Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Dr. Ecstasy

2005-01-30, New York Times

By [Alexander] Shulgin's own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compounds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, ''empathogens,'' [and] convulsants. And in 1976, Shulgin fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of the depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy. Most of the scientific community considers Shulgin at best a curiosity and at worst a menace. Now, however, near the end of his career, his faith in the potential of psychedelics has at least a chance at vindication. A little more than a month ago, the [FDA] approved a Harvard Medical School study looking at whether MDMA can alleviate the fear and anxiety of terminal cancer patients. And next month will mark a year since [the start of a] study of Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. Shulgin's knack for befriending the right people hasn't hurt. A week after I visited him, he was headed to Sonoma County for the annual ''summer encampment'' of the Bohemian Club, an exclusive, secretive San Francisco-based men's club that has counted every Republican president since Herbert Hoover among its members. For a long time, though, Shulgin's most helpful relationship was with the D.E.A. itself. The head of the D.E.A.'s Western Laboratory, Bob Sager, was one of his closest friends. In his office, Shulgin has several plaques awarded to him by the agency for his service. Shulgin has been credited with jump-starting today's therapeutic research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magaz ... 00&en=0b...

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http://cjonline.com/indepth/missilesilo ... rial.shtml

Chemist testifies in LSD trial

By Steve Fry
The Capital-Journal

A senior chemist for the Drug Enforcement Administration testified Tuesday that he met a man charged in an LSD conspiracy case when the alleged conspirator was a student at Harvard University.

William Leonard Pickard, 57, and Clyde Apperson, 47, are charged in U.S. District Court with conspiracy and possession of LSD with intent to distribute more than 10 grams of LSD. The two were arrested after officers seized an LSD lab from a rental truck soon after the vehicle left a converted missile base near Wamego on Nov. 6, 2000. Their trial is in its ninth week.

Roger A. Ely, senior forensic chemist at the DEA's laboratory in San Francisco, was on the witness stand most of Tuesday testifying about his relationship with Pickard.

Ely said he learned of Pickard through Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, who e-mailed to ask him if it would be OK for a Harvard University student working on a project to contact him. Pickard called a day or two later, Ely said. Ely testified that topics the two discussed included the use of the Internet to get illicit drugs, the use of encrypted messages to elude law enforcement investigators and Russian drug trafficking.

But, Ely testified, he became more careful in his dealings with Pickard and stopped initiating contact after Shulgin, a toxicologist-pharmacologist who invented 200 mind-altering chemicals including ecstasy, told him that Pickard had been arrested at an LSD laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. In that 1992 case, Pickard was convicted of possession of mescaline and possession and manufacture of LSD.

From that point on, Ely said, he talked to Pickard only about information that was in the "public domain."

Ely also testified that Pickard once prodded him on what he thought the future of "synthetic illicit substances" would be.

Pickard's defense attorney, William Work, questioned Ely at length about a series of e-mails from Pickard to Ely, who couldn't specifically identify them but said the messages appeared familiar.

Rork said the e-mails were copies that came from computer discs that had been kept in a storage locker in Massachusetts, then were sent to Pickard.

[American Dream]

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Fugi ... 086459.php

Fugitive to face LSD charges

By Eric Brazil, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Published , June 6, 1998

When Nicholas Sand last stood before U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti, the judge roasted him for having"contributed to the degradation of mankind" and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

That was on March 8, 1974. Two years later, when he lost his appeal of a conviction for manufacturing LSD, Sand jumped bail in San Francisco and vanished.

This week, Sand was returned to San Francisco, and he and Judge Conti are about to meet again.

For 23 years, he remained at large, shuttling between Canada and Mexico and continuing to manufacturer the pure acid that turned on a generation and made the Bay Area psychedelia central.

But in September 1996, Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Sand in his LSD laboratory in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlan.

What they found flabbergasted the mounties.

It was, they said -- and Interpol and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agreed -- the largest designer drug lab in the world. In addition to $500,000 in cash and gold bullion, and a cache of firearms, the mounties found LSD, DMT, Ecstasy and Nexus with a street value of $6.5 million.

There was enough LSD, said RCMP Staff Sgt. Kenneth Ross, to make 45 million doses.

The lab"was literally better than the Health Canada lab," Ross told The Examiner."Our lab tested it (LSD) out at 106 percent purity." Sand, he said"is an icon in the world of illicit drugs."

The $800,000 lab and warehouse -- also Sand's residence -- had been under surveillance for several months. The mounties moved in when they suspected that Sand planned to leave the country.

It took investigators nearly two months to identify Sand, because he had false identification and refused to discuss his background.

In February, Sand, 58, pleaded guilty to trafficking in LSD and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

He was then sent back to San Francisco for the resolution of his case here.

San was arraigned Friday before U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte. His case -- now complicated by a bail-jumping indictment -- was re-assigned to Judge Conti, who is regarded as one of the toughest sentencers on the federal bench.

Sand's attorney, Patrick Hallinan, said he was going to take a hard look at the initial conviction in an attempt to win some leniency for his client.

"Some of the facts raise very, very serious issues that go to the heart of the justice system," he said.

Sand, a New York native who was living in Santa Rosa when he was indicted in 1973 for manufacturing LSD and evading income tax, was a disciple of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the so-called King of LSD, the prosecution charged.

While Stanley, the man who made LSD available to the masses, became internationally famous, it was the low-profile Sand who actually manufactured most of the product when the Bay Area drug culture flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, according to law enforcement officials.

Sand's first brush with the law was a 1967 arrest in Colorado for illegal possession of LSD and failure to register as a drug manufacturer. When police stopped him in Dinosaur National Monument for a traffic violation, they found the truck he was driving equipped with a mobile LSD lab and $40,000 worth of the hallucinogenic drug aboard.

In 1990, Canadian police arrested Sand for operating a lab in British Columbia. However, using one of the numerous false IDs he kept handy, he escaped before police could determine his true identity and his status as a fugitive.

The San Francisco indictment that led to Sand's 1974 trial and sentencing accused him of being part of a far-flung conspiracy that had labs in Belgium, Mexico and Honduras, as well as the Bay Area. Its distribution network included Hells Angels and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a drug cult founded by the late LSD guru Timothy Leary, according to the prosecution.

Enough LSD was found by investigators at a lab Sand operated in the Sonoma County town of Windsor to supply 1.5 million doses.

One of the principal witnesses against Sand and two co-defendants was William Mellon Hitchcock, an heir to the U.S. Steel fortune, who testified under immunity and acknowledged that he had bankrolled the operation. The jury deliberated four days before convicting Sand.

Hallinan said that Sand's 15-year sentence on the LSD charge was"very severe," given the nature of the crime. He could receive another five years if he pleads guilty to or is convicted of jumping bail. Authorities in Canada have decided to let Sand's Canadian sentence run concurrently with whatever sentence he gets from Conti, Hallinan said.

Sand will appear in Conti's court at 10 a.m. June 16.


The Vancouver Sun and Province contributed to this report.

[American Dream]

U.S. Army Chemical Corps Insignia

It was 1974 and Pickard went to San Francisco's federal building to pay his respects.

Tim Scully was on trial for making huge batches of LSD in a Sonoma County farmhouse. Scully believed the drug could raise people's consciousness and had bluntly told the court he had wanted to "turn on the world."

"There was a break, and I walked out into the hall, and he introduced himself as a fellow chemist," recalled Scully, once an "apprentice" to Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the most infamous psychedelic sorcerer of the '60s.

Pickard smiled and handed Scully a U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Group pin with a flask and test tube design.

"He was trying to express some brotherhood of underground chemists," said Scully, noting that many acid chemists felt "we were doing a public service."

Later, Pickard paid $5,000 for a print by Dutch artist M.C. Escher, "Heaven and Hell," that Scully sold to pay legal fees. It showed angels and devils and seemed to reflect the LSD experience.

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Wil ... 910096.php



M.C. Escher, "Heaven and Hell"

[American Dream]

http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/sample ... death.html




According to Major General William Creasy, chemical incapacitants went hand in glove with the strategic requirements of the Cold War. As chief officer of the US Army Chemical Corps, Creasy promoted the psychochemical cause with eccentric and visionary zeal. He maintained that this type of warfare was not only feasible but tactically advantageous in certain situations...

Psychochemical weapons, Creasy argued, offered the most humane way of conducting the dirty business of warfare. He preached a new military gospel: war without death. An era of bloodless combat was just around the proverbial corner. There was only one problem. The sadly misinformed lay public and their elected officials harbored a knee-ierk aversion to chemical weapons.

In 1959 Creasy testified abefore the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. He explained to the bewildered congressmen how a psychochemical "attacks the sensory, perception, and nerve centers of the body...discombobulating them...Your hearing might be affected, your sight might be affected, your physical balance might be affected." Moreover, these drugs worked so swiftly that people wouldn't even know they'd been hit.

U.S. Army Chemical Corps Insignia

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Magnificent extragalactic trisexual desires multiple sex with all creatures any time/any space.
Non-smokers only. No weirdoes.

Amalgam X






http://www.acceler8or.com/tags/brotherh ... rnal-love/

[American Dream]

Sun Ra

[American Dream]

http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... kenji-liu/

Way-Seeking Mind – Guest Editor Kenji Liu



As a teen, my first explicit encounter with Buddhism was in an independent bookstore on Philadelphia’s South Street. The stern, grey, hardcover of Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind came back with me to central New Jersey where I muddled through its pages. I sat on my room’s hardwood floor and tried to figure out what he meant by holding oneself upright and relaxed, what I was supposed to do with my half-open eyes. My parents, being very Roman Catholic, would have been of little assistance if I had asked. But living in the middle of a suburb, feeling alone and full of teenaged ennui, there seemed to be something about meditation that fit.

Years later in California, when I sat my first ten-day meditation retreat in the tradition of S. N. Goenka, I came back to this initial seed of practice. As an aspiring young anti-racist activist, I also sought to understand how dhamma (dharma) and social justice could co-exist and even nurture each other. This proved essential and fortifying when I later began participating in mostly white convert sanghas, by providing a strong foundation from which to “recognize,” try to “accept,” “investigate,” and practice “non-duality” when encountering overt or subtle racism, sexism, and other issues.

In the 2000s, I joined Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s Buddhist Alliance for Social Engagement (BASE) program for youth activists led by Diana Winston, and later co-led a BASE group for anti-racist activists mentored by Mushim Ikeda. I also guest edited an issue of Turning Wheel in its original paper incarnation on “Building Alliances to Address Racism.”

As time went on I continually studied dhamma (mostly Theravadan), the writings of socially engaged Buddhists in Asia, and other essential frameworks of thought—intersectional oppressions (Sherover-Marcuse), marxisms, feminisms, critical race studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and more. I saw how compatible these intellectual perspectives are with dhamma in many ways. I sought to practice dhamma within the context of larger social and intellectual movements.

I also learned that Buddhism has a long history of politics, both reactionary and progressive, wherever it goes—that it is a changing cultural and historical product. As such it is not inherently progressive or radical—witness Zen Buddhism being yoked to Japanese imperialism, patriarchy and abuse within many traditions, or as I heard once, that there is not a single democratic Buddhist country (one can certainly debate if Myanmar is democratic despite recent events).

From personal experience I saw that the need to transmit dhamma through human beings also means that dhamma teachers are almost always influenced by culture, class, race, gender, and everything else that makes us interesting. I learned about the immense variety of practices in the world called Buddhism, and recognized my own sit-centric (or cushion-centric) prejudices. I became less Buddhist-identified and more interested in living a kind, mindful, and just life with a strong radar for fighting systemic oppression in all forms.

An important insight I remind myself of regularly is that although Buddhism is about ending suffering, it is a mistake to think that it espouses passivity, or that its expression “looks” a certain (peaceful) way. Stories abound in many lineages of master teachers intervening against different forms of delusion by what could be considered to be violent means—ranging from harsh words to physical action—in order to cut through ignorance or prevent greater harm. There are Buddhist martial arts traditions whose practitioners are just as comfortable with meditation as they are with a lethal weapon. There are deities and manifestations of boddhisattvas whose fearsome appearance or wielding of swords is not simply a metaphor. Sometimes direct action and incisiveness is necessary, and its experience may not match the peaceful pop culture appropriation often marketed to us.

Today, I am happy to return to Buddhist Peace Fellowship as a Guest Editor and Senior Writer for Turning Wheel Media. I look forward to doing what I love here—social and cultural commentary—with the special flavor that dhamma practice provides. May my time here stimulate reflection, constructive dialogue, insight, kindness, and a fierce commitment to ending all forms of personal, interpersonal, and systemic suffering.

[American Dream]

Satcakras and Mula-Prakriti from a 19th century Rajasthani painting



http://loveisthewateroflife.tumblr.com/ ... a-prakriti

[American Dream]

It is commonly repeated, after all, that before one lets go of the self, one has to have one in the first place. bell hooks repeats this teaching in relation to gender, saying “A central problem for women is that you can’t give up the ego and the self if you haven’t established a sense of yourself as subject”. Here psychology and soteriology can be understood as sequential: psychological process, including grounding, orientation, establishment of healthy ego boundaries, secure attachment, and emotional maturity are prerequisites for deconstructive, and liberating, inquiry. If this is the case, then the popularization of Buddhism and mindfulness might be to some extent misguided. Indeed, most people who attend intensive meditation retreats spend much of their time processing personality content rather than the traditional vipassana insights, and the question is begged whether the Buddhist practice being pursued in earnest by western practitioners is culturally or psychologically appropriate, or even as effective as the exercises are designed to be in the traditional context. Further, there is a conversation happening now in western Theravada about whether intensive meditation retreat is contraindicated for people with histories of trauma or otherwise unstable psychological histories. We may be prescribing a strong medicine where it does not serve. Buddhism was not originally intended to be a populist practice, with everyone invited to meditate, and given the impression that such practice would be good for them! Mythically, after the Buddha’s awakening, he felt that the wisdom he had realized was too subtle for people to understand, and initially decided not to teach. He changed his mind only after being exhorted by a deity (Brahma Sahampati) to see that there were in fact “beings with little dust in their eyes” who would in fact understand the Dharma. And even then he reserved the teachings on not-self for the monks and nuns, not offering them to lay people for many years. In our culture where substantial politically rightward drift is only reinforcing tribalism, paranoia, solidification of identity, affinity, and insularity, teachings on the Emptiness of self are perhaps simply not the right medicine, and should be deemphasized in favor of ethical and community-building teachings.

--Buddhist “not-self” meets poststructuralist subjectivity | . sean feit . dharma, yoga, art .

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Here’s what our parents never taught us:

You will stay up on your rooftop until sunlight peels away the husk of the moon,
chainsmoking cigarettes and reading Baudelaire, and
you will learn that you only ever want to fall in love with someone
who will stay up to watch the sun rise with you.

You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you will
realize that nowhere seems like home anymore.

A woman will kiss you and you’ll think her lips are two petals
rubbing against your mouth.

You will not tell anyone that you liked it.
It’s okay.
It is beautiful to love humans in a world where love is a metaphor for lust.

You can leave if you want, with only your skin as a carry-on.

All you need is a twenty in your pocket and a bus ticket.
All you need is someone on the other end of the map, thinking about the supple
curves of your body, to guide you to a home that stretches out for miles
and miles on end.

You will lie to everyone you love.
They will love you anyways.

One day you’ll wake up and realize that you are too big for your own skin.

Molt.
Don’t be afraid.

Your body is a house where the shutters blow in and out
against the windowpane.

You are a hurricane-prone area.
The glass will break through often.

But it’s okay. I promise.

Remember,
a stranger once told you that the breeze
here is something worth writing poems about.

— “Here’s What Our Parents Never Taught Us,” Shinji Moon

[American Dream]

Las nepantleras, modern-day chamanas, use visioning and the imaginal on behalf of the self and the community. Nepantleras deal with the collective shadows of their respective groups. They engage in spiritial activism. We need the work of las nepantleras to bridge the abyss between Native people and Chicana/os. Nepantleras are the supreme border crossers. They act as intermediaries between cultures and their various versions of reality. Las nepantleras, like the ancient chamanas, circumvent polarizing binaries. They try not to get locked into one perspective or perception of things. They can see through our cultural conditioning and through our respective cultures’ toxic ways of life. They try to overturn the destructive perceptions of the world that we’ve been taught by our various cultures. They change the stories about who we are and about our behavior. They point to the stick we beat ourselves with so we realize what we’re doing and may choose to throw away the stick. They possess the gift of vision. Nepantleras think in terms of the planet, not just their own racial group, the U.S., or Norte América. They serve as agents of awakening, inspire and challenge others to deeper awareness, greater conocimiento; they serve as reminders of each other’s search for wholeness of being.

— Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Speaking Across the Divide”

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