Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Aug 26, 2018 8:57 pm

Religion, the Scarlet Woman, and Dope Part III

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The legendary magician Aleister Crowley, a self-professed follower of the 'Sumerian tradition,' made use of drugs in various magical rituals. I mention Crowley now as much of his magical system was an attempt to recreate the Mystery schools of the ancients which were widespread amongst planter-type civilizations.

"In certain magical operations which Crowley performed (e.g. the Abuldiz Working in 1911, the Paris Working in 1914, and the Amalantrah Working, 1918) a variety of drugs was employed.
"Cocaine, which he assigns to the element of Fire, was used for fortifying the will, thus helping to keep the object of the operation firmly in mind. Morphine, slowing and purifying the mind, makes thought and its formulation more vivid and precise. Heroin, it seems, partakes of both these qualities and combines them in a peculiarly subtle manner.
"To the element of Water he attributes hashish and mescal, owing to their image-making properties, and also because they open the gates of Pleasure and Beauty. Morphine he also attributed to this element.
"To Air, which is the element assigned to the reasoning faculties, he attributes ethyl oxide (ether) for its use in mental analysis and the more profound movements of introspection.
"Finally, the element Earth embraces all the directly hypnotic drugs which induce repose and forgetfulness, enabling the Magician to withdraw into the arms of the Great Mother to restore his devitalized vehicles, astral and physical.
"With the attribution of specific drugs to the elements, the old ceremonial and symbolic techniques of subconscious control are superseded by living and experiential aids. Similarly, with sex, alcohol, the mystic dances and circumambulation, the use of mantra and lyrical incantation. These aids, used in conjunction with drugs, stimulate the whorls of energy in the subtle body. In connection with sex and drugs, Crowley wrote in 1917: 'I note, with all stimulant drugs, that if one is with others, the force is entirely dissipated, usually on the sexual plane. If one is alone, one becomes creative at once. This is important, as establishing the Kundalini doctrine, with its upper and lower exits. It does not bear, however, on the doctrine of abstinence from sex; for in normal excitement the sex seems to stimulate the other creative power.
"That is to say, sex seems to stimulate the Kundalini or Serpent Power. Crowley thus observed the direct effects of sex and drugs on the vital centre or magical power in the human organism."
(The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant, pgs. 97-98)


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Crowley

I have found virtually no references to entheogens in Crowley's writings on drugs. This may simply have been out of ignorance -the psychedelic properties of magic mushrooms and the likes were all but unknown in Western culture before the 1950s (at least amongst mainstream sources). Possibly the 'directly hypnotic drugs' associated with the element of earth are in reference to entheogens (and are interestingly linked to the Earth mother), but its difficult to say. Kenneth Grant wrote The Magical Revival in the 1970s when the use of entheogens had become widespread, yet he virtually ignores them as well. Of course, the 'directly hypnotic drugs' may also be a reference to opium, which was curiously left out of Grant's elemental classification system.

Further, even though heroin is mentioned in the passage discussing drugs falling under the element of fire, it could actually have been associated with earth as its effect are described as a combination of cocaine and morphine (which was classified under the water element). On the other hand, Crowley claims that heroin aids the powers of concentration, whereas the 'directly hypnotic drugs' are said to induce forgetfulness. Crowley does not seem to believe the same was true of opium, however. If opiates are in fact the bulk of the drugs that fall under earth, it makes the line 'withdraw into the arms of the Great Mother to restore his devitalized vehicles, astral and physical' most curious in regards to what we've already learned about the mother cult that has appeared the world over since the days of ancient Sumer. The noted metaphysical scholar Robert Anton Wilson, himself a big fan of Crowley, seems to have shared a similar view of opiates.
"To activate the first brain take an opiate. Mother Opium and Sister Morphine bring you down to cellular intelligence, bio-survival passivity, the floating consciousness of the newborn. (This is why Freudians identify opiate addiction with the desire to return to infancy."
(The Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1, Robert Anton Wilson, pg. 200)


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There are no shortages of references to opiates in the writings of Crowley and his followers. Opiates (especially heroin) and ether seem to have been the main drugs used in Crowley's magical system. The power of heroin was in fact almost to much for the Great Beast to handle.
"Morphine tends to aid concentration and relieve the pressure of anxiety. Like opium, it aids the creative imagination. Objections to the use of these two drugs consist in the fact that they impair executive ability, so that the ideas which they inspire remain sterile and are rarely carried over into practical life. As is well known, opium has the virtue of relieving pain and conferring philosophic tranquility...
"Heroin combines the virtues of opium and cocaine. It excites the imagination, aids concentration, and induces calm. Unlike opium and morphine, however, it increases power and endurance.
"The life-death struggle which Crowley waged against heroin is related in Liber 93. Towards the end of his life, he notes:
" 'There is no yen at all (from the drug) when I am free from (a) care, (b) boredom. To reach physiological minimum I must have (1) daily masseur-valet to get me up and out, (2) supply of books and forced stage or screen visits, (3) secretary at will, (4) company, (5) food and drink.'
"In the same diary he notes that 1914 was the probable date of his first heroin experiment, taking some three grains per day. After the tremendous struggle with the drug -to which reference has already been made -he shook off completely its hold over him and there is no further record of its use until, in 1940, seven years before his death, his doctor began prescribing 1/4 or 1/6 grain for recurrent attacks of asthma. The complaint had again become acute, and this is the first record of heroin consumption in his dairies for many years. From that time on, until his death in 1947, he took steadily increasing doses until in 1946 we read of doses as large as 6 grains per day.
"His excessive use of the drug between 1920 and 1922 he ascribed to financial anxiety, lack of stimulus (correspondence with chelas, etc.), and his inability to get things published.
"The conclusions he reached in respect of the drug in Liber 93 led him to declare that his experience should serve as a preliminary prima facie case for a revolutionary revision of the extant medical theories on the subject, and of the legislation regarding the sale of heroin and similar drugs."
(ibid, pgs. 95-96)


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chunky heroin

So much for Crowley. I would now likely to briefly return to my theory that the priesthoods and esoteric orders of various matriarchal societies used entheogens in secret rites while promoting the use of opiates to the general populace. We may be able to gleam elements of these practices by examining of the European alchemists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At the heart of alchemical philosophy was a secret raw material that was considered essential to an alchemical work.
"Simply stated, the alchemical work begins with a secret raw material called the prima materia, or prime matter, a single substance absolutely essential to the work but never identified except by the most unusual terms. It is called the radical moisture, the round body from the center, the hermaphroditic monster, Adam's tree of paradise with many flowers, the water, the sperm of the world, the empress of all honor, the dragon, and many other names. Once in hand the prima materia must be transformed through the alchemical operations into the philosopher's stone, although some authors maintain that the prima materia is the stone. In any case, the next step is to extract from the secret stone, through the torment of fire, the miraculous water: the aqua permanens or aqua divina, also known as the strangest of liquids, drinkable gold."
(Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, Clark Heinrich, pg. 169)

Naturally some have speculated that this prima materia is a magic mushroom or some other kind of entheogen. For instance Clark Heinrich argues a text known as the Emerald Tablet, which was highly popular with alchemists in the Middle Ages, is a metaphor for the fly agaric mushroom.
"...the secret substance's father is the sunlike mature mushroom, whose 'seed' falls from his body to bring about the birth of his offspring. Its mother is the white, rough-textured 'moon' of the mushroom embryo, which seems to give birth to the solar cap. The wind carries the mushroom spores as well as the rainstorms that cause the mushroom's birth. The earth 'nurses' the mushroom from egg to cup as the mushroom draws water from it. 'When it turns toward the earth' corresponds to the end of sporulation, when the upturned cap begins to dry out and turn back toward the ground; this is the optimal harvest time, because fully mature mushrooms have the highest concentration of muscimol, the main active ingredient. Drying converts ibotenic acid to muscimol as well; once completely dry 'its power is complete.' The last statement of the quotation recapitulates the whole process, adding that the substance receives the power of higher and lower things. The 'higher and lower things' refer to the powers of heaven and earth, but also warn the initiate to be aware that the same mushroom can lead to both heaven and hell. The final promise is that the glory (bliss) of all creation awaits the person who likewise receives the powers of the secret substance."
(ibid, pg. 170)


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Mercurius, the personification of the prima materia,
showing characteristics of the fly agaric mushroom


https://visupview.blogspot.com/2011/11/ ... -part.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 29, 2018 4:01 pm

Cannabis in Spiritual Practice

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Somatophobia runs deep. Its principles so saturate the tissues of our cultural body that many people pass their entire lives rarely ever waking up from its spell. To embody its gospel is to stifle sensation, to enter into conflictual resistance with the world of nature and the felt current of the life force. By dampening and putting a dimming lid on the feeling presence of the body, somatophobia relegates the experience of human ecstasy to a nonacceptable, hence nonexistent, dimension of consciousness and causes the brilliant energies of the whole pantheistic realm of organic life to go dark. Somatophobia would like to suppress any awareness of these realms from accessible experience, and herein lies its problem with cannabis, which, used as a spiritual sacrament in conjunction with body-oriented meditation practices, powerfully supports the very dimensions of experience that the somatophobic bias would like to prohibit.

The wandering ascetics and sadhus who are devoted to Shiva don’t just worship him as an arms-length object of veneration. They invoke him every day as they begin their spiritual practices through smoking ganja (what cannabis is called in India) to awaken the feeling energies of the body and, in a real and palpable way, activate in themselves the same energies that Shiva would have stimulated when he would drink bhang. Christian devotees, by eating a communion wafer, ­participate in a ritual that symbolically partakes of the body of Christ. For Shaivite sadhus, however, there’s nothing at all symbolic about smoking cannabis. They’re not just symbolically partaking of Shiva’s body. They’re actively transforming the state of their bodies into the bodily experience of Shiva. By doing what Shiva did, they’re able to tap into what Shiva must have experienced.

When my wife was a young woman, she spent time in retreat in the foothills of the Himalayas, exploring yoga practices that she’d learned in Varanasi. She would often awaken in the morning to find a group of wandering Shiva babas—ascetics following Shiva’s ­practices—on her porch where they had sought shelter during the night. They always treated her with great respect and would invite her to participate with them in their morning yoga practices, which always began with a ritual invocation to Shiva by the passing around of a small clay pipe called a chillum, which was filled with cannabis. From one person to the next, the chillum would be passed. Everyone would inhale deeply, holding the sacred smoke in their lungs as long as possible. Only after the chillum had made several rounds would they begin to do their yoga asanas, and they told my wife that the ganja was what allowed them to feel their way so deeply into their practices.

Contemporary Indian commentators may attempt to explain away Shiva’s use of cannabis by suggesting that drinking bhang gave him more energy, but this is a specious and inadequate answer, most likely proposed by scholarly commentators who’ve rarely, if ever, smoked cannabis themselves. Cannabis, especially the purer strains of sativa, does not just give you energy. Cannabis wakes the unfelt body up. It powerfully stimulates awareness of the body as a field of minute tactile sensations—vibrating, shimmering, flowing, buzzing. It stimulates the current of the life force, which can be felt as waves of tactile sensations and energies spreading through the entire body. It shifts awareness away from the mind and redirects it back into the body. It exposes the resistance and tension of the somatophobic body and offers in its place the possibility of an alternative, highly embodied consciousness based on the conscious relaxation of those tensions.

If the path of the Buddha primarily follows along the stepping-stones of the mind on its way to freedom, the path of Shiva traverses a different route as it moves through the loamy soil of the cellular energies and feeling presence of the body. On every part of the body, down to the smallest cell—and perhaps even smaller, down even to the smallest subatomic levels of energy and matter—minute little ­pinprick blips of sensation can be felt to exist, and even though these sensations are unimaginably small and oscillating at incredibly rapid rates, they can still be distinctly felt as a mass or flow of vibrations. To start reexperiencing this literally sensational dimension of our consciousness, all we have to do is let go of our obsession with the thinking mind and turn our attention instead back to the feeling body.

Buddhism relaxes the body through calming the mind. The path of Shiva illuminates the mind through awakening and liberating the potent energies of the body. And, while this illumination and awakening are equally accessible to meditators exploring deeply body-oriented approaches to Buddhist practice, it is especially true for Shaivite practitioners who use cannabis to support and catalyze their practices. The Buddha’s path is about purification of mind and body. The practices of Shiva are about celebration—awakening, honoring, surrendering to, exulting in the feeling current of the life force that passes through the body. They’re about waking up the body’s sensations and dancing on the currents of its liberated energies, like a body surfer riding a wave in the ocean.

Shiva wants to wake the body up from its long slumber, viewing the awakened body as the direct doorway to the dimensions of embodied consciousness described in the Vedas. To awaken the body from its hibernation from feeling is to become ever more grounded in the sensory experience of the present moment. Thoughts jump to the future or retreat into the past, but the felt awareness of the body can only be experienced right now. And then right now again as we soon discover that the felt presence of the body, passing through what we call time, is more a phenomenon of flow than stasis. Shiva celebrates our miraculous participation in the pulsing current of organic life, which courses through every single moment, taking all of the natural world along with it on its journey from here to here. His practices can so ground you in dynamically felt presence that past and future, which can be known only as thoughts, momentarily disappear. In the chapters that follow, we’ll present specific practices that, catalyzed by cannabis, can guide us to an awakened celebration, rather than a habitual blockage, of the felt presence of sensations and the river of the life force.


Excerpted from Cannabis in Spiritual Practice by Will Johnson, published by Inner Traditions.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 03, 2018 6:04 am

I won't link to the Summit Lighthouse but here is one of their "ascended masters":

Fun Wey

The ascended master Fun Wey serves under the master Eriel in his retreat in Arizona. Fun Wey teaches the “fun way” to the ascension. He says, “The fun way of living is the God way of living. It is the abundant life for which the Christ came into manifestation in ye all.”[1]

Fun Wey began his evolution in the elemental kingdom, mastered certain disciplines and was transferred to the human kingdom, given a threefold flame and the opportunity to earn his immortality.

The master Eriel rescued Fun Wey, when, as an infant born to an old Chinese family, his life was threatened. Fun Wey attained his ascension from Eriel’s retreat after giving enthusiastic and illumined obedience to the master.

Serving on the third and sixth rays, Fun Wey radiates the qualities of joy and the desire to serve. He also works with the elemental beings. His radiation may be drawn through the melody of “In a Country Garden.”

Fun Wey tells us:

It was by no idle measure that the Father bestowed upon me the name Fun Wey, for indeed by obedience, chastity and love I found my way back to his heart under the tutelage of beloved Eriel. Precious friends of light, it was because I found the fun way to the ascension that the Father gave me this name, and so I come today to bring to you the knowledge and understanding of the meditations of my heart as I saw truly that the way back home was the way of delight in God’s Law.[2]
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 04, 2018 7:09 am

I Was God: And You Were A Figment Of My Imagination

By Laren Corrin September 2, 2018


Sixteen years ago I dusted myself off from several years of entanglement with the mental health system and left it all behind to redefine my life and myself. I had become ensnared in the mid-1990’s when I exposed the beginnings of a consciousness awakening mixed with unprocessed feelings of discovering I was a potential father without partnership with the mother. She told me on the phone after I had moved 5000 miles away for college that actually she really could get pregnant.

School counselors were my entry point to mental health engagement. Prior to the news of the pregnancy I had been a light one or two drink drinker and had smoked cannabis and a nicotine cigarette once each with no further draw to try either again. I had never made more than a couple dollars over minimum wage and was still too early in college with loans hanging over my head to be close to a professional career. It was a pretty simple math equation of financial life game over for me. At least the options I was aware of. The mother offered that she could take care of the child on her own and didn’t need my help. I could participate as much as I chose so the child would get to know who I was. She had a career path ready to take off that more than doubled my wage. I attempted to continue on living in the unknown.

I began to try cannabis more when offered, then LSD and mushrooms out in Hawaii where I was at school. I had been studying biology, chemistry and physics and was left wondering how solid reality and we really were when looked at from atomic building blocks of matter. I changed majors and began to study psychology. Sensation and Perception class focused my contemplation on how much the actual construction of the world takes place in our perception.

The drugs combined with my desire to know how life worked and what made a human broke down all past social conditioning of my individual self. I realized I was God. So was everyone else and I shared with anyone who would listen, but found no one who could understand or navigate the territory. “Loopy Laren,” one friend called me. As my experience was much clearer and more self-evident than the materialistic constructs I was raised with, I was convinced I was onto something. There was little internet to speak of then and no Google to find others who experienced life as I was beginning to, so I voyaged on my own as best I could. I transferred back to school in Maine to face life unfolding there with new eyes.

It took two years for a confirmation from paternity testing that I had a firstborn son. I began to roll cigarettes with a little cannabis at the tip before classes. I still got A’s and B’s, but couldn’t take the edge off the life stress. I hit up the school doctor for a Valium prescription, and then a psychiatrist for more Valium, which meant they insisted on Prozac to go with it at least. Valium felt nice for about two days until it was gone and Prozac left the edges of my mouth cracked from yawning, my body feeling amped up with additional stress, and my penis numbed from sensation so much that ejaculation was near impossible. In that time I went from trying one illicit substance to every one I could find, moving on from psychedelics to opioids and stimulants including heroin and crack cocaine.

Needless to say, rather than process my feelings and adjust my life course according to circumstance, I became too numb to feel and didn’t have a productive discussion of my life experience or emotions around it in mental health settings. I was not surprised. I was told in psychology classes that emotions were a laughed at not serious line of study and though behavior was in vogue for a while, it was now all about genetic predisposition and brain chemical imbalances.

Some people do a beach in Florida on school break, but that was just a little too vanilla for me. I combined psychedelic mushrooms, injectable Ativan, credit cards given so easily to college kids back then and a memorized phone number for United Airlines, which I dialed in the middle of the night. I desired to leave the frozen solid early Maine spring and see the hot oozing volcanic lava in Hawaii. This flowed into a 10-day, $10,000 crack cocaine and random spending spree. Forgetting the sage advice of a friend that what goes up must come down, I interrupted my spree to wander through the Kilauea lava fields in a drowsy drug withdrawal and eventually was met by U.S. Forest Rangers with guns at the ready. After a quick search of me and my belongings, the volcano growled a thunderous roar and low cracking that sounded as if the newly formed earth we were standing on was about to split open and swallow us whole. The rangers scurried back up to the plateau where their helicopter was idling as one yelled out “come quick if you want, or we’re leaving without you.” In a flash I abandoned the cave where I had been sleeping next to an active lava flow and joined them for a helicopter ride up to the station for interrogation. I passed with a small fine and continued on to receive traffic tickets at the airport after smoking crack while driving my rented Mustang pedal to the metal to catch a flight heading back home.

I was picked up in the Los Angeles LAX airport for my first hospitalization. I had kept my sister in the loop of my travel plans in case I went missing and she got concerned. After smoking more crack in the restroom, I was tapped on the shoulder by the police at the gate to board a changed-on-the-whim flight back to Hawaii before returning to Maine. I let the police know I was too busy to talk with them, as I needed to catch a flight. I turned back away from them. They tapped me on the shoulder again and let me know I was going with them. Friendly enough folk to a 6’2” white guy, and they apologetically kept suggesting they were treating me well. In a holding cell, awaiting my baggage, I swallowed a pill bottle full of random psychiatric meds I had traded with someone I met in Hawaii. After all, I didn’t want to pick up a drug charge if they searched me. On the way to the hospital for evaluation the officers didn’t appreciate me moving my cuffed hands from behind my back where it hurt to in front, but I repeatedly did it anyway as it was more comfortable and I could. I did it for the last time at the Harbor UCLA hospital intake area where I heard a staff member yell out “get the Haldol.”

Next thing I remember was being sucked back into my body. The sounds of static and sight of dots formed into beeping electronics, voices, and ceiling tiles. I soon met a psychiatrist near my own young 20’s age. She asked how I managed to get a Valium script and insisted that surely Prozac was the wrong prescription as my diagnosis should now be Bipolar and required different meds. There were many more DSM labels to come. Something about being in a coma reset myself and let me remember my intuition that all along knew no meds or illicit drugs were the answer. I let her know I wasn’t into their psychiatric meds, however the system was not yet done with me. Easy in, not so easy out.

I couldn’t find out how many hospitals I went to over the years as some lost all records of me being there, including Harbor UCLA. I don’t know how many involuntary hospitalizations I endured either. I adjusted to my new role leaving all hope of ever working again or completing my last semester at the university, as I was withdrawn from classes after that hospitalization. I lived on Social Security, Medicare, HUD housing assistance, food stamps, and a payee at the General Assistance office to dole out $30 each week in spending money. I pulled cigarette butts from the ash cans outside the emergency rooms that I frequented to lodge my complaints, and rolled the remaining tobacco into the nastiest cigarettes I ever smoked. I fulfilled the miserable role of permanently and totally disabled and carried out the suicidal thoughts and attempts that went with it. I knew from the get-go that the DSM disorders were just temporary made-up constructs to organize behavior and symptom patterns and no one really knew what the meds did, so I ditched all meds soon after each hospital release.

When I found an exit window to turn away from illicit drugs, I also tried to refuse the psychiatric meds at the treatment center. I was informed a few days after, while in withdrawal from the five years of benzodiazepine use, that I had to choose to take antipsychotics or be transferred to indefinite commitment in a state hospital. I had been up against that kind of threat before and knew from past experience they would just force medicate me to silence ways of thinking they deemed unacceptable. I wish I had been allowed more time to detox my body and mind without threat of a legalized gang attacking me, pulling my pants down, jamming a long pointy object in my ass, and squirting unwanted fluid into me.

I also had gotten jammed up in the awakening process in a sort of metaphysical solipsism or Drishti-Srishti Vada state of experiencing everything and everyone in the world as just a construction of my own consciousness. It had gotten so painfully lonely I was willing to attempt to keep living for a year, but if things didn’t turn around I was done. I pretended the psychiatrist really existed to submit myself and take the antipsychotic Seroquel, and of course several other medications.

After I left the treatment center, I refused a court offer of probation contingent on taking antipsychotics and fortunately my case was dismissed. I did not want legal precedent forcing me to take meds outside a hospital. I had been arrested before going to treatment when I asked to use a phone at a jail to call for help to get a dog out of the mud nearby in the bay, and I thought it inhumane that they said no. Intuitively, I still knew that meds and drugs were not necessary. I let my outpatient psychiatrist know I was going to get off all the meds, but would let him manage the elimination process. He thankfully agreed though it was a much longer three-year timetable than I would have designed.

In the process, a translation of a text written over 1600 years ago, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, almost fell off the library shelf at me. I finally knew that someone else sometime else had awakened in a similar way to me. Everything aligned with my experience except line 16 in section four about objects existing independent from being cognized by any single consciousness (Iyengar, 19931). At least I was not alone in experience and awareness completely.


Continues: https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/09/go ... agination/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 08, 2018 11:27 am

Process Oriented Approaches to Altered and Extreme States of Consciousness

Ron Unger, LCSW

When John Herold went to see a Process Work counselor, they talked about how John’s experience of extreme states had been too intense and had been disruptive in his life, and had led to hospitalization, something that John wanted to avoid in the future. But they also talked about how these states had value. The counselor then compared John’s experience with drinking an entire bottle of Tabasco sauce all at once. Why not instead, the counselor suggested, “try being just a little psychotic all the time?”


...“Dreamland” for example can be seen as a level of reality, or a way of being in touch with an aspect of reality. In process work, “dreaming” is not just something we do at night, but something that comes up in body sensations and symptoms, in fantasies, in visions and voices, etc. These experiences are “not real” from the perspective of consensus reality, but are completely real on their own terms.

Another level of reality is that of “essence”: this relates to the non-dual aspect of reality. At this level we can experience that we are all one consciousness, that there is no observer separate from the observed, and that all of reality can be experienced as right here right now.

This relates to my experience, as many of the most powerful events that shaped me did not take place in “consensus reality.”

One such event occurred when I was 17 years old, when I took LSD for the first time. I had the experience of going to another dimension, where I met some beings who told me I did not have to continue to be who I had been, that I could be a completely new person. This sounded great to me, because I did not like my self up to that point — it was too much shaped by fear, defined by people who had abused me. So I went with the new identity!

For the next 15 years or so, I continued to see my origin as more related to that “dreamland” event of becoming a new being, than it was to my “consensus reality” experience of growing up with abuse. I also focused very much on “essence level” reality, as that gave me a point of origin quite other from my childhood, and helped me continue to escape from feeling vulnerable.

This continued until various events, combined with my increasing awareness of the costs of denying my basic human vulnerability, pushed me to face my past and the dimensions of experience that I had disowned. This was at first shocking and very disruptive, and it seemed I was at risk of losing my sense of safety and being stuck in the trauma that I had previously avoided — at least until I got help in integrating from some competent therapists, one of whom had training in process work.

In Process Work, everyone is understood to have a “primary process” or a kind of functioning with which they identify, and also the possibility of having a “secondary process” which may disturb, or offer an alternative to, the primary process. When the contrast between the primary and secondary process is very sharp, there is the possibility of something they call a “process inversion” in which the two switch, and what was the person’s primary process now seems to be completely missing.

From this point of view, what happened to me when I was 17 was that I crossed over from what had been a primary process highly affected by trauma and abuse, to a secondary process of being someone who was fresh and unaffected by abuse. This was a “process inversion” because my past identity became missing, and I could not or would not relate to the person I had been. Turning to face my childhood trauma 15 years later threatened me with another such inversion, but after some rocky times I found ways to become more fluid and able to draw from both identities: the one who had been crushed by abuse, and the one who had never been touched by it.


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https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/09/pr ... me-states/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Sep 09, 2018 10:43 pm

My research and observation has convinced me that PCP is a toxic substance that should NEVER be used!!! In the late 1960's and the early 1970's large quantities of ersatz "mescaline" tablets were manufactured and sold in Berkeley, California by viciously irresponsible criminals. Instead of mescaline, these tablets contained a uneven mixture of chemicals that included LSD and PCP. The greedy amateur chemists who concocted these tablets knew that LSD, especially when contaminated with manufacturing byproducts, can make people physically uncomfortable, especially in the initial stages of the trip. Adding PCP, which, in low doses taken by mouth, can have a tranquilizing effect, was thought to make the trip "smoother". Dealers found that people were frequently willing to pay more for what they were told was mescaline than for what they were told was LSD. Some ignorant and/or naive users were reported to have taken too many tablets and suffered a PCP overdose.

I do not understand what the writer of the article means by "violently hallucinating". Perhaps he meant the person was violent AND the person was hallucinating? And as for "singing naked", well, most people have done so while taking a shower. Surely, singing is usually a sign that a person is happy! Being naked in a supermarket, however, can cause people with guns to handcuff you and lock you up. I very strongly suspect that the writer of the article knew very little about hallucinogens or schizophrenia, and even less about how the two might possibly be related... )





("As we sort through incoming Ask Erowid questions and reader- submitted Experience Reports, some myths and misunderstandings stand out as persistent and widespread.

One of these myths, which we ourselves heard when we were teens in the 1980s, is that "taking LSD seven times makes you legally insane."

The proposed number of times varies but is usually under ten.
 Unfortunately, it is difficult to narrow down the earliest date of this word-of-mouth myth. Informal surveys of some of the educated subculture reveal that it was around by the early 1970s and was widespread by 1980."

---from Erowid.org, 2003.)





I was asked by someone in the "BERKELEY" group on Flickr: "I don't understand what your images have to do with Berkeley?"

Here is my reply:
Myron J. Stolaroff, the former Ampex executive, noted in 1999 that LSD was the most important invention of the last 1,000 years. No intelligent well-informed person would disagree. Berkeley was world headquarters for LSD, a substance which the government conservatively estimates more than 90 million people have taken. (In 1993 a ranking DEA official, Gene Haislip, stated that the entire global supply was controlled by a group of approximately 100 people in the San Francisco Bay Area.) I was present when much LSD was delivered to the very tiny Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley. A manager of the Buttercup was Kary Mullis, the inventor of the ultra-important polymerase chain reaction DNA test. Mullis famously attributes his invention to the fact that he took LSD in Berkeley. A waitress at the Buttercup was Suze Orman, who went on to become the bestselling financial author. She was frequently annoyed at the 2 customers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were poor and tried to get free coffee. When asked how Apple got the jump on IBM, Jobs famously said "Maybe they didn't take enough acid." (Or check out the cover story in FORTUNE magazine, "The Edison of the Internet", about long-hair Bill Joy and the U.C. Berkeley computer group.) A google search I just did shows 26,200 results for the quote "There are 2 major products that come out of Berkeley--LSD and UNIX." There was a reason the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, labeled former Berkeley resident Timothy Leary "the most dangerous man in America". The reason, of course, was Leary's advocacy of LSD. (I think Leary had an amazing brain. Some of what he wrote was utterly brilliant. His life, however, was apparently such an intense game-playing ego-circus that we may never truly know if he worked for [or cared about] anybody other than "TIM LEARY". Did Leary associate with persons linked to the CIA and other intelligence agencies? Yes, of course! So did I. There were more than a few spooks in the Berkeley LSD scene, and since you never knew who they were, the possibility of association with them was absolutely unavoidable. I did my best to have NO contact with Tim. I did not want to get arrested or murdered. I was friends with his son, Jack, who supplied quantities of crystalline LSD. [It was the only kind I have ever taken that caused me to hallucinate actual paisley patterns!] More than once, Jack said to me, with a great deal of emotion, "My father is a liar!") In the words of a popular song from that time ("San Francisco [be sure to wear some flowers in your hair]" by Scott Mckenzie, 1967): "ALL ACROSS THE NATION, SUCH A STRANGE VIBRATION"...




("Just after the election of John Kennedy to the presidency, a pediatrician of English extraction working in New York City wrote the pharmaceutical company Sandoz on New York Hospital letterhead requesting a gram of LSD. A package came by return mail to Dr. John Beresford, with a bill for $285..."

---Peter Stafford, in PSYCHEDELICS ENCYCLOPEDIA)


Among the many people who tripped on LSD from that gram were Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Paul Krassner, Charles Mingus, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert [Ram Dass], Ralph Metzner, and Alan Watts.


http://thewordsofjdyf333.blogspot.com/2 ... hy_32.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 10, 2018 9:14 pm

THE HIGH PRIEST AND THE GREAT BEAST: TIMOTHY LEARY’S BELIEF THAT HE WAS A ‘CONTINUATION’ OF ALEISTER CROWLEY

Image

A year after their trip at Bou Saada, Leary and Brian discovered that, in 1909, Aleister Crowley and the poet Victor Neuberg conducted a magical ceremony at that exact same riverbed in the dunes outside Bou Saada where they had taken LSD. Crowley and Neuberg summoned demons by invoking nineteen ‘calls’ that had originated with Doctor John Dee and Edward Kelly. Enochian magic was integral to Crowley’s magical system, and it was Dee and Kelly’s angelic script that Crowley was invoking at Bou Saada.

The work took a few weeks as they invoked one ‘key’ of the manuscript a day, bidding a string of angels and demons to appear inside a magical triangle marked in the sand. Mescaline was used, as was sexual magic, with Neuberg at one point buggering Crowley at an altar in a makeshift stone circle and dedicating the act to the god Pan. When the day came to invoke Choronzon, the demon of chaos and the abyss, Crowley did not remain outside the magic triangle. Instead he deliberately sat inside it.

The pair would have made quite a sight as they performed their strange works amongst the shifting Saharan dunes. Crowley was dressed in a long black hooded robe with a revolver around his waist. Neuberg, with two tufts of dyed red hair twisted into horns, sat watching in a magic circle created for his own protection, and made notes. Crowley instructed Neuberg that, whatever happened, he must resist any attempt from the demon to be released. The invocation was completed, three pigeons were sacrificed and, according to Neuberg and Crowley’s accounts, Choronzon appeared. The demon possessed Crowley and began to taunt Neuberg, pleading to be released. They later claimed that Crowley/Choronzon began to change shape, appearing to Neuberg in a string of forms including an old lover and a snake with a human head. It begged the poet for a drink of water and promised that it would sit at his feet and obey him if it was freed. With Neuberg distracted by the dazzling images materialising before his eyes, the demon gradually dribbled the fine sand on the magic circle, slowly erasing it. Then the entity that possessed Crowley’s body rushed at Neuberg and, according to The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, “flung him to the earth and tried to tear out his throat with froth-covered fangs.” Fortunately, Neuberg had been armed with a consecrated magical dagger and managed to fend the beast off. Choronzon was banished, leaving Crowley lying naked in the sand. With the ceremony over, the magic circle and triangle were erased and a fire was lit to purify the place.

Leary and Barritt were astounded when they discovered this, a year after their desert trip. That they had been at exactly the same riverbed was coincidence enough, but the cowled figure inside a dust devil that Barritt had ‘seen’ matched Crowley’s description of his possessed self. Crowley, who had been wearing a black hooded robe, described the demon possessing him as being a coagulation of forms that “swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps like dust devils”. The fact that he had been using a manuscript of the work of Dr. John Dee, which had also appeared to Barritt, pushed the incident way beyond coincidence.

There were many similarities between Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley, and this had not gone unnoticed at the time. Andy Warhol, for example, had commented on it. They had both come from repressive middle class backgrounds, and both rejected those values to found liberated and hedonistic religious sects. They both put great value on sex and drugs, and there are strong parallels between Leary’s Millbrook commune and Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema on Sicily. Crowley was dubbed the ‘wickedest man in the world’ during his lifetime, while Leary was called “the most dangerous man in America” by President Nixon. Crowley’s commandment ‘Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law’ has similar libertine values to the commandments of the League of Spiritual Development, a “personal religion” of Leary’s invention, although Leary’s were softened to disallow controlling others. Both wrote re-interpretations of the Tao Te Ching. This is an indicator of the similar size of their egos, as the Tao Te Ching is arguably one of the most complete pieces of text ever written, and there are few who believe that they can improve on it. As Robert Anton Wilson demonstrated in Cosmic Trigger, there are many parallels between the “Starseed Transmissions”, the information received during Leary’s experiments with channelling whilst in Folsom Prison, and Crowley’s Book of The Law. There are also parallels between the decline of each man’s life during their later years, and on the people, such as John Lennon, whom they have both influenced. They both had wives named Rosemary.

Leary started to think of himself as a ‘continuation’ of Crowley, as opposed to a ‘reincarnation’ as it is normally understood. There were strong parallels between Dee and Kelly, Crowley and Neuberg, and Leary and Barritt, and Leary saw himself as part of a line of sorcerers that reoccurred throughout history. This was something that Crowley appeared to be aware of, although he believed that he was a reincarnation of Kelly, rather than Dee. (From what we know of Crowley, it is not surprising that he would wish to associate himself with the one considered to be the most evil!)

Leary believed that he was playing out a ‘script’ for a regular transformative current that repeated itself throughout time. These ‘scripts’ existed in a similar manner to a song. A song only exists in time, not space, but it still exists enough for patterns, harmony and meaning to be detectable. Indeed, ‘time’ was the key here, or rather the change in the qualities of time that could be detected under LSD. There were moments during a trip, Leary believed, that his awareness outgrew the normal, unstopping, linear flow of time. After all, just as a two-dimensional drawing can only be properly observed from three-dimensions, so time, the fourth dimension, should only really make sense from a fifth dimension or higher. The expanded awareness of LSD seemed, on occasions, to give just such a higher perspective. From this point otherwise invisible patterns and currents in history became apparent.

Leary’s belief that his awareness had gone beyond the linear flow of time is actually not as absurd as it might seem at first glance. There is a growing consensus amongst scientists that, while time itself is real, the perceived onward march of time is an illusion. As Einstein once famously wrote to a friend, “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.” Writing in The Scientific American (Vol. 15 No. 3 2005, p82) Paul Davies concludes that, “The passage of time is probably an illusion. Consciousness may involve thermodynamic or quantum processes that lend the impression of living moment to moment.” He then goes on to note that, “It is possible to imagine drugs that could suspend the subject’s impression that time is passing.”

During this period Leary was writing a book about his jail break called It’s About Time, and he would later end his autobiography with the exact same words. The book was later renamed in a direct homage to Crowley; it was published under the name Confessions of a Hope Fiend, a title chosen to consciously reference Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend and Confessions of Aleister Crowley.

Shortly afterwards Leary was kidnapped at gunpoint in Afghanistan, brought back to America and placed in solitary confinement in Folsom prison. After making a deal with the FBI that destroyed his reputation amongst many of his hippy followers, he became an evangelist of personal computers and the Internet. He died of cancer on May 31st 1996.

Read more: https://www.dailygrail.com/2018/08/the- ... r-crowley/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 14, 2018 8:03 am

LSD Lab In Color

San Francisco Bay Area LSD lab used by William Leonard Pickard, 1988. The narc in the protective bodysuit (upper central part of image) was not careful enough and got so intoxicated on LSD dust that he had to be rushed to a hospital, saying that everything had turned into a "cartoon".


("Pickard faced 20 years in prison if convicted in 1988, but according to a court affidavit, charges were dropped because he was an informant."

---quote from an article about William Leonard Pickard, "Past director of UCLA drug policy program convicted of running LSD lab" by Brad Greenberg. The article was published in the Daily Bruin, University of California, Los Angeles, on 4.3. 2003, and was about Pickard's later arrest and conviction on LSD charges including those related to another LSD lab that was being set up in a converted missile silo in Kansas. In the trial that occurred after Pickard's final arrest in October 2000, the authorities alleged that at one point he had been producing approximately 2.2 pounds of pure LSD [enough to make between 10 to 20 million doses] every 5 weeks.)


(Waldron Voorhees, also known as "Captain Clearlight", bragged that he was the "LSD King" because he "made 250 million" doses of LSD. After his 1992 LSD arrest, Voorhees betrayed his co-defendants by officially admitting he was guilty and agreed to help the DEA. "Voorhees and his attorney agreed for Voorhees to be wired for sound and walk through the Upper Haight to attract street dealers."

---quotes from an article by Jack Boulware, San Francisco Weekly, 8.21. 1996.)


("...intelligence is more important than elimination."

---Nazi counterespionage officer H. J. Giskes, in his 1949 book "London Calling North Pole", explaining why the Nazis sometimes secretly helped British flyers escape from Nazi-occupied countries. These British flyers were completely unaware that that their journeys to freedom were orchestrated by the Nazis. Giskes was quoted by former U.S. Director of Central Intelligence (de facto head of the CIA) Allen Dulles in a book Dulles edited, "Great True Spy Stories", published by Harper & Row in 1968.


Please click here to read my "autobiography":
http://www.thewordsofjdyf333.blogspot.com/





The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), a Federal agency, conducts "buy/bust" operations, where its agents buy illicit drugs from a dealer and then immediately arrest the dealer. Sometimes the agents do a "sell/bust" operation where they sell drugs to a person and then immediately arrest the person. Occasionally the agents will conduct a "buy/let go" operation and at a later date arrest the dealer. What is not commonly known to the public, however, is that the DEA (and other law enforcement groups) also do "sell/let go" operations where, to establish the "credibility" of their undercover agents to a group of drug dealers, they sell a dealer drugs and do not attempt to arrest the dealer until some future date, frequently after the dealer has re-sold to the community the drugs the police provided him...


("As the U.S. Supreme Court said in Russell, supra:

'The illicit manufacture of drugs is not a sporadic, isolated criminal incident, but a continuing, though illegal, business enterprise. In order to obtain convictions for illegally manufacturing drugs, the gathering of evidence of past unlawful conduct frequently proves to be an all but impossible task. Thus in drug-related offenses law enforcement personnel have turned to one of the only practicable means of detection: the infiltration of drug rings and a limited participation in their unlawful present practices. Such infiltration is a recognized and permissible means of investigation; if that be so, then the supply of some item of value that the drug ring requires must, as a general rule, also be permissible. For an agent will not be taken into the confidence of the illegal entrepreneurs unless he has something of value to offer them. Law enforcement tactics such as this can hardly be said to violate "fundamental fairness" or be " shocking to the universal sense of justice" . . . .'"


Excerpted from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdyf333/1 ... 749954606/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 18, 2018 9:07 am

Elon Musk Does a Lot More than Smoke Weed. I Know, I Sold Him LSD.

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Elon Musk inhaling a space blunt, by u/BlackSendok9 on Reddit


“Were you able to send those documents I asked for?”

The message appeared against the fuzzy blue screen on my rickety phone — the kind that slides apart to reveal the keypad.

Genius billionaire Elon Musk had improvised a code word, “documents,” to disguise why he was texting an underemployed student in their early twenties at a second-rate hippie college.

Thankfully, my rarely-sober brain could keep up, and between binging episodes of Battlestar Galactica, I wrote back to confirm what I am now telling you all: I sold Elon Musk a half sheet of blotter LSD, along with a couple dozen microdots and a vial of liquid acid of indeterminate strength. (And a bit of ecstasy, if my memory serves.)

While I never knew Elon Musk other than through texts and a single phone call, I had become close to people in his inner circle before the opportunity arose to sell him banned substances. His friends in my city constituted a bubble of nouveau-riche tech entrepreneurs, artists, foodies, and Burning Man acolytes.

I remember one big rich-people party where Musk was present, the only time I think we were ever in physical proximity; I spent the evening getting incredibly stoned in a back room off a Volcano vaporizer with an esteemed local chef I’d previously mistaken for a square. I wish I could say more about my experiences with these people, but it’s amazing I remember anything more than doing whip-its, riding my bike, and weird meditation classes.

My main Musk connection, who had been close to him for years, described his partying and drug-use habits to me vividly: he had been using psychedelics regularly for years, with little sign of letting up — and throwing the occasional wild drug party. This is where my services came into play.

I had been selling weed and other mind-altering substances for a few years, to dozens of customers, mostly small-time. Toward the end of my drug-dealing career I had upgraded to bulk sales worth thousands of dollars apiece. When this mutual friend let Musk know I was sitting on an ample stash of psychedelics, he generously chose me as his supplier. My friend encouraged me to set whatever price I wanted; Elon wouldn’t question it. I made about three times what I would have selling to anyone else.

Over the decade since, this one-time exchange with a billionaire has meant little to me other than being a funny anecdote to gain clout at a party, or try to impress a date. But, after witnessing the recent backlash against Musk for smoking weed on live TV, I am realizing it could mean a lot more to some people:

Image


For one thing, what I know about Elon Musk reflects an old truth: The rich get to live under an entirely different set of rules than the rest of us. From supposedly frowned-upon lifestyle activities such as drug use, to the harassment and abuse being addressed by the #MeToo movement and the abuse of children by Catholic priests, rich white men in particular have too often been able to get away with whatever they want.

Shortly after my interaction with Musk, one of my own suppliers received two years’ probation for getting caught with an amount of mushrooms worth less than the package of acid I had mailed to the CEO of Tesla. This, along with other pressures, led me to stop my own legally risky behavior. Something told me guys like Musk wouldn’t pay for my defense lawyer if the FBI kicked in the door to my efficiency apartment.

People I grew up with have been circulating in and out of prison their whole lives over what started as an arrest for a single joint. When I was dealing, it wasn’t unusual to hear about people receiving long sentences for what we were doing, and that hasn’t changed today. Some enthusiasts, including Tim Tyler and Robert Riley, have been sentenced to life without parole for nothing other than being caught three times with LSD.


Continues: https://medium.com/@tarttoter/elon-musk ... 04288ae1b/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 18, 2018 10:34 am

After 26 years in prison for LSD, and clemency from Obama, Timothy Tyler is a free man

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Just over two years ago, Timothy L. Tyler was granted the chance of a lifetime when President Barack Obama commuted his double-life prison sentence. Tyler was arrested in 1992 and convicted in 1994 for selling LSD and cannabis to a police informant.

Despite Obama’s action in August 2016, Tyler was not released from federal prison for another two years, until May 29, 2018. Even after leaving prison, he did not regain full freedom. He spent time in Las Vegas, Nevada first in a halfway house and then on home confinement.

Exactly two years later on Thursday, August 30, 2018, Tyler was released from home confinement. Twenty-six years after his arrest in 1992, he is a free man.

In an exclusive Psymposia interview, Tyler recounted the day that he first received the news. He was ordered to go to an office at 2:00PM, which was unusual. As he was ushered into the office, the guard let him through the door without asking him why he was there—also unusual.

In the waiting room Tyler met two other inmates. No one knew why they were there, but they learned they had each made a clemency petition: could this be the moment they had waited for all these years?

The first man was called into a separate room to receive a telephone call. When he left shortly after, he simply flashed the other two men a thumbs up.

Finally, Tyler took his call. It was from Professor J.P. “Sandy” Ogilvy, a law professor at the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ogilvy had handled his clemency petition.

“Timothy, I’ve got some good news for you,” Ogilvy said. “The U.S. Pardon Attorney decided to give your clemency petition to The President of the United States and he signed it. He gave you a two year release date, with a requirement that you enroll in a residential drug abuse program (RDAP). You no longer have a life sentence.”

“I was trying to hold everything back to not break down and cry,” Tyler said of that moment. “Even the woman who handed me the phone, I almost wanted to hug her—she looked like she was gonna cry.”

Tyler left the office in a daze. When he returned to his quarters, he called his sister, Carrie, who didn’t answer. He then called his mother, Lura, and gave her the incredible news. She was so shocked she couldn’t understand what he was saying. “I felt like all the negativity she had in her life for the last twenty-six years, all the depression, just lifted out of her, when she realized that I was going to come home.”

Tyler’s gift is one too many prisoners will never know of–among them his late father, Timothy Varnum Tyler, who was also implicated in his son’s drug charges. The junior Tyler refused a plea deal to avoid testifying against his father, but T.V. Tyler received ten years anyway. He died in prison at age 53, with eighteen months remaining on his sentence.

Tyler lived out the remaining two years of his sentence as a new man. “When I got a release date, I finally had a date to look forward to for the first time,” he said. “I now understand how it feels for people that come in knowing they’ll be let out in five years, to know that a day will come when they’ll be let out.”

Image
Timothy and his sister Carrie after release on August 30, 2018


https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/timo ... obama-lsd/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 19, 2018 9:53 pm

Seeing the Invisible: Art and the Occult

Gary Lachman

A more successful, at least at first, occult artist was the Londoner Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), who burst on the English art scene as an enfant terrible of the Edwardians, having received acclaim at seventeen in 1903 as the youngest ever exhibitor at the Royal Academy. Yet Spare’s celebrity was soon overshadowed by his interest in the occult, magic, and strange, liminal states of consciousness, and he quickly slipped into obscurity.[15] He developed an art of Beardsleyesque delicacy and magical power, creating an original system of sigils and occult signs, aimed at contacting other planes. Among his many occult influences was witchcraft, a muse he shared with the Australian painter Rosaleen Norton (1917-1979), whose pagan, demonic canvases are often similar to Spare’s.

Spare was for a short time an associate of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) , mentioned earlier, the most notorious magician of the twentieth century, whose ideas influenced Norton and practically every occult artist that followed. Crowley himself painted, and in recent years his crude, disturbing work – like Spare and Norton, Crowley incorporates much transgressive sex in his occultism – has garnered much attention and been exhibited widely.[16] And with Crowley we enter a realm of occult art in which the distinction between magic and art, ritual and performance, always flexible, becomes practically non-existent, an in-between sphere known as “occulture.”

The roots of occulture, like that of most art movements, reach back in various directions, but we can say that one sure source for it was the remarkable resurgence of widespread popular occult interest that made up the “occult revival of the 1960s.” World War I had put an end to fin-de-siècle occultism. Interest in spirituality and the occult rose again in the post-war years and we can even see the 1920s as a kind of ‘golden age of modern esotericism,’ with many of its major figures all operating at the same time. And, as I briefly mentioned, Surrealism had more than a passing interest in the occult, André Breton himself being especially fascinated by the Tarot. But by the ‘dirty thirties’ and World War II, attention had turned elsewhere.

Yet by the late 1950s, interest in magic, witchcraft, the paranormal, and especially UFOs, began to spread. The Beat poets of San Francisco and New York had discovered the wisdom of the East, in the form of Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the novels of Hermann Hesse. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider sent many off on existential quests. And in 1960, a book appeared in France that sparked an international magical revival. The Morning of the Magicians was a bestseller in France, and repeated its success in its English and other translations. Devoted to alchemy, ancient civilizations, extra-terrestrials , occult Nazis, mutants, and dozens of other strange ideas, in the Paris of Jean Paul Sartre and l’engagement it was as if a flying saucer had landed at the Café Deux Magots. A flood of books, films, television shows, and comic books, all riding on the occult wave dominated the popular culture of the time. By the middle of the decade, ideas that had been of interest to only a fringe segment of society, were now being embraced by the most famous people in the world, the Beatles. The rise in popularity of mind-altering substances like cannabis, magic mushrooms, and most influentially, LSD, seemed to confirm that a strange shift had happened, a return to ancient wisdom, smack in the middle of the modern age. It seemed that as man put his footprint on the moon, a new age of harmony and understanding was beginning on earth.

Yet by the early 1970s, that vision had faded and the dream dissolved. A grimmer sensibility settled in, a harder take on reality, a blacker shade of dark, that was reflected in popular culture. This was beginning of what we can call “dark rock,” the occult inspired current of heavy metal, and the more sophisticated enchantments of artists like David Bowie, who, like others, sought a golden dawn. And it was out of this in-between world, where art and magic meet, that occulture was born.

Allegedly coined by the performance artist/occultist Genesis P-Orridge in the 1980s, and associated with the high randomness of “chaos magick,” the portmanteau “occulture” gained academic credibility in 2004 when Professor Christopher Partridge defined it as a concern with “hidden, rejected and oppositional beliefs and practices associated with esotericism, theosophy, mysticism, New Age, Paganism,” and other ideas belonging to the “occult subculture.”[17] This elucidating mouthful reminds us that an academic discovery of the occult – or rediscovery, as many pre-Enlightenment scholars were well acquainted with it – coincides with its recent artistic reassessment. This has led to scholars, artists, and practitioners rubbing magical elbows at such events as the conference on “The Occult and the Humanities” held in 2013 by the art department of New York University and which featured artists, mages, and academics deliberating on the place of the occult in today’s culture.[18]

As you might expect, occulture covers a wide spectrum, ranging from the diaphanous watercolours of the contemporary Swedish artist Fredrik Söderberg, to the more aggressive displays of the Swiss mixed-media artist Fabian Marti.[19] It’s roots lie in earlier occult artists such as the Crowleyan filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and the equally Crowleyan actress and painter Marjorie Cameron (1922-1995) , in the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs Jr. (1914-1997) and Bryon Gysin (1916-1986), the magical cinema of Alejandro Jodorowksy and the dark “roccult and roll” of Orridge’s Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth and similar acts.[20] Like most esoteric terms, occulture is open for multiple interpretation, and we should not expect it to sit quietly with any single one. According to the “subcultural entrepreneur” Carl Abrahamsson, we should see occulture as a “general term for anything cultural yet decidedly occult/spiritual,” a brief that certainly covers a lot of ground, and allows artists to explore something other than their deadpan apathy –as postmodernism demands – and gives occultists a new way to look at their interests.[21]

If nothing else, occulture has stirred up a lot of action, at least in the English speaking world, from lavishly produced publications such as Fulgur Esoterica’s Abraxas: International Journal for Esoteric Studies, Abrahamsson’s Fenris Wolf, Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor Journal, and William Kiesel’s Clavis: Journal of Occult Art, Letters, and Experience, to collectable texts from Scarlet Imprint, Jerusalem Press, and the Ouroboros Press. And there are the conferences, seminars, symposia, book launches, lectures, exhibitions and events, much like this one, that proliferate like errant spirits, let loose by some sorcerer’s apprentice. For something unseen, it seems pretty clear that the occult, at least in the art world, is getting a lot of attention.


https://garylachman.co.uk/2018/09/18/se ... he-occult/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 22, 2018 9:11 am

Fred Turner: The Multimedia “Surround” and the Forces of Fascism

“I THOUGHT THE COLD WAR WAS A BLACK-AND-WHITE WORLD AND THEN EVERYTHING TURNED INTO TECHNICOLOR HIPPIES. THAT TURNED OUT NOT TO BE TRUE.” -FRED TURNER

Fred Turner had just finished a Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory when he moved to San Diego in 1996. He had seen technology used as a tool of war, and he thought that “hippies were against technology — computers especially.” Then he saw a copy of Wired.

“It was all psychedelic colors, a big picture of ‘Whole Earth’ on the front and daisies. All this iconography I recognized from the counterculture in the 1960s.” In fact, he learned that countercultural dreams of shared consciousness had found a natural home in the computer world, where cyberspace was seen as a new electronic frontier. Former “communalists” had found new hope in “virtual communities.”

“I thought the Cold War was a black-and-white world and then everything turned into technicolor hippies. That turned out not to be true,” said Turner, a former journalist and now an intellectual historian at an important moment in our history. “I started reading my way into the 1940s and 1950s. I began to see a much more radical period than I ever knew about. I began to see a very direct protest against mass media and mass culture.” The result was The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.

With the rise of fascism in the 1930s, people worried about how mass thinking and mass media worked together, focusing our attention on a single media point and a single magnetic leader – thus feeding our longings for control, leadership, and submission. The antidote? “The notion that has run through 30, 40, 50 years of media theory, is that you have to decentralize ownership, decentralize media technologies, give everybody a microphone, and suddenly we will all be in a free space. That turns out not to be the case.”

Our multi-sourced multimedia “surround” has been mass marketed for us in a dispersed and globalized media environment, infiltrating even our attempts to create such “free” spaces. “I’ve done a lot of work at Burning Man, and that’s a very Dionysian place, in which the ecstatic impulse to dance naked in the desert and build giant bonfires meshes very nicely with high ticket prices, the transportation system, and the politics of personal display that also animate Facebook.”

Our politics, too, have been turned upside down by media dispersal – especially by Donald Trump. “He becomes the embodied voice of grievance, and that’s what Adolf Hitler was. He speaks that grievance into Twitter, which is a hyper-personalized medium. It then gets amplified by a whole series of other media, which interact in the ecosystem that is decentralized and yet, ironically, because it is decentralized, tends to be an ever larger megaphone for the very charismatic forces that decentralization was meant to combat.”

“OUR DEMOCRATIC SURROUND IS SO SATURATED WITH IMAGES AND VOICES – EVEN MORE WITH TWITTER. AND ALL THE CHATTER IS ONE OF THE UNINTENDED WARS ON THINKING.” -ROBERT HARRISON

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 24, 2018 10:18 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 26, 2018 8:16 am

FATHER YOD: WAR HERO, BANK ROBBER, POLYGAMIST CULT LEADER AND PSYCHEDELIC RECORDING ARTIST!

Three alleged bank jobs, three successful restaurants (the Aware Inn and Old World in Hollywood, and the Discovery Inn in Topanga) and three sons later, Jim was bored with his money and marriage. He began drinking heavily and cheated on Elaine until his affair with TV actress Jean Ingram, in 1963, ended with Jim’s killing of Ingram’s jealous husband with two chops to the neck and a bullet in the head. Jim was freed after three months once it was determined that he had acted in self-defense. Oddly, Jim had killed another man in self-defense, two years prior to killing Ingram’s husband, in an unrelated altercation with an angry neighbor over a pit bull.

Jim’s brief marriage to his third wife, a 19-year old French hippie named Dora, led him through his dark night of the soul, one acid trip at a time. Hopped up on a steady diet of black beauties and booze, Jim emptied money from the register at the Old World and bought a purple Rolls Royce. His erratic behavior prompted his investors to cut him out of his own restaurant and Dora to beat a hasty retreat. On April 1, 1969, Jim opened The Source and became a devotee of shifty customs agent turned Kundalini yoga teacher, Yogi Bhajan, in an effort to sober up and turn his life around.

At this time, Jim began pursuing another 19-year old, named , who danced at the Whisky a Go-Go and partied with self-proclaimed son of Aleister Crowley, and his girlfriend, Diane Stewart. One night, Jim spotted Robin hitchhiking to her friend Sharon Tate’s house and invited her once more to come with him to one of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini yoga classes at his 3HO ashram. She reluctantly accepted his invitation and the two stayed up all night talking about spirit and getting to know each other. The next morning, Robin learned the shocking news of Sharon Tate’s grisly murder and took that as a sign to follow a new path with Jim Baker. The two were wed after three months of Kabbalah study at the B.O.T.A. school in a ceremony performed by Ann Davies.


https://pleasekillme.com/father-yod/
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