterprise. But when you release some of these forces of course it brings up certain cultural liberalization.

So that is why there was some limited cultural liberalization. And there were also some independent groups. Of course the secret police controlled all of them. Their members informed on each other. By the way, that is when this practice was introduced on a nationwide basis in Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks knew that they had to allow partial liberalization, but they were afraid they might lose the country ideologically, so they started to encourage people to inform on each other.

From documents that I read I have this hint that Barchenko was actually recruited as an informer, to inform on the other people who were in the occult, New Age-type spirituality. He delivered reports about other people. He wasn’t actually trusted by many spiritual seekers in the St. Petersburg esoteric circles, because they suspected him of being a secret police snitch. But he was not the only one. A lot of people were encouraged to do this. It was part of the game.

PoS: So the Bolsheviks as a whole didn’t look very favorably on this New Age spiritual movement.

AZ: No, no. In fact in 1929 they started to crack down on this. It was allowed during the 1920s because the dictatorship did not have yet a total grip on the country and because there were still some pre-1917 cosmopolitan Bolshevik types like Bokii, who played with this or tolerated it. There was another person, Anatoly Lunacharski, the commissar of Enlightenment – it’s like the Secretary of Education. He promoted the idea that Communism should be treated as a new religion. He and those who agreed with him called themselves “God-builders.” And if you look closely, Communism is indeed a secular prophesy. Lenin, Stalin and the rest of the gang never wanted people to think this way. For them Communism was high science through and through – the science that harnessed the laws of history. But Lunacharski actually wanted to promote this idea that Communism was a new religion of the oppressed masses and to tell the populace that instead of God we have Karl Marx, and instead of the Ten Commandments we have certain communist commandments. There were some others who wanted to link Communism to spirituality. But Stalin shut all this down in 1929.

PoS: So what happened to the spiritual practitioners? Were they just told to not do it? Or were they sent to the gulags? Or?

AZ: Well many of them were sent to concentration camps. It’s clear from documents I am familiar with that in the late 1920s, they were informing on each other. Doing these esoteric things, the occult, but informing on each other at the same time. In 1929 they were sent to labor camps for three or five years. Many of them were released in the early 1930s. But during the period of the Great Terror, 1937-1938, they were thrown into prison again. And many of them were either executed or died in labor camps from hunger, disease, and hard labor.

But the secret police – who were issued quotas about how many people they should arrest – they even tried to manufacturer some occult groups, so that they could report to their bosses that they had uncovered an occult, anti-Soviet group. Because if one didn’t catch enough anti-Soviet elements, he could not be promoted or, worse, one could become a victim himself. A large set of declassified secret police documents that I recently read – it is about so-called Asian Brothers, the last (1940-1941) Freemason police case in Red Russia – is a pathetic and surreal story. In the 1920s and the early 1930s, manufacturing their cases, Soviet secret police at least dealt with real practicing occultists and intellectuals interested in mysticism. This particular case under the name of “Obscurantists” was manufactured out of a thin air from the beginning to the end and involved four persons who completely stopped toying with occult at the end of the 1920s, and three of whom, on top of this, were paid secret police informers.

I guess by that time the regime ran out of occultists to be arrested. Officers wrote the scripts of testimonies for the four accused persons and tried to force them to endorse these documents. Interestingly, one of them, certain Eugene Tager, a former anarchist who toyed with Freemasonry in the 1920s, was delivered from a Kolyma labor camp where he was doing his time for his esoteric “sins” to play a role in this new case. Yet the man firmly stood his ground. He was repeatedly beaten by his investigator but never testified against himself or other people and completely refused to cooperate. Moreover, the guy had a nerve to file a complaint against his investigators. So they gave up on him and sent him back to Siberia to finish his sentence.

The other two, Boris Astromov and Sergei Polisadov, very active Freemasons in the 1920s and simultaneously seasoned police informers who earlier gave to the police a lot of “human material” to work with, now realized that their turn had come and refused to cooperate too. Essentially, the entire case was based on testimonies of Vsevolod Belustin, a former head of the Rosicrucian order in Russia and also a police informer, the only one who cracked and agreed to testify against himself and others. The investigators contemplated to construct a case about a secret anti-Soviet Freemason organization “Asian Brothers” that spied for England and that involved those four along with a dozen of Orientalists from Soviet Academy of Sciences. Although Belustin cooperated, coauthoring his testimonies with his investigators, to his credit, many of the names of “Freemasons” he mentioned belonged to long-deceased people, including Sergei Oldenburg, a famous Russian student of Hinduism and Buddhism. Although the three former Freemasons/informers were sentenced to several years of labor camps, secret police fiction writers could not produce a sound case and had to archive the file.

In fact, Bokii, who was arrested and executed in 1937, became a victim of a similar case that was totally made up by his former colleagues who sought to destroy him on the orders from Stalin. Bokii’s interest in occult and mysticism and participation in Barchenko’s United Labor Brotherhood in the 1920s were used as a jump start to invent a more sinister plot. The plot involved a tale about the anti-Soviet secret society called Shambhala, with branches allegedly all over the world. This society planned to murder comrade Stalin. It was totally bizarre. Stalin hated Bokii anyway. As one of the bosses of the secret police, Bokii supervised phone wiretappings and radio surveillance and had files on all Bolshevik elite. Stalin knew he had all this information and wanted to eliminate the chief of the Special Section. So the occult games that Bokii had played during the 1920s were used against him in 1937. It was just an excuse to eliminate him.

Barchenko was the last one to be shot. There was a whole group of them, who were supposedly part of this secret society of Shambhala. And Barchenko was the only one who was fighting for his life to the end. He tried to intrigue his investigators by presenting himself as a valuable scientist – an asset that could very useful to the Bolshevik state. When the “investigation” was nearing its end, Barchenko suddenly started claiming to have discovered a mysterious biological weapon. This delayed the execution, but eventually he couldn’t avoid it. He was executed too. Of course, Hitler did the similar things in Germany with former occultists. When he was still maturing, during the 1920s, he dabbled a bit into these esoteric groups. But when he came to power, he outlawed all of them. Because in a totalitarian dictatorship there can be only one master, only one cult.

PoS: Do you think communism and these spiritual interests were compatible?

AZ: Well, Bokii’s interest in the Shambhala myth was coming partly from the fact that his communist idealism had begun to crack. He was an idealist. He expected that when in 1917 the Bolsheviks came to power, a golden age would arrive. People would be all brothers and sisters. They would stop stealing. They would love each other. The beasts and their prey would embrace each other. But it didn’t happen. Then in 1921, when the Red sailors at Leningrad – who had been the backbone of the Revolution – revolted against the Bolshevik regime, and the revolt was suppressed, he had a nervous breakdown. He might have started saying to himself: “my goodness, we killed so many people in the civil war; half of the nation was destroyed to build a new society.” And it was justified on the basis that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, but now there was no omelet. I assume that this is when he became interested in Barchenko.

People are sometimes surprised that Bokii, a die-hard Bolshevik, suddenly turned toward the occult. But part of the reason is because he thought maybe if they go to Tibet they might uncover some secret knowledge, some techniques that could show Bolsheviks how to sway the minds of the people toward Communism and make people better. In case of Bokii and Barchenko it is all about the mind-bending. The Bolsheviks had taken power and they were building socialism. This was all right. But the two friends were disturbed by the fact that the minds of the people were still infested with old prejudices. So they were posing a question for themselves, “How can we transform the minds of the populace?” That is how they eventually became interested in the Shambhala legend. In their view, it could contain some high knowledge that they can bring back to Red Russia and use to spearhead Communism. In other words, unlike people like Ungern or Bolshevik fellow-travelers in Mongolia, who were more interested in using martial sides of the Shambhala prophecy, Bokii and Barchenko were eager to use the inner spiritual aspects of that legend. Barchenko claimed to have known Tibet, and so they tried to organize an expedition. Readers can find out what happened later by reading my book.

[American Dream]

Trip to Saturn

Sun Ra soon left college because, he claimed, he had a visionary experience as a college student that had a major, long-term influence on him. In 1936 or 1937, in the midst of deep religious concentration, Sun Ra claimed that a bright light appeared around him, and, as he later said:

My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up... I wasn't in human form... I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn... they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools... the world was going into complete chaos... I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me.

Sun Ra said that this experience occurred in 1936 or 1937. According to Szwed, the musician's closest associates cannot date the story any earlier than 1952. (Sun Ra also said that the incident happened when he was living in Chicago, where he did not settle until the late 1940s). Sun Ra discussed the vision, with no substantive variation, to the end of his life. His trip to Saturn allegedly occurred a full decade before flying saucers entered public consciousness with the 1947 encounter of Kenneth Arnold. It was earlier than other public accounts: about 15 years before George Adamski wrote about contact with benevolent beings; and almost 20 years before the 1961 case of Barney and Betty Hill, who recounted sinister UFO abductions. Szwed says that, "even if this story is revisionist autobiography... Sonny was pulling together several strains of his life. He was both prophesizing his future and explaining his past with a single act of personal mythology."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djBKQNVj5Cc

[PufPuf93]

I made a post about seeing Sun Ra and Arkestra long ago in Berkeley at the One World Family Restaurant and commune. I know it was sometime between December 1973 and June 1975 as I was living with a girlfriend Jill in the top flat at 2214 Durant. Jill (6 years older than I) already had a BA and Masters in Anthropology and Archeology and was working part time for Cal in Kroeber Hall. I was a Cal undergrad and working part time for the US Forest Service in Berkeley. The One World Family commune and vegetarian restaurant was located on the east side of Telegraph Avenue across from Moe's Books.

Sun Ra post at RI

search.php?keywords=arkestra&terms=all&author=pufpuf93&fid%5B%5D=8&sc=1&sf=msgonly&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

We knew and partied regularly with half the folks in the 6 flats of the older building. Plus we were a city stop for visitors from our rural part of Humboldt county in Berkeley. Dave lived below us with his girlfriend, a Boalt Law School student. He was a chemistry grad student who made blotter acid and had lived prior to us in our flat before moving in with girlfriend below (and freeing space for our lease). The other top flat was the Oakies. They were one Cal student from Oklahoma and an assortment of friends from Oklahoma. The friends all worked as waitresses or busboys at Magnolia Thunder Pussy restaurant several blocks away on Shattuck. The Oakies sold some pot too. The roof of the building was flat and graveled and one could see directly across the SF Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco skyline. On Saturady night midnight there was the Metaphysical Film Society that held forth in the Mitchell Brothers Theatre near Magnolia Thunder Pussy's on Shattuck. It was a porn theatre except for the MFS (a membership group) meetings. The MFS showed weekly flicks like Skidoo or 2001 or Freaks or Reefer Madness and shorts like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and old news reals. There was an outrageous salt water fish tank under black light in the theatre lobby. The setting was loose in that people brought in food and smoked pot and did other drugs (Dave's blotter mostly) and chatted. We go out to see music in Berkeley Clubs like the Longbranch Saloon, Keystone, Ashkenaz, and other more ephemeral venues.

search.php?keywords=arkestra&terms=all&author=pufpuf93&fid%5B%5D=8&sc=1&sf=msgonly&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search


>>>>>Exerpt from http://quirkyberkeley.com/gone-3-collec ... ure-icons/ (this is a really nice link in general, lots of pictures and lots of Berkeley counter culture history.

And then it was One World Family.

Daily Californian, May 10, 1974

They painted a rainbow on the building that is still there.  They published a vegetarian cookbook:

They served cheap vegetarian food:

And they had a band, straight rock and weirder:

So far, so good.  Their values were altruistic.  They didn’t hurt anybody.   But it was just a tad weird.  To say the least.
Allen Noonan was a sign painter in Long Beach.  He made paintings as well, and I really like his work:

You can see more here.

And then something happened.  These are not my words, but his/theirs:

Allen Michael has been a direct channel of the Universal Mind since he experienced a cosmic initiation in 1947. The experience that transformed Allen Noonan, as he was then known, took place in Long Beach, California, where he was a pictorial sign painter.
While painting an outdoor signboard, Allen was suddenly enveloped in a bright purple and gold light, and found himself (the entity in the body, not the body itself) being transported up into what he later realized was a Galactic Mothership. Upon materializing onboard the spaceship, he appeared before a great Light. And a Voice spoke to him out of the Light, telling him that he was chosen to be the messenger who would fulfill the role of being the New World Comforter and channel of the Everlasting Gospel.
He was given the name Allen Michael, reflecting the truth that he is incarnate in a body to make Michael’s Stand with the holy people of the world.
He accepted the mission, and from that point onward he has been in direct telepathic contact with the Universal Mind of ETI – Extra Territorial Intelligence – channeling the energies of the Spirit of Truth through the spoken and written word, as well as in deeds done that will bring this world up to and through our planetary cosmic initiation into the long awaited Kingdom of God. 

And so on.  Allen Noonan sign-painter became Michel Allen incarnate spiritual master from Galactica, a God-conscious soul dedicated to serving humanity, God’s Comforter Spirit of truth, embodied on the planet since April 1947, as a soul from Galactic Headquarters.
The Barb voiced concern about Noonan and his group.

Berkeley Barb, March 19-25, 1971

The Barb detailed the flying saucer stuff, and then noted rather astutely that “Words known for their link to classical forms of fascism and totalitarianism pervade the One World World doctrine.”  The Barb cautioned that “maybe people ought to know before digging too much on the Messiah’s newly-opening place.”
The One World Family left Berkeley in the mid 1970s.  The commune houses were sold to the University and now house the Lothlorien student housing coop.

It is vegetarian.  Clothing optional.  Decisions by consensus.  Middle Earth friendly.

I am resisting impulses to judge.  I can give Lothlorien a pass, but it is just plain hard not to see One World Family as delusional.  But – they didn’t hurt anybody.

Okay.  Exhale.

>>>> End exerpt from http://quirkyberkeley.com/gone-3-collec ... ure-icons/

More about One World Family and Allen Michael

http://www.galactic.org/OWFC.pdf

http://www.galacticmessenger.com/gmn/al ... comforter/

[SonicG]

Haaah awesome...Just pulled out the Sun Ra bio for my New Years resolution to read more books...!!

Cosmic Love to All in the New Year!!

[American Dream]

That great way of dissent was very, very complicated... I see good people trying the best they can to live in this world and change it, some of us misdirected, a few of us intentionally pushing things in a bad direction. I think we all are ultimately uncontrollable but that there are forces that try- and do to some degree succeed- to spin things in desired directions...

The Prankster and the Assassin



As the 1960s progressed, Thornley immersed himself in the burgeoning counterculture, along the way experimenting with psychedelics, helping to organize the Griffith Park Human Be-Ins and formulating his own philosophy called Zenarchy.

As part of Kerry’s interest in sexual liberation, he joined “a sexually swinging psychedelic tribe” into mate-swapping known as Kerista. Kerry – calling himself “Young Omar” – wrote several articles for the Kerista Swinger, the official newsletter of the group, of which the following is an excerpt:

Kerista is a religion and the mood of Kerista is one of holiness. Do not, however, look for a profusion of rituals, dogmas, doctrines and scriptures. Kerista is too sacred for that. It is more akin to the religions of the East and, also, the so-called pagan religions of the pre-Christian West. Its fount of being is the religious experience and that action or word or thought which is not infused with ecstasy is not Kerista. And Kerista, like those religions of olden times, is life-affirming.

In Drawing Down The Moon, Margot Adler observed that Thornley’s writings on Kerista signaled the true beginnings of the Neo-Pagan movement in contemporary culture, which since the mid-60s has expressed itself in myriad forms such as free love communes, Wicca practitioners, the back-to-nature movement, psychedelic experimenters and other groups dedicated to spiritual discovery. Adler cited Thornley as the first person to actually use the word Pagan to describe past and present nature religions.

At the same time that Thornley was embracing the 60s counterculture, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison launched his now-famous investigation, which contended that a cabal of rogue intelligence agents had masterminded the JFK assassination, and that its base of operations was the Guy Banister Detective Agency in New Orleans. However, before Garrison was able to bring his case to trial, both Banister and David Ferrie – another suspect in the case – mysteriously died. At that point the key suspect in the case became Clay Shaw, director of the New Orleans Trade Mart and a former CIA asset.

In the spring of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald had moved from Texas to New Orleans, and during this period became involved with different communist organizations, including the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Garrison claimed that Oswald had been directed in these activities by the Banister operation, working as an infiltrator to gather information on subversive organizations in New Orleans. Garrison further theorized that Banister and his crew set up Oswald as a fall guy by creating the cover story that he was a radicalized communist with an itchy trigger finger.

On February 21st, 1968, Garrison issued a press release stating that Kerry Thornley was a CIA agent who had participated in this assassination conspiracy with the likes of Banister, Ferrie and Shaw. Also listed among Garrison’s suspects was Gordon Novel, who had attended USC with Kerry a decade earlier.

The principal witness against Thornley was a self-proclaimed “witch” and French Quarter scene maker named Barbara Reid, who claimed she had seen Oswald and Thornley together at the Bourbon House restaurant in September 1963. Thornley denied this allegation, insisting the last time he’d been in contact with Oswald was when the two served together in the Marines. Garrison charged Thornley with perjury, claiming he’d lied about this purported meeting with Oswald in New Orleans. Oddly enough, Barbara Reid was a friend of Thornley’s, and also a member of the New Orleans branch of the Discordian Society. In fact, Reid even claimed, at one point, to be the incarnation of Eris.

Garrison further asserted that Thornley was part of the crew enlisted to set up Oswald prior to the assassination, and that his Warren Commission testimony – as well as his book, Oswald – were concocted to portray Oswald as a commie-influenced lone nutter. Garrison also suspected that Thornley had been intimate with Marina Oswald – all part of Thornley’s supposed role as one of the notorious Oswald doubles running around New Orleans and Dallas (prior to the assassination) as part of a plot to paint Oswald commie red. It didn’t help things that during his residence in New Orleans, Thornley had brief encounters with a number of Garrison’s alleged conspirators, including Ferrie, Banister and Shaw. Thornley described these as brief and uneventful meetings, although Garrison suspected something far more sinister.

Oswald, as the theory goes, was set up as an assassination fall guy by Banister’s operation. Kerry later suspected that he, as well, may have been set up in a similar manner – as a secondary patsy – had the Oswald set up gone awry. So, taking this one step further, it could be conjectured that Kerry’s apparent chance meetings with the likes of Shaw, Banister and Ferrie were actually orchestrated to be later used against him. To Kerry, this seemed the only way to reconcile all the alarming coincidences that placed him in the company of Garrison’s rogue gallery of suspects, as well as in proximity to Oswald’s movements (or the movements of Oswald doubles) during August and September of 1963.


Newspaper clipping on Kerry Thornley's subpoena from Jim Garrison


Operation Mindfuck and the Bavarian Illuminati

Among Jim Garrison’s more colorful unofficial investigators (known as “The Dealey Plaza Irregulars”) was one Allan Chapman, who subscribed to the theory that JFK’s assassination had been orchestrated by the Bavarian Illuminati, that infamous secret society much ballyhooed in the annals of conspiracy lore. Chapman also claimed that the major television networks were controlled by the Illuminati.

After catching wind of Chapman’s goofy Illuminati theory, Thornley – with the support of some of his fellow Discordian Society pranksters – initiated what became known as Operation Mindfuck (OM), a campaign designed to screw with Garrison’s head by sending out spurious announcements suggesting that he (Kerry) was indeed an agent of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria (AISB).

Under the auspices of “The Bavarian Illuminati”, Kerry invented a Do-It-Yourself Conspiracy Kit, which included stationery containing dubious letterheads. Among the culprits who helped perpetrate OM was none other than Robert Anton Wilson. As Kerry later noted:

Wilson and I founded the Anarchist Bavarian Illuminati to give Jim Garrison a hard time, one of whose supporters believed that the Illuminati owned all the major TV networks, the Conspiring Bavarian Seers (CBS), the Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy (ABC) and the Nefarious Bavarian Conspirators (NBC).4

These OM communiqués led Garrison to suspect that the Discordian Society had operated as a CIA front organization involved in the JFK assassination. As Wilson observed in Cosmic Trigger:

Try to picture a jury keeping a straight face when examining a conspiracy that worshipped the Goddess of Confusion, honored Emperor Norton as a saint, had a Holy Book called “How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her After I Found Her,” and featured personnel who called themselves Malaclypse the Younger, Ho Chi Zen, Mordecai the Foul, Lady L, F.A.B., Fang the Unwashed, Harold Lord Randomfactor, Onrak the Backwards, et al…

Amazingly, the first edition of The Principia Discordia – of which only five copies were produced – is said to have been printed using a mimeograph machine in, of all people, Jim Garrison’s office…two years before the Kennedy assassination took place! The clandestine after-hours copying operation was allegedly perpetrated by a typist in Garrison’s office named Lane Caplinger, who was friends with Thornley and Hill.

While it’s a given that Thornley and Hill were both in possession of this first edition of The Principia Discordia, what is not commonly known is that Slim Brooks – another member of the New Orleans Discordian Society – also received a copy of this rare first edition. It can also be assumed that other recipients of The Principia Discordia first edition included Barbara Reid and Roger Lovin, both New Orleans Discordian Society members. Lovin – known in the Discordian Society as “Fang the Unwashed” – was identified by Garrison witness Bernard Goldsmith as being connected to Oswald in New Orleans.

Thornley later wrote that “Slim Brooks was an active participant in exchanging Discordian declarations and documents and Gary Kirstein would therefore have known about this network and may have used it as cover at some point or other. In 1968 Roger Lovin told me that Jim Garrison was investigating the possibility that the Discordian Society was some kind of CIA front – which, at that time, I thought was very funny and completely absurd of Garrison. Roger Lovin was another active Discordian in New Orleans…Roger was also a close friend of Slim Brooks and in 1968 when he fell under suspicion with Garrison’s office much as I did…I believe it is very possible that Roger was unwittingly or somehow semi-wittingly involved in the assassination.”



German Breeding Experiments and MK-ULTRA

As the 70s progressed, Thornley became increasingly paranoid and began to suspect that everyone he’d ever known, even his closest friends and family, had some role in the ever-escalating conspiracy he perceived swirling around him, as demonstrated in correspondence from the period.

Robert Anton Wilson was the recipient of many of Thornley’s rambling letters, which wove together a vast conspiratorial web featuring Kerry at center stage battling the very same shadowy spectres that had eliminated JFK, RFK and MLK.

At one point, Wilson received a letter from Thornley stating: “I am the most important man on the planet – I am the only one who knows all about the Kennedy assassination!” Due to this dangerous knowledge, Kerry insisted that his life was threatened by this sinister cabal who wanted him silenced. Wilson tried to rationalize the situation, reminding Kerry that there was a distinct difference between “theory” and “proof.” Much to Wilson’s shock, Kerry came to suspect him of being involved with an “assassination conspiracy team” and, furthermore, that Wilson was Kerry’s CIA baby-sitter.

In one letter, Kerry related a particularly mind-blowing acid trip he’d taken where memories of his involvement in the assassination bubbled to the surface of his conscious mind, thus revealing his participation as an unwitting dupe – all part of a mind control experiment perpetrated by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

More at: http://www.dailygrail.com/Essays/2016/9 ... e-Assassin

[American Dream]

Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted by Extraterrestrials?

A prestigious Harvard psychiatrist, John Edward Mack, thought so. His sudden death leaves behind many mysteries.


Aside from those of his circle and university colleagues, Mack is scarcely known today. But 20 years ago, when he burst onto the scene as the Harvard professor who believed in alien abduction, he was probably the most famous, or infamous, academic in America, “the most important scientist ever to dare to admit the truth about the abduction phenomenon,” in the words of Whitley Strieber, whose best-selling memoir, Communion, introduced millions of Americans to alien encounters.

Tall, impulsive, and magnetic to women and men, Mack was everywhere, or so it seemed—on Oprah and Nova; on the best-seller lists; in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time; at his Laurance S. Rockefeller–supported Program for Extraordinary Experience Research; in scholarly journals, documentaries, poems, theater pieces, and Roz Chast cartoons. And then suddenly he was under investigation at Harvard, the target of a grueling inquisition. “I didn’t think people would believe me,” Mack had confided to his longtime assistant, Leslie Hansen, who was in Newport last July. “But I didn’t think they’d get so mad.” In the end he achieved a measure of vindication, but his freakish demise denied him a final reckoning in an unpublished manuscript he saw as his cri de coeur against scientific materialism and “ontological fascism.”

He left behind another unpublished manuscript, with another mystery he was seeking to unravel, a secret as dark as death itself. And now his interrupted journey may be heading to the big screen. After a four-year negotiation, the film and television rights to Mack’s story were granted by the Mack family to MakeMagic Productions, which has partnered with Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, and a major feature film is currently in development. But two decades after Mack took alien abduction from the pages of the National Enquirer to the hallowed halls of Harvard, the question remains: why would a pillar of the psychiatric establishment at America’s oldest university court professional suicide to champion the most ridiculed and tormented outcasts of society?

On Cuvelier’s porch, a Vermont shopkeeper who wanted to be known as “Nona”—the way Mack identified her in Passport to the Cosmos, his 1999 follow-up to Abduction—remembered filling 300 pages with “abduction recollections,” which Mack struggled to accept as real. Had she actually traveled on shafts of crystalline light? “John, I know when I’m physically gone,” she remembered replying. “I know when I’m going through a wall.” Mack had had one nagging disappointment, Nona recalled. He had never undergone an abduction, or even spied a U.F.O. Why can’t I see one?, he wondered. Nona would twit him. “Probably because you’re not patient enough, John.”

‘I was raised as the strictest of materialists,” Mack told the writer C. D. B. Bryan. “I believed we were kind of alone in this meaningless universe, on this sometimes verdant rock with these animals and plants around, and we were here to make the best of it, and when we’re dead, we’re dead.” A great-grandfather of his had pioneered the use of anesthetics in eye surgery, and a great-uncle had been one of the first Jewish professors at Harvard Medical School. His father, Edward, was a noted literary biographer and scholar at the City College of New York who had remarried a widow with a young daughter after his wife died of peritonitis eight months after John was born. John’s socially prominent stepmother, Ruth Prince, was an eminent feminist economist and New Dealer whose first husband, a great-grandson of the founder of Gimbels department store, had jumped or fallen from the 16th floor of the Yale Club as the Great Depression deepened.


John Edward Mack with his then wife, Sally, and their first child, Daniel, in Japan, 1960.

Mack graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School and, while only a resident, founded one of the nation’s first outpatient hospitals. He took his social-worker bride, Sally, to an Air Force posting in Japan and, once home, introduced psychiatric services to incarcerated youths and impoverished nursery schoolers. He started the first psychiatric department at Cambridge hospital, winning a prize for a study of childhood nightmares, a field he would explore further in his first book, Nightmares and Human Conflict. His second book, a groundbreaking psychological study of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1977. He traveled in the Middle East, lecturing on the Arab-Israeli conflict and going on “bomb runs,” traveling from city to city warning what would happen if a one-mega-ton bomb exploded overhead, and getting arrested with his family at nuclear-test sites. He cornered Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb then pressing President Reagan for a Star Wars nuclear-weapons shield in space. Teller denounced peacenik physicians and told Mack: “If you are not in the pay of the Kremlin, you’re even more of a fool.” After the cold war ended, Mack studied consciousness expansion with Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born psychoanalyst who had experimented with L.S.D. Grof and his wife, Christina, had developed a breathing discipline called Holotropic Breathwork to induce an expanded state of consciousness. In one breathwork session with Russians at California’s Esalen Institute, Mack recounted that he became, “a Russian-father in the 16th century whose four-year-old son was being decapitated by Mongol hordes.’’ He owed a lot to the Grofs, Mack later said. “They put a hole in my psyche, and the U.F.O.’s flew in.”

More at: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/ ... on-science

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: http://citizeninitiative.com/against_grof_therapy.htm

NEW AGE THERAPY– HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS OR DELUSION?

by Stephen J. Castro

Published in The Therapist, 1995, 2 (4): pp. 14–16.


I am not a therapist but happened to read the recent Daily Mail feature on psychotherapy and was impressed by the sanity of statements reported from Ivan Tyrrell, one of the editors of The Therapist. Living as I do on the fringe of Britain’s largest New Age Community located on the north east coast of Scotland, namely, the Findhorn Foundation, a sane, rational voice on some of the controversial issues in psychotherapy was a welcome alternative to the totemic jargon from adherents of the various New Age therapy cults rife in these parts. In fact, if you have ever experienced (and it is indeed a quite unforgettable experience) someone go berserk and beat a cushion in order to express "repressed" anger, edged on by a group of onlookers displaying the fervour of a mindless mob, you tend to value rationality, and not gestalt. It was therefore heartening to read in the Daily Mail that "there are more than 400 published studies that show quite clearly that when people are focused in this way they just become more angry – not better."

This article concerns a controversy that caused quite a stir here in the small Scottish town of Forres, this being a "transpersonal" therapy known as Holotropic Breathwork™, which at the time was being introduced into this country by the Foundation, a charitable educational trust. The therapy was commercially presented to Everyman as "ideally suited for those seeking greater psychological opening as well as an expanded mystical and spiritual dimension in their lives." As I desire some further research material on hyperventilation – the principal methodology employed by this therapy – I hope for a response to this article from professional therapists.

Due to the often overlooked factor of the societal influence that therapies and therapists now have upon contemporary society and social trends, I feel that the issue of Holotropic Breathwork™ could serve to stimulate debate. After all, in the West, and particularly within the New Age counter-culture, therapy is becoming seen by many as a "spiritual path," and the therapist is replacing the image of the Eastern guru as one who is supposedly able to facilitate spiritual growth and experiences.

Holotropic Breathwork™ is promoted by Grof Transpersonal Training, Inc. Its founder, Stanislav Grof, M.D., had emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the USA in 1967. A researcher into the clinical effects and possible psychiatric use of LSD, he was invited to undertake U.S. government funded research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Centre, and was at one time assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. However, within a decade (1973) Dr. Grof had turned away from clinical research (LSD was now a controversial issue) and became "scholar-in-residence" at the Esalen Institute of California, a New Age therapy centre, where he had already achieved celebrity status due to his experiential interest in psychedelics, non-conventional psychotherapy, and altered states of consciousness (ASCs).

In 1976, Dr. Grof and his wife Christina, a former devotee of the controversial Indian guru Swami Muktananda, (1) developed the practice of Holotropic Breathwork™, a "non-pharmacological" technique, which, "although not as profound as high dose LSD or psilocybin, provides access to similar experiential territories." (2) The purpose of Holotropic Breathwork therapy is to act as an amplifier or catalyst of biochemical and physiological processes in the brain. Dr. Grof states, "It seems that the non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by Holotropic breathing is associated with biochemical changes in the brain that make it possible for the contents of the unconscious to surface." (3) The methodology of Holotropic Breathwork involves extensive periods of hyperventilation, and the "already powerful effect of hyperventilation is further enhanced by the use of evocative music and other sound technology … these two methods potentiate each other to what is undoubtedly the most dramatic means of changing consciousness with the exception of psychedelic drugs." (4)

In 1990, the Director (Craig Gibsone) of the Findhorn Foundation announced in the members’ internal magazine that the Foundation was considering a three-year training programme for Holotropic Breathwork™. My concerns about the introduction and inevitable spread of Holotropic breathing had arisen from alarming reports of disorientated participants who had emerged "high" or distressed from the sessions, my reading of Dr. Grof’s books, and the commercial nature of the therapy in question. As one Foundation staff member and breathwork supporter succinctly expressed it, "… the income out of the training programme itself is only one aspect. We also need to consider that we are qualifying people to give workshops in a realm which opens up a deep inner spiritual knowing and which can provide a good income on top of it, and that we can potentially earn substantial sums by hosting workshops for the public in the future." (5)

In an attempt to initiate dialogue, I, and another, wrote open letters to the Foundation membership. I had no medical background, nor was I claiming any spiritual status, but reading information from more learned sources enabled me to formulate what I hoped was a commonsense argument against the indiscriminate commercial employment of the technique of Holotropic breathing in the name of "spirituality":

"Any active jogger in the community will no doubt be aware of what is termed ‘runner’s high’ – that moment of euphoria and well-being sometimes experienced after pushing the body to its limits. The ‘high’ is due to cerebral hypoxia: the reduction of oxygen transmitted to the cortex of the brain. Very few objectively-minded persons encountering such a state would deem it ‘spiritual,’ and quite rightly so. It is a physiological response of the brain triggered by bodily stress and oxygen deprivation. Endogenous opioids such as endorphins and enkephalins – morphine-like chemicals – are secreted by certain brain cells to alleviate the organism’s distress.

"Holotropic Breathwork induces an abnormal degree of cerebral hypoxia, which is known to give rise to seizure activity in the brain’s limbic system. This will affect lobal areas of the brain associated with memory and emotion. The symptoms of limbic lobe agitation include: depersonalization, involuntary memory recall, intense emotion, euphoria, auditory and visual hallucinations. All of which are known to arise through prolonged Holotropic breathing.

"The use of rhythmic breathing, music, dance, ritual, hallucinogenics, narrative, emotional arousal, sex, physical exertion etc., have been applied in one form or another throughout all ages and ethnic cultures to induce altered states of consciousness. Legitimate traditions warn against any practice employed in an ad hoc manner upon a random collection of people at differing stages of evolutionary growth and needs. Such techniques will merely produce counterfeit experiences – not spirituality – and can be seriously damaging to the developmental potential of the participants …" (6)

In response, a partisan of the breathwork sought to reassure me that "Holotropic Breathwork™ has its roots in Freudian, Reichian, and Jungian therapies as well as Eastern philosophies and shamanic practices." Hence my concern! A concern articulated much more coherently in a critique of Holotropic therapy made by Kevin Shepherd: "Dr. Grof is fond of making very brief references to a wide variety of mystical traditions like Sufism and Yoga, but is clearly unwilling to focus upon traditional conclusions as to the dangers of unprepared practitioners and inadequate teachers of mysticism." (7) Shepherd has also observed that, "The ‘New Age’ frequently revels in the glamour supplied by associations of Eastern mysticism, but finds it very convenient to neglect traditional Eastern mystical principles which warn that only a minority of highly prepared candidates can safely tackle intensifications of experience in this field, which will merely produce abnormalities in those unprepared, or who follow inexpert teachers." (8) As to Freud, Reich, and Jung, I was sorry to be a dissenting heretic, but I felt that some of the theories of those revered icons were not entirely beyond dispute, Reichian permissiveness being a case in point.

Another critical view of Holotropic Breathwork came from Dr. Linda Watt. After studying accounts of breathwork, Dr. Watt, who practices at Leverndale Psychiatric Hospital in Glasgow, was reported by The Scotsman (9) as saying that "hyperventilation could cause seizure or lead to potential psychosis in vulnerable people," and added, "physiologically, hyperventilation is quite a dramatic thing for your body. Instructions to have buckets, towels and sick bowls around you because you could lose control of all your body functions is alarming; it’s really quite masochistic." "Pillows to buffer kicking or pounding," and "plastic bags or buckets in case of nausea and vomiting," (10) were specified by Dr. Grof as indispensable items in a room for Holotropic Breathwork. Not surprisingly, perhaps, when we are informed that, "among the reactions that might spontaneously occur … are violent shaking, grimacing, coughing, gagging, vomiting, a variety of movements, and a wide range of sounds that include screaming, baby talk, animal voices, talking in tongues or a language foreign to the client, shamanic chanting, and many others …" (11)

I knew full well at the time that Dr. Stanislav Grof is a highly acclaimed figure in the commercial world of transpersonal psychology, (12) but, to quote another critic again: "Because Dr. Grof is an M.D. is no reason to revere his prescriptions for ‘self discovery,’ but rather a reason to analyse his therapy with a due critical spirit." (13) The relevance of criticism was impressed upon me further through a non-critical article by Dr. David Mead, a practitioner of Holotropic Breathwork™ who described his own participation in this extreme therapy: "The music was powerful and I soon found myself running through a cold, grey, northern forest howling like a wolf – being a wolf. Then there was snarling and fighting with the facilitators and my sitter until I collapsed …" (14) Dr. Mead’s hallucinogenic lycanthropic experience was no doubt applauded and classified under the rubric of shamanism (15) by breathwork partisans. Be that as it may, note that the snarling and fighting was not an hallucination.

[liminalOyster]

AD, do you think there is a bit of a counter-archetype to the TIDS one? I came across this Castro fellow a few years ago when reading about Meher Baba due to a friend's family's connections to that guru's "school." IMHO, there's more than a few fallacies in the piece you've posted, ie this sort of thing:

In fact, if you have ever experienced (and it is indeed a quite unforgettable experience) someone go berserk and beat a cushion in order to express "repressed" anger, edged on by a group of onlookers displaying the fervour of a mindless mob, you tend to value rationality, and not gestalt.

For that matter, the notion that "therapy is becoming seen by many as a 'spiritual path,'" is extremely ignorant of the roots of modern psychotherapy which are without dispute intertwined with spiritualism and supernaturalism et al. Seems like little reasonable doubt exists that the psychotherapist is and was always modernity's attempt to sanitize/secularize other forms of spirit guide. Those who debunk various forms of counterculture spirituality inevitably seem to reveal their own neurotic fixations and inellectual rigidity (ne irrationality) on deeper dig.

[American Dream]

I do find that voices from inside New Age type circles who have turned against it often rant in extreme terms about the things they are critical of. I tend to give them some benefit of the doubt in regards to what they are critiquing . My default stance is that people who are a bit off balance tend to flock to these areas and it should not be surprising that their criticisms are sometimes intense and broad brush stroke (especially if they have been really burned and/or recently left).

In the case of Grof, I was inspired to revisit the subject yesterday after visiting with someone who has experienced psychedelic therapy and Grofian breath work as deeply troubled by opportunism, dangerous practices and unaccountability. They were struggling with their own particular set of challenges to begin with, so your mileage may vary.

Regarding psychotherapy as spirituality, I would take that at least two ways: one as a tradition bedeviled by many of the problems which have bedeviled religion- but also as driven by those desires for liberation and transcendence which represent the better part of our creative force.

[liminalOyster]

Fair enough. I just wonder to what degree the speculated diagnosis of TIDS might equally well be given to detractors and refugees from the same groups.

In the case of Grof, I was inspired to revisit the subject yesterday after visiting with someone who has experienced psychedelic therapy and Grofian breath work as deeply troubled by opportunism, dangerous practices and unaccountability. They were struggling with their own particular set of challenges to begin with, so your mileage may vary.

I'm interested in all you find. Holotropic breathwork is very intriguing to me but I admit to knowing little to nothing about it.

[American Dream]

I've never experienced Holotropic Breathwork but I consider it to be a technique of altered consciousness, in the same ballpark with many others. The issues that come up with delegating power to another, commercializing it, etc. are not unique. "Self-brainwashing" in solitary practice brings its own set of challenges.

Attacking those who deviate from group norms does happen all the time. That said, more heterodox groups of practitioners are somehow intriguing to me.

[American Dream]

Hyper-associative States, Synchronicities, Isomorphisms, & The Universal Pattern

James Kent

Chapter 16: Psychedelic Information Theory

If there's one thing the human brain loves, its ordered patterns. The brain likes audio patterns (rhythms); visual patterns (stripes, mandalas, mosaics); syntactic patterns (language, logical formulas, melodies); interpretive patterns (charts, graphs, symbols); metabolic patterns (respiration, hormonal pulses, circadian rhythms, action potentials); behavioral patterns (routines, habits); etc. In fact, it is not a stretch to say the brain's entire function is ordered pattern recognition, memory, and recall. That's it. The task of pattern recognition, memory, and recall describes our every basic organic function from the genetic level on up. This ordered pattern construction works both ways along the atomic scale: Humans are created out of ordered patterns of nucleotides (DNA), which arose out of conditions within ordered patterns of water and minerals settling on the surface of the earth, moving in ordered revolutions around the sun, spinning in the ordered web of the greater cosmos, which was itself condensed out of distributed patterns of energy spreading across a vast expanse at high speeds. But in addition to pattern recognition, pattern memory, and pattern recall, humans can also create new patterns that are uniquely their own. This is the essence of genetics, language, art, science, invention, and cultural evolution. Like DNA, we can absorb patterns, remix them, and reproduce them in new ways, and we do this by applying abstract associations between patterns to create meaningful connections


Synchronicities

A synchronicity can be defined as "meaningful coincidence" between similar patterns recurring in close temporal proximity. A classic example of a synchronicity is thinking about someone you haven't talked to in a while, and then having them phone you up out of the blue some short time later. In this instance the quality of the synchronicity can be mapped in terms of probability and coincidence. The longer it has been since you have talked to that person (say one to ten years), the lower the probability they will call for no reason; the shorter the time span between your thought of them and the phone call (say one minute to a few hours) the, the higher the coincidence rate. Thus, when you have low probability patterns suddenly recurring out of the blue with a high coincidence rate (close temporal proximity), the greater the impact of synchronicity for the person experiencing it. The synchronicity may be amplified if the coincidence is sparked by a third random event which appears to have nothing to do with anything (no contextual relevance) on the surface. For example, say your friend's name is Bob, and you happen to be eating a bag of "Bob's Maine-Style Potato Chips," (which you picked out of the blue, for no special reason), and while you are eating them your mind wanders to your old friend Bob, who then calls on the phone.� This experience could also be called a "coincidence," but when these coincidences are parsed through our logical analysis filters, the spontaneous recurrence of specific pattern of data multiple times within two or more separate domains (Bob:Chips, Bob:Memory, Bob:Phone) over a short duration create the most meaningful synchronicities.

Within the context of psychedelic activation of the cortex, the tendency to make meaningful connections out of even wider ranges of random data becomes amplified, and in this state even the most unrelated bits of perception can be pieced together into one large meaningful coincidence. This state can lead to paranoia (anxiety or fear of being watched, followed, trapped, manipulated, persecuted, etc.) or the thrill of discovery (Gnostic bliss, esoteric enlightenment, occult unveiling, mystical revelations, etc.). There are many schizophrenics who receive hidden messages from meaningful coincidences, and at the most extreme end of this disorder the data that is parsed is perceived as a coded transmission from God, or the Devil, aliens, ECCO (John Lilly's Earth Coincidence Control Office), or whatever supernatural other they believe is sending them secret signals. However, the encoded messages and hidden meanings which arise from these states are meaningful only to the people who experience them, and often sound perfectly crazy when they try to explain it to anyone else. And upon closer examination it would appear that these secret messages are not actually coming from an external source, but are actually being pieced together from "random noise" via an excitation of activity in the syntactical pattern-matching routines of their own temporal lobes.

So does that mean that ECCO doesn't exist? Probably. Does that mean synchronicities don't exist? No, they certainly exist, but we make the synchronicities in our head based on the connections we form between patterns in our neural tissue. Our brain is wired to parse synchronicities for a reason, so the art of finding meaningful coincidences between things has definite survival value. In fact, the ability to find meaningful connections between otherwise random events are the foundations of both deductive reasoning (logic and science) and spiritual belief (faith and intuition). The concepts of coincidence, probability, luck, and fate are intimately tied into our notions of self, God, spirituality, and the "existential meaning" of being. Hence any object which amplifies the levels of meaningful connections derived from otherwise random data (such as psychedelics) will be perceived as spiritual in nature, possibly even supernatural in origin (food of the Gods anyone?). Yet it is my assertion that these are not supernatural powers imparted by a spiritual force, they are merely our normal everyday powers amplified by a chemical excitation of the associative cortices. And to go back to my "Logic Mill" metaphor, the quality of the "meaningful connections" produced in the psychedelic state will vary with the dose range. At lower doses the meaningful connections and synchronicities are still hung on a logical-yet-loosely-associative framework; at higher doses the meaningful connections start to loose touch with actual reality, and spin off into illogical and paradoxical associations based solely on the user's own internal ideation. Both of these events can be extremely "meaningful" in the emotional and existential sense, but the quality of "meaning" produced is dependent on how well these new associations can be integrated into the user's pre-existing ontology upon returning to sobriety.

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