Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
'No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.'
— ex-State Department employee William Blum
CATNIPPED: WATCH A JAGUAR TRIPPING BALLS AFTER EATING AYAHUASCA VINES
Apparently animals dig otherworldly experiences, too. Take this jaguar for instance, who seeks out and then happily munches on the Banisteriopsis caapi vine located in rainforests of South America.
Ayahuasca AKA yajé is a tea brewed by shamas known for its psychoactive effects. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the role of Banisteriopsis caapi in the making of ayahuasca.It contains harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine, all of which are both beta-carboline harmala alkaloids and MAOIs. The MAOIs in B. caapi allow the primary psychoactive compound, DMT (which is introduced from the other primary ingredient in ayahuasca, the Psychotria viridis plant), to be orally active. The stems contain 0.11-0.83% beta-carbolines, with harmine and tetrahydroharmine as the major components
From what I understand, a human wouldn’t get this effect from eating the yajé vine alone. It would have to be mixed with other plant matter to reach its full, trippy effect. Perhaps a jaguar’s liver processes the plant differently? I don’t know.
What is known is that many animals “self medicate”—take for instance when your dog eats grass, it’s probably trying to bring on vomiting. Pregnant elephants in Kenya have been observed eating the leaves of certain trees to induce delivery. Some species of lizards are believed to eat a certain root to counter the venom of poisonous snake bites.
And as we’re reminded every holiday season (on websites just like this one) reindeer located in the Arctic Circle are known to eat the Amanita muscaria mushroom, an especially strong “magic” mushroom. Maybe that’s how Santa’s reindeer achieve lift off…
via Ultraculture
Social Justice and the 4 Noble Truths: 2014 Roundup
Posted by: Katie Loncke Posted date: December 23, 2014
The System Stinks 2014:
Social Justice and the Four Noble Truths
Contributors (clockwise from top left): Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Mushim Ikeda, Hozan Alan Senauke, Funie Hsu, Faith Adiele, and Maia Duerr.
Moro during his kidnapping
With this installment I would now like to consider some of the other acquaintances Stark made in Italy beginning around the late 1960s. Of these strange associations the great Philip Willan notes:"Stark's activities offer other surprises. As well as cultivating imprisoned left-wing terrorists, he appears to have been in contact with leading exponents of the right. Documents confiscated at the time of his arrest show that he had been in touch with Salvo Lima, Andreotti's political ally allegedly linked to the Mafia, and with Prince Gianfranco Alliata di Montereale, linked to freemasonry and the Mafia and implicated in the Borghese coup attempt. There was also evidence of contact with Graziano Verzotto, an associate of Sindona's and president of the Sicilian state mining corporation, Ente Minerario Siciliano, who fled Lebanon in 1975 after being caught up in a financial scandal. He was equally at home with the rightists as he was when masquerading as a left-wing sympathizer. A confiscated letter to Wendy Hansen, American vice-consul in Florence expressed the view that circumstances were not yet ripe for military coup in Italy. Most interesting of all, though, was evidence that he had been in touch with Vito Miceli, former director of Italian military intelligence. A complex and never fully resolved tale involving Miceli leads back, by roundabout route, to the Moro affair."
(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pgs. 311-312)
As was noted in part one, it was believed that Stark had acquired the initial batch of LSD that he used to gain access to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in Rome during 1969. In addition to P2, there were other neo-fascist organizations with occultic overtones operating in Italy during this time. Two of the most notorious were Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale. These groups and many other lesser outfits were deeply influenced by the ideology of the occultist and philosopher Baron Julius Evola. Evola himself had served in the SS during the final years of the war where he had been involved in some very mysterious doings (noted before in brief here) and afterwards would become deeply involved in the post-war Fascist International.
the banners of Ordine Nuovo (top)
and Avanguardia Nazionale (bottom)
During his youth in the 1920s Evola had experimented with drugs including opium, hashish and mescaline. Evola would go on to distance himself from these youthful excesses and harshly criticize drug use amongst the profane masses. But in some of his later writings such as Eros and the Mysteries of Love and Ride the Tiger Evola would indicate that the use of psychedelics showed potential when combined with rigorous ritualistic preparations. In the latter work he stated:"At this point, it will be helpful to add some details. In general, drugs can be divided into four categories: stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, and narcotics. The first two categories do not concern us; for example, the use of tobacco and alcohol is irrelevant unless it becomes a vice, that is, if it leads to addiction.
"The third category includes drugs that bring on states in which one experiences various visions, and seemingly other worlds of the senses and spirit. On account of these effects, they have also been called 'psychedelics,' under the assumption that the visions project and reveal the hidden contents of the depth's of one's own psyche, but are not recognized as such. As a result, physicians have even tried use drugs like mescaline for a psychic exploration analogous to psychoanalysis. However, when all is reduced to the projection of a psychic substratum, not even experiences of this content interest the differentiated man. Leaving aside the perilous contents of the sensation and their artificial paradise, these illusionary phantasmagoria do not take one beyond, even if one cannot exclude the possibility that what is acting may not be merely the contents of one's own subconscious, but dark influences that, finding the door open, manifest themselves in these visions. We might even say that those influences, and not the simple substratum repressed by the individual psyche, are responsible for certain impulses that can burst out in the states, even driving some compulsively to commit criminal acts.
"An effective use of these drugs would presuppose a preliminary 'catharsis,' that is, the proper neutralization of the individual unconscious substratum that is activated; then the images and senses could refer to a spiritual reality of a higher order, rather than being reduced to a subjective, visionary orgy. One should emphasize that the instances of this higher use of drugs were preceded not only by periods of preparation and purification of the subject, but also that the process was properly guided through the contemplation of certain symbols. Sometimes 'consecrations' were also prescribed for protective purposes. There are accounts of certain indigenous communities in Central and South America, whose members, only while under the influence of peyote, hear the sculpted figures on ancient temple ruins 'speak,' revealing their meaning in terms of spiritual enlightenment. The importance of the individual's attitude clearly appears from the completely different effects of mescaline on to contemporary writers who have experimented with drugs, Aldous Huxley and R. H. Zaehner. And it is a fact that in the case of hallucinogens like opium and, in part, hashish, this active assumption of the experience that is essential from our point of view is generally excluded."
(Ride the Tiger, Julius Evola, pgs. 169-170)
the Baron
Evola also indicates that narcotics, when used with consciousness maintained "with the pure I at the center", could potentially open up a "higher reality" as well. Nor was Evola the only philosopher popular amongst the neo-fascist who saw the potential in drug use. Ernst Junger also experimented with LSD with the assistance of Albert Hofmann himself, for instance.
Junger
Three wise men but only two Santas
This photo dates from another psychedelic conference, long ago (late 1970s) and is previously unpublished I think. Only xerox prints survive, alas.
Alp, Ginz & The Hof
The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy
By Steve Silberman
Posted: April 21, 2011
Timothy Leary, Los Angeles, March 1992. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, used with permission of the Allen Ginsberg Estate. (Allen is visible in the mirror.)
In November of 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg made a modest proposal to a room full of Unitarian ministers in Boston. “Everybody who hears my voice try the chemical LSD at least once,” he intoned. “Then I prophecy we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.”
The poet had been experimenting with drugs since the 1940s as a way of achieving the state that his Beat Generation friends named the “New Vision,” methodically keeping lists of the drugs he sampled — morphine with William Burroughs, marijuana with fellow be-bop fans in jazz clubs, and eventually the psychedelic vine called ayahuasca with a curandero in Peru.
For Ginsberg, drugs were not merely an indulgence or form of intoxication; they were tools for investigating the nature of mind, to be employed in tandem with writing, an approach he called “the old yoga of poesy.” In 1959, he volunteered to become an experimental subject at Stanford University, where two psychologists who were secretly working for the CIA to develop mind-control drugs gave him LSD; listening to recordings of Wagner and Gertrude Stein in the lab, he decided that acid was “a very safe drug,” and thought that even his suburban poet father Louis might like to try it.
By the time he addressed the Unitarian ministers in Boston, Ginsberg had become convinced that psychedelics held promise as agents of transformative mystical experience that were available to anyone, particularly when combined with music and other art forms. In place of stiff, hollow religious observances in churches and synagogues, the poet proposed “naked bacchantes” in national parks, along with sacramental orgies at rock concerts, to call forth a new, locally-grown American spirituality that could unify a generation of Adamic longhairs and earth mothers alienated by war and turned off by the pious hypocrisy of their elders.
Ginsberg’s potent ally in this campaign was a psychology professor at Harvard named Timothy Leary, who would eventually become the most prominent public advocate for mass consumption of LSD, coining a meme that became the ubiquitous rallying cry of the nascent 20th-century religious movement as it proliferated on t-shirts, black-light posters, and neon buttons from the Day-Glo Haight-Ashbury to swinging London: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
Among those who took up the cause was the Beatles. John Lennon turned Leary’s woo-tastic mashups of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into one of the most profoundly strange, terrifying, and exhilarating tracks ever recorded: “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver, which swooped in on a heart-stopping Ringo stutter-beat chased by clouds of infernal firebirds courtesy of backwards guitar and a tape loop of Paul McCartney laughing.
As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Ginsberg and Leary made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, Hebraically-bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation.
By the close of the ’60s — with ominous stormclouds on the horizon in the form of violent debacles like Altamont, a Haight-Ashbury that had been taken over by speed freaks and the Mob, and Charles Manson’s crew of acid-addled zombie assassins — Ginsberg was already looking for more grounding and lasting forms of enlightenment. He eventually found what he was seeking in Buddhist mindfulness meditation.
The poet retained his counterculture cred until his death of liver cancer in 1997, but Leary didn’t fare as well. Subjected to obsessive persecution by government spooks like Watergate plumber G. Gordon Liddy, Leary launched a series of psychedelic communes that collapsed under the weight of their own ego-trips. Years of arrests, jail terms, spectacular escapes from prison aided by the Black Panthers, disturbing betrayals, and bizarre self-reinventions followed the brief season when the psych labs of Harvard seemed to give new birth to a new breed of American Transcendentalism that was as democratic as a test tube.
The spectacular rise and fall of Leary and Ginsberg’s plot to turn on the world is the subject of a new book by Peter Conners called White Hand Society, published by City Lights Books. I knew Ginsberg well for 20 years and was his teaching assistant at Naropa, a Buddhist university in Colorado, yet I learned a lot about Ginsberg’s role in helping to create Leary’s public identity by reading the book, which is based mostly on the lively correspondence between the two men. (For more detailed analysis of White Hand Society, see this insightful review by poet, Buddhist student, and Ginsberg scholar Marc Olmsted.) I spoke with Conners when he came through San Francisco on his book tour. He is currently at work on an oral history of the jam-band scene called JAMerica.
Testimony centered around establishing the presence of a national LSD drug ring run by Rainbow Family members, and a hit that was placed on Kaiser after an April 24, 2000 bust in which he was caught in the midst of preparing pure LSD for sale. According to Pierce County Sheriff’s Detective Warren Dogeagle, it was the first bust of an LSD lab since 1981. Dogeagle testified that a Bremerton man arrested for LSD named his source. That source then named Kaiser, who was arrested at his Whidbey Island home, along with girlfriend Shauna Daniels.
“(Daniels) came out of the back area where Nick was, and we confronted her first in the hallway,” Dogeagle said. "Nick was preparing blotter acid and liquid vials of LSD.” Dogeagle testified that Kaiser was diluting pure LSD, and still had rubber gloves on when he was cuffed. To make blotter acid, he explained, pure LSD is diluted and soaked up in a fibrous paper, then dried and sold. While detectives were combing Kaiser’s apartment, a number of people stopped by “to visit”. A few people were arrested that afternoon, he testified. “Nick wanted to cooperate with us,” Dogeagle said. “He wanted to know what he could do to cut his losses. ”Nick named a few of the people he dealt to, setting up a “reverse” deal (busting someone loweron the hierarchy) with one of them. That person was arrested. He was attempting to set up a sting with his source in San Francisco, but the source became more and more suspicious and the deal never happened. Drug dealers in general have “a very good word of mouth system,” Dogeagle said, and it’s“almost instantaneous that news gets out.
Kaiser had told Dogeagle that he traveled to San Francisco about twice a month and would rent a hotel room. His source would meet him there, and deliver to him anywhere from 10,000 to 70,000 dosage units of acid.‘ Kaiser was cooperating with law enforcement through May. “In June, he stopped calling us,” Dogeagle stated. The last time he heard from Kaiser was on June 9, just two days before his murder.
Cunningham said he met Kaiser in Portland in 1996. “I lived on the streets most of the time and Nick was always around,” Cunningham explained. “I met him sitting in the corner one day.” The two belonged to the Rainbow Family for four or five years, he said, and he continued to trust Kaiser even after Kaiser told him that he had turned some names over to the DEA. ‘“It didn’t really bother me at all,” Cunningham, who often referred to Kaiser as “Nickie” testified. “It made no difference to me what Nick did. Nick’s my friend.”
Cunningham heard Kaiser was at the Northport Barter Fair, and he “followed the sound of the nitrous tank and found Nick. ”Kaiser was with “a guy named Josh from Mendocino Valley,” Cunningham recalled. “I told Nick that he was in some serious shit. I didn’t believe he was on the (Fair) lot. I didn’t think he’d show up somewhere like that. He knew San Francisco wanted him dead…He didn’t seem too worried about it. Evidently, Josh was going to speak to people in California on Nick’s behalf. ”Kaiser apparently never knew that Schaefer planned to go to California, then to Hawaii, where he would leave the country.“ Josh said he was going with them, at least to Hawaii,” Cunningham said. “He asked if he could get work here for money for the road.” By “work,” Cunningham clarified, Kaiser meant he was looking for drugs to sell.
Cunningham told them he could get them five pounds of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the three planned to go to his cabin on Crown Creek, southwest of Northport, the next day. From there, Cunningham would run to a nearby supplier’s house and return with the product. On Saturday, Cunningham and Grange left the Fair to get firewood from a nearby slash pile. Cunningham thinks they left again to call Schultz to tell him Kaiser wanted a meeting. Schultz told him to “stay away from Nick, otherwise they wouldn’t talk to me either.” Cunningham said that he then handed the phone to Grange, who spoke with Schultz for awhile. The call was not able to be verified through any phone records. Williams reported that he, too, had called Schultz that night, then hand the phone to Grange. That call was able to be traced. On Sunday, Cunningham left the Fair with Kaiser and Schaefer around noon. They passed John Grange at the gate on their way out. The three stopped at a gas station in Northport for food and to “smoke a bowl,” Cunningham said. Then they went on to Crown Creek cabin, where he saw Grange’s Bronco parked in the trees alongside the house, an unusual spot. Schaefer and Kaiser asked about all the brass on the ground outside. Cunningham told them it was from target practice, and went inside to get the .22 caliber rifle that Grange’s father had purchased for his son just three days earlier. He couldn’t find the gun, so Cunningham went outside and asked Kaiser and Schaefer if they wanted something to eat. They agreed, and went inside to get a pan. When he came outside, Cunningham said he saw Williams crossing the lawn. He greeted him, introduced the three, then headed down to Crown Creek to get water for macaroni and cheese.
Cunningham said he got water, and was just starting to come back when he met Williams, who said, “This is going to happen right now. Then, I heard the shots.”Cunningham didn’t know how many shots were fired. “Half a dozen, maybe more, maybe less,” he guessed.
The two ran up to the cabin to see Schaefer and Kaiser laying in the fire pit. Cunningham remembers Grange standing near the stairs to the basement. Cunningham said he took his pan of water and started washing off Kaiser’s face. “There was blood everywhere,” he said. “I couldn’t see any specific entry or exit wounds.” They were bloody from the tops of their heads to the middle of their chests.“ I was moved from Nick, and Nick was pulled up the side of the house a little bit and then picked up.” When Cunningham was asked by both lawyers to repeat how he had washed off Kaiser’s face, he grew upset, nearly crying, and asked “Why’ve you got to ask me (screwed) up shit like that,man?”
At another point, upset with rehashing what he’d already testified to, Cunningham told Wetle,“I’m done doing this.” The court took a recess and Cunningham returned to the stand. Both Cunningham and Williams say that after the murders, Grange threw Kaiser over his shoulder and loaded him in Kaiser’s Bronco. Cunningham believes Schaefer was loaded through the passenger door. A blue blanket covered one of them—Williams thought it was Kaiser, while Cunningham believed it was Schaefer. A shovel and pick-axe were loaded into the vehicle. “They got there somehow,” Cunningham said. “It might have been me, I don’t remember.”Grange told the two to bury the bodies while he stayed and buried the gun. They drove up the hill, stopping once because Kaiser’s head fell onto Cunningham’s lap.
They stopped at a clearing and began digging. Williams dug closest to the road, and Cunningham began a second grave a few feet away. Who used the shovel and who used the pick-axe was unclear—Cunningham didn’t remember and Williams thought he used the pick-axe, although the grave both say Williams dug showed only shovel marks. The attempt was aborted soon after, but not before each grave was about four feet long and one-and-a-half feet deep. The two drove the vehicle farther up the old logging road and parked it between some trees. They put a rag in the gas tank and tried to light it like a candle,” Cunningham said. “It didn’t work.” They tried to siphon gas out of the tank with a new garden hose, pieces of which were recovered from the crime scene. It was too long, and Cunningham, then Williams, tried to cut it with the shovel, but nothing worked. The two took a pot pipe, and a new bottle of rum off of the victims before they left. Cunningham said he poured some of it out,” he said. “There’s spirits in the bottle, spirits in the land.”
Williams saw the pipe and told him it was “sick and wrong” and to get rid of it. Cunningham threw it into the woods.They returned and told Grange that it was too hard to dig.“He said, ‘I figured as much, you were back too quick,’” Cunningham testified.Grange ran underneath the house and got a can of gas they kept for the generator. “The three of us drove up to the top of the hill,” Cunningham said. About three-quarters of the way up,Williams got out to watch for cars. Cunningham and Grange “poured some gas on the car, lit another fire,” he said. “It caught in flames. I got back in the truck. We went down the hill and picked up Dane.”Back at the cabin, “I threw my shirt in the fire pit, because it had blood all over it,” Cunningham remembered.
Williams recounted a similar version of events. He arrived at Barter Fair on Sunday around noon with a friend, he said. He saw Grange at the gate, and decided to leave with him because he’d forgotten his wallet and the pot he was going to sell. In the car, Williams said, Grange told him, “It was going down, that they’re going to threaten him. He said he hopes Nick comes out by himself, said he felt sorry for anyone else who comes out. He had done it for the family before, as far as I knew, threatened people. He was going to make sure Nick didn’t visit anybody or come around anymore. Jeff had spoken earlier about him being a part of the ‘wrecking crew’ in Portland. “The month prior to this, Rob had mentioned doing away with Nick,” Williams continued. “The reality of him actually killing them wasn’t believable. A lot of people make a lot of accusations and threats that don’t get carried out."
Williams apparently was asked to also get his .22 to threaten the victims with. He refused, and after they parked the car, which was “to be hidden out of the way of sight,” at the Crown Creek cabin, he went down to the creek. He said he got “spooked” and ran back to his own cabin. “I kind of had some thoughts going through my mind about what was said the month before,”he said. “I had a lot of thoughts. I wasn’t sure if he was going to shoot him, if he was going to threaten him.”
Figuring whatever was going to happen had “already transpired,” Williams ran back to the Crown Creek Cabin. He saw Cunningham and was introduced to Kaiser and Schaefer. Then, he said, Cunningham motioned to him with his head and the two walked down to the creek together.
He claimed that Cunningham never made it t the creek to get water in the pan,and that the two stopped and talked for about five minutes. Williams and Cunningham told him, “He’s in the basement. It’s going to happen now.” Williams said that after they heard the shots, they ran back up to the house. According to him, Cunningham reached the scene first. Cunningham believes Williams was first. At the scene, Williams said, “Chooey was standing in the middle of the path with a .22 in his hand. He said, ‘Jeff, come on.” Williams claims he panicked and ran back and forth between the cabin and the creek while the other loaded the bodies. At one point, he said, he helped Cunningham drag Schaefer by the foot, and saw bullet holes in Schaefer’s forehead and cheek. He remembers Grange wrapping Kaiser in the blue blanket and throwing him over his shoulder.
Then, Williams said,” I was under the steps of the cabin looking for a pick or a shovel. Grange said, ‘Bury them, you guys bury them.’“I found a shovel,” Williams continued. “Jeff grabbed a pick.” Williams remembered having to ride with his elbows against the dashboard because Kaiser’s body was pressed against the back of his seat. When they stopped to dig the graves, Williams said, Cunningham was, “beside me, pretty upset, digging also. He was borderline crying. I just want to get it over with, get out of there.”
Williams agreed that he had yelled at Cunningham on the walk back for taking Schaefer’s pipe. He concurred that, when they got back, Grange expressed surprise at how quickly they’d returned, and that, Grange went beneath the house for a gas can.When they drove back up to Kaiser’s car, Williams said he asked to be let out to watch for cars,but Grange wouldn’t stop. He asked a second time, nearer to the victim’s car, and they let him out. About 10 minutes later, they dropped him off.
The three then went to the Whitebird Tavern in Northport, where Williams played pool with one of the bartenders. When they returned to Williams’ cabin, they found Cunningham’s former girlfriend, Maija Soucie. Soucie was looking for a ride back to Portland. Soucie testified that she felt very unwelcome, and that “it was very heavy, thick air. It was very uncomfortable, very sensitive, and I felt a lot of tension. I certainly felt the uneasiness of having me around—or anyone around, for that matter.”
Cunningham wanted to leave with her for the night, but Grange wasn’t happy about the idea. Cunningham was dogged, though, and Grange relented and loaned them his truck, telling them to be back early the next morning. The two then headed off to the Crown Creek Cabin. A drunken Cunningham then told Soucie. “He only said Nick,” Soucie, also a friend of Kaiser’s, testified. “He was in so much fear, pain. I’ve never felt him so lost. He was hurting for Nick. It was a friend of his. He was in total disbelief that it came to this.”
Cunningham told her that the shooter “was Chooey,” and that Williams had been “in a state of panic, running up and down the road, just scared, freaked out. I was in shock,” Soucie said, “but I remember what he said." The two stayed at the Crown Creek cabin. The next morning, late, they met Grange and Williams coming to get them. Grange was furious because they were late, and the three packed up. Williams borrowed the vehicle then, and went a few miles away to pick up five pounds of marijuana—although Williams said he borrowed his mother’s car. Williams returned and the three re-loaded the car.
They dropped Soucie off at another friend’s, and between the three of them, left five dogs behind.‘Shot in the head, both.’On the ride to Portland, Williams said, Grange told them what happened while they were at the creek. “He told us how he took them out, “Williams recalled. “He mentioned that he took Josh out first with head-shots. Nick was lying down at this point to cover his ears, and he shot Nicknext. He said they were shot in the head, both. He was pretty nonchalant, like something hehad to take care of that was just business.”They arrived at Schultz’s house in Portland at about 2 a.m. Cunningham “ate a whole bunch of valium, drank a bunch of booze, and went to bed,” he said. The next day, Grange told Schultz that “he was the one that shot him. Dane told him there was some other guy that was there, as well.”“Rob seemed to act surprised, “Williams said, “but …I felt it was an act. He asked me, ‘you’re not going to have a momentary lapse of reason and go to the authorities? ‘ I told him no.”
Return to Data & Research Compilations
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests