by Username » Thu Jan 03, 2008 3:08 pm
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Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft
Book Three: The Manson Secret
By Peter Levenda
pgs. 391-399
Grof in his writings about this time (1973, when he joined Esalen) is extremely prescient about the psychological and spiritual value of the LSD experience. Like Koestler, he is a European Communist who has defected to the decadent West and discovered the Soul in the process. What is more important, he bases his conclusions on more than 4,000 LSD experiments, a huge database that surrenders some interesting data.
In 1973, he published an article entitled “LSD and the Cosmic Game: Outline of Psychedelic Cosmology and Ontology” in the Journal for the Study of Consciousness. In this article, he states that he had “personally conducted over 3000 psychedelic sessions” since 1954, when the first shipment of LSD arrived in Prague from Sandoz Pharmaceutical. He also had “access to records from over 1800 sessions run by several of my colleagues in Europe and in the United States.” More importantly, he goes on to state,
“The majority of subjects in these sessions were patients with a wide variety of emotional disorders, such as severe psychoneuroses, psychosomatic diseases, borderline psychoses and various forms of schizophrenia, sexual deviations, alcoholism and narcotic drug addiction.”
This is in parallel with the US governments’s own practice in the 1950s of testing LSD on prisoners–usually violent offenders and sexual psychopaths–and patients in mental institutions. Dosages ranged from 10 to 250 micrograms of LSD 9in Prague) and from 300 to 500 micrograms at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center; in the latter case, Grof was using the LSD in an atmosphere conducive to “healthy” spiritual and psychological states, the “set and setting” approach. In Prague, however, the approach was rather more clinical. His report is based on both the Prague and the Maryland research.
He talks about the current (1973) state of LSD use in the United States, when it was largely a phenomenon of the young, anti-war crowd so perfectly exemplified by Leary and others:
“Many hundreds of thousands of persons in the United States alone have been involved in unsupervised experimentation with psychedelic substances...many of them are repeatedly confronted with the experiences and insights described in this paper. Experiential sequences of this kind can have an enduring effect on the world-view of the psychedelic drug users, their life philosophy, and basic system of values.”
This is an interesting and ambiguous statement. He begins by speaking about unsupervised experimentation (which he clearly dislikes) and then ends by linking that to an”enduring effect” on the world-view, philosophy and values of the users. One wonders if the effect is to be understood as positive, or negative? One also wonders if the LSD experimentation undertaken by the military and the CIA falls under the category of “supervised” or “unsupervised,” since the military and intelligence applications would not have been designed to elevate the mind or spirit of the subject, but to break down his or her psyche and make it more malleable to the controllers.
Grof continues by linking the insights obtained by LSD users to the sacred scriptures of the Hindus, the Vedas, which—as we have seen—had some very interesting things to say about the nature of Evil, God and the Devil. He then goes further to associate LSD insights with the new, post-Newtonian physics of Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Niels Bohr, eventually culminating in a brief overview of the work of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, the “holonomic” model of the universe.
Since his article addresses cosmology and ontology, he finds himself considering the problem of Evil. He speaks of his LSD subjects having visions of gods and demons from every culture, even cultures with which they were not familiar (and thus reinforcing Grof’s idea that there does exist a kind of “ancient racial memory” or “collective unconscious” a la Jung, common to all humans regardless of their ethnic origins). Subjects would see ancient Egyptian gods as well as Christ, Buddha, etc. In addition, visions of “Satan, Lucifer, Kali, Lilith, Moloch, Hekate, Pluto, and Coatlicue” were not uncommon.
According to Grof, his subjects revealed a sense that Creation had taken place as a kind of outpouring of consciousness from the unitary Universal Mind, which “initiates a creative play that involves complicated sequences of divisions, fragmentations, and differentiations” that eventually leads to “an infinite number of derived entities that are endowed with specific separate forms of consciousness and selective self-awareness.” These “derived entities” or “filial conscious entities” then gradually lose contact with the Universal Mind, building screens that divide them from each other and from the Universal Mind. That is, they gradually “forget” their origins, and their interconnectedness with each other.
This is nothing less than Gnosticism, of course. The descent of spirit into matter is discussed from a psychedelic, twentieth century perspective but it is the descent of spirit into matter nonetheless. It is also reminiscent of Arthur Young’s “arc” and Arthur Koestler’s Janus-faced holon system. (Later in the same article, Grof actually refers to the “derived entities” as Janus-faced, but with no reference to Koestler, as Koestler had not yet published Janus.) Under the influence of LSD, the subjects experience this “screening” process and gradually break down these barriers and eventually enter into the Presence of the Universal Mind. This, again, is Gnosticism and shares a great deal in common with the shamanistic experiences described by Eliade and others. Grof links them to Jain philosophy, as well as to “the monadology of G. W. Leibnitz, and to the holonomic theory of David Bohm and Karl Pribram.” He goes further, linking them to Sri Aurobindo and “the system of Kashmir Shaivism,” and again illustrating the Asian focus of many consciousness pioneers of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. (A popular and amiable authority on Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts, gave the very first Esalen seminar.)
Thus, it should probably come as no surprise that the conclusions of Grof when it comes to the nature of Evil are typically Asian, and specifically Hindu or Vedic. As Alan Watts says in his autobiography, “Somehow the atmosphere of Hindu mythology and imagery slid into [LSD experiences}, suggesting at the same time that Hindu philosophy was a local form of a sort of undercover wisdom, inconceivably ancient, which everyone knows in the back of his mind but will not admit” (Watts, p. 344).
LSD subjects, Grof reports, describe Evil as “an indispensable instrument in the cosmic process.”
“The recognition that evil is the price that has to be paid for the creation of the existing experiential realities and that it is not only a useful, but necessary ploy in the universal drama tends to bring forgiving and reconciliation.
“According to the insights of LSD subjects, the Universal Mind has to negate itself and create its polar counterpart in order to enter the process of creation.”
This could have been extracted from the work of a Wendy Doniger or a Trevor Ling, or one of the first or second century Gnostic writers. To Grof, working from his LSD database, this negative principle of creation “permeates in increasingly concrete forms all the levels of the process of creation” including being responsible for the splits and “screening” that prevent the individual “derived entities” from contact with each other, and with the Universal Mind.
“Since the divine play, the cosmic drama, is unimaginable without separate entities, without distinct protagonists, evil is thus absolutely essential for the creation of the universe...the experience of unification and consciousness expansion is typically preceded in the LSD process by an encounter with the forces of darkness, confrontation with evil appearances, or passing through demonic screens; this is typically associated with extreme physical and emotional suffering.”
Again, we are on familiar ground. The hideous visions and experiences of the shaman—externalized in the case of the serial killer—are once again before us. LSD provides an opportunity to undergo this experience, but in a socially acceptable “set and setting,” under the comfortable supervision of a therapist who may or may not have undergone the complete spiritual transformation personally. There are those who might complain—reasonably enough—that the drug-induced spiritual experience is to the real spiritual experience as the travelogue is to the place visited. Alan Watts mentions that many people who have had a positive experience with LSD then abandon the drug and go on to more spiritual work. The implication is that the LSD experience (or any experience with a hallucinogen, such as psychedelic mushrooms or peyote) is initiatory: it starts one on a spiritual path, like the drugs taken at the Rites of Eleusis, but is not the path itself. That is why it is dangerous to take the drug under any circumstances other than under the careful tutelage of an experienced user and in a setting of spiritual (psychological) protection. That is why the BLUEBIRD and MK_ULTRA experiments were so wrong, not only from a moral or ethical standpoint, but from a deeper, more profound point of view.
Grof reiterates that evil “is inextricably woven into the cosmic fabric and indispensable for the existence of experiential worlds” and thus that “it cannot be defeated and eradicated in the world of phenomena.” The parallels with Gnostic thought and ancient Hindu theology could not be more emphatic. The world, then, is under control of the Demiurge, or Lord Mara, or Satan. The phenomenal world is evil, and since it cannot be defeated there is only...escape.
“Thus the polarity between good and evil is usually transcended simultaneously with the sense of alienation and individual separateness, with the distinction between inactivity and action, and with the illusion of the objective reality of the phenomenal world.”
While all of this may be perfectly valid, and is certainly in line with some of the more advanced spiritual disciplines throughout the world and throughout the ages, it can also be understood as a way of avoiding political commitment and social involvement. We can comfort ourselves with the consideration that the phenomenal world is an illusion of which Evil is a necessary component; but when a little girl dies from a sniper’s bullet, or an old lady collapses from hunger on a city street, or one million Cambodians are slaughtered in the killing fields, or six million Jews are turned into smoke and ash in the concentration camps, then these theological, cosmological, and ontological speculations are of very little use.
But does that mean that we must abandon the technology of the spirit, the “machineries of joy” as I have called them, after Bradbury, in order to do “good works”? When spiritual growth virtually requires isolation from the world at large, how to look out for our fellow human beings? How to contribute in a meaningful way to the world and its relentless struggle with the very real, if also very illusory, forces of evil? Perhaps the example of the shaman—a person who has undergone all the enormous psychological pressures and spiritual stresses of which Grof, Eliade, and so many others write—is the example to follow, for the shaman returns to his village and becomes a healer, a seer, a therapist, and a spiritual force to be reckoned with. The shaman is not a luxury in his village; he is not reading tea leaves or bending spoons or checking your aura. The shaman is a necessity, a requirement for the life of the village. For all of his or her strangeness and other-worldliness, the shaman is a committed member of the community and performs valuable (and life-saving) services. The shaman can also, however, attack villagers, attack other shamans, and kill from a distance. The interest of governments in these latter powers at the expense of the former is what has damned them, and led to the present state of affairs in which the Pandora’s box of consciousness—what is commonly known as the “black box”—has been recklessly opened, and the demons and evil spirits of the Other Side let loose upon the world.
And the opening of that box was quite easy, once the right tools had been obtained and a general understanding of the problem was at hand. As Grof explains later in the same article:
“There exists a wide spectrum of mind-altering techniques that can facilitate the occurrence of such unusual states. ...They involve the use of psychedelic substances or a combination of various extreme situations, such as prolonged stay in the desert, exposure to unusual temperatures, sleep deprivation, fasting, social isolation, sensory overload, physical pain, difficult body postures, and respiratory maneuvers combining hyperventilation and withholding of breath.
“Similar changes of consciousness can also be produced by various laboratory and clinical techniques. We can mention in this context sensory deprivation and overload, electric stimulation of the brain, kinaesthetic devices, variations of hypnotic induction...”
Paging Dr. Cameron. Will Dr. Mengele please pick up the white courtesy phone?
I don’t want to make light of the above, and I don’t want to over-react. In fact, what Grof is saying is quite correct: non-ordinary states of consciousness can be reached by any and all of these methods and many more besides. This is obvious from the vast literature on the subject, from the lives of the Christian saints, from the examples of Hindu ascetics and Siberian shamans. What is missing is the context under which these technologies should be used. The non-denominational methods advanced by Grof and others in the field may not be sufficient; cultural loading may actually be a requirement in this case, rather than an obstacle. Yet, Grof is understandably reluctant to call in the priests.
Further along in this seminal essay on LSD and the “cosmic game,” Grof complains that most existing religious systems are replete with “inconsistencies and paradoxes,” and says,
“Many of them are unable to reconcile such fundamental contradictions as the assumption of a benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient creator and the existence of evil and suffering in the world; omnipotence of God and the concept of sin, as well as man’s responsibility for his actions; or the supreme justice of God and the inequities existing among people."
He then notes that many religions are in conflict with each other, each cult claiming a “monopoly on God and infallibility of their creed; they hate, reject and persecute the members of the competing religions.” Then he goes on to explain this gross inconsistency by falling back on the game scenario of the Universal Mind:
“According to the metaphysical system described above, the inconsistencies and paradoxes existing within the individual religious frameworks, as well as the conflicts between them, have been deliberately created by the Universal Mind and build into the scheme of things as important elements in the cosmic game.”
In other words, we are back to the Gnostic Demiurge, a God who created the phenomenal world as a place of evil, a matrix of matter in which to entrap spirit.
The only religions exempt from this problem are those that are “characterized by their universality and all-encompassing understanding, compassion and tolerance. They have a definite pantheistic emphasis and believe in ultimate unity of all creation.” The spiritual path, according to Grof, is one in which the individual gradually rises from self-awareness, to awareness of the connections that connect him or her to everything else in creation, and then eventually back to the Universal Mind itself. This is a basic blueprint for the initiatory systems of most of the world’s secret societies. The identification of a matrix underlying all of creation and the interconnectedness (as detailed in the doctrine of signatures, or correspondences, of the medieval magicians and alchemists) of all “things,” all phenomena, used as a machine to elevate consciousness to higher levels, is familiar to all students of hermeticism and of the hierarchical structure of occult loges or orders, from the Freemasons to the Rosicrucians and the Golden Dawn, the OTO, etc. These disciplines provided a framework, an intellectual context, within which the non-ordinary states of consciousness described by Grof could be integrated into the psyches of the initiates, while at the same time surrounding the initiate with a social support apparatus so that the intense preliminary stages of psychological disintegration would not be summarily dismissed as psychosis or mental disease.
Like Eliade and R.D. Laing, Grof understands that the mental states accompanying the various stages of “illumination” are construed as mental illness, “particularly schizophrenia,” by mainstream science. He claims that the work of his colleague, Abraham Maslow, has begun to change all of that, with Maslow’s discovery of the “peak experience” and it’s identification as a “supernormal” state rather than a pathological one. Grof was probably being optimistic in this regard, since mainstream psychiatry and psychotherapy at this time are still resistant tot he idea of these states as anything other than mental disorders. With new drugs to combat some forms of schizophrenia, Laing’s insistence that “mental breakdown may also be mental breakthrough” has been devalued, even though one could argue that suppressing a mental state through chemical means is not the same as curing it, and does not mean that the existential nature of the schizophrenic state has been somehow explained away by describing it as a chemical imbalance. One could reasonably wonder if the state preceded the imbalance, or the imbalance the state; and then ask if the cause-and-effect relationship between chemical “imbalance”and mental state was a valid perspective in the era of quantum consciousness.
At least Grof realizes that not all “peak experiences” may be blissful, and once again touches the edge of our argument by stating,
“However, the peak experiences can also occur under circumstances which are unfavorable and critical for the individual; in this case, the ego consciousness is shattered and destroyed rather than dissolved and transcended.
“This is true for situations of severe acute or chronic physical and emotional stress, as well as circumstances in which body integrity or survival are severely threatened. Many people have experienced fundamental spiritual opening at the time of accidents, injuries, dangerous diseases or operations.”
And, we may add, during torture, interrogation, “brainwashing,” “psychic driving” and “depatterning.” Remember that Grof is coming from a background in which he performed LSD research—since 1954—on the behalf of first the Czech government and then the US government at the same time that these governments were experimenting with LSD for military and intelligence applications. The above remarks by Grof would have been quite interesting to the project leaders of these agencies, as they point the way towards alternate methods of interrogation and “brainwashing,” using techniques already in their arsenal but applying them towards different goals. Although the agendas of the intelligence agencies would have been unique to them, the resultant effects on the psyches of their subjects would have been to open them up to spiritual forces for which they were not prepared (neither the subject nor the controller), and for psychological (and spiritual) blowback that could not be predicted.
Grof then makes reference to the works of Arthur Young (of the original Nine) as representative of the “convergence between mysticism, modern consciousness research, and quantum-relativistic physics,” before proceeding to a discussion of the holonomic model of the universe proposed by David Bohm and Karl Pribram. He mentions in passing that “Karl Pribram formulated then a neurophysiological theory that connects the holonomic concept of the Universe to brain anatomy and physiology.” From there, he goes on once more to associate these ideas with the Hindu Vedas.
That Arthur Young should appear in this article is not surprising, but what may be more astonishing is the fact—related by Jack Sarfatti—that The Nine actually lectured at Esalen! Twenty years after the first appearance of The Nine to the circle around Andrija Puharich, they again manifested in the person of on Jenny O’Connor. Ms. O’Connor was “channeling” The Nine and came to the attention of Werner Erhard, the neo-fascist creator of a school of self-development known as “est,” for “Erhard Seminar Training,” and always printed in lower-case letters. (Erhard had famously changed his name from Jack Rosenberg to “give up Jewish weakness for German strength.”) Sarfatti himself had been a visitor to Arthur Young in the company of Puharich and Ira Einhorn, and had worked sporadically with Arthur Young’s Institute in Berkeley, California. Oddly enough, he seems not to have been aware of Young’s involvement with The Nine in its earliest incarnation. In the late 1970s, Jenny O’Connor was referred to Sarfatti by one of the est people, and Sarfatti was not impressed. Nonetheless, O’Connor became ensconced at Esalen, channeling messages from The Nine and having influence over some management decisions and organizational structuring at the Institute, at the same time that Esalen was being visited by Soviet officials as well as by Einhorn, various physicists, Stanislav Grof (who was “Scholar-in-Residence” from 1973 to 1987), and many, many others.
Grof does not ignore the psychic abilities and coincidences that sometimes attend the spiritual awakening. In a 1996 interview with Russell E. DiCarlo, he states,
“...karmic experiences are often associated with meaningful synchronicities. For example, a person has a difficult relationship with another person and has a past life experience that shows the two of them engaged in some sort of violent conflict. One of them is the victim and the other the aggressor. If this person completes reliving that incident and reaches a sense of forgiveness, his or her attitude towards the other protagonist changes in the positive direction... What is quite extraordinary is that at exactly the same time a significant change in the same direction often occurs in the other person... This can happen even if there was not a conventional communication or connection of any kind between these two persons.”
In other words, a “non-local” relationship develops of which quantum physics has given us the exemplar. Grof believes that reincarnation is a “pragmatic concept, reflecting an effort to understand the complexity of these experiences that spontaneously emerge in non-ordinary states.”
In his work Books of the Dead: Manuals for Living and Dying, Grof provides us with illustrations of some of the visions seen by his LSD patients, those who had taken high doses of the drug and experienced death and rebirth scenarios. On page 29, for instance, we see a drawing of a “Moloch-like deity with a furnace-belly and tearing claws” which “immediately preceded psychological rebirth and the opening into light.” One wonders what would have happened had the individual been given the same dose of the drug but under conditions less than ideal: a government laboratory, for instance, or a CIA safe house? Would they have been classed as psychotic, and would they have been programmed—inadvertently to be sure—to regard the experience as a negative one, thus blocking their psychological or spiritual growth? And would anyone have cared? Would this person’s rather ambiguous mental and emotional state have affected his or her performance in the outside world, as a teacher, or scientist, or criminal, or spy, or soldier?
Or would the weight of what they had experienced—and the lack of a competent social structure to explain it and support it—have led that person to leap from a hotel room window on a cold night in the City of New York?
Probably this chronic mutual suspicion of our neighbor’s capacities...will never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction...It doesn’t seem inaccurate to say most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. But is anyone supposed to act on this knowledge., even genuinely live with it? If so many are teetering on the verge of murder, de-humanization, sexual deformity and despair...all forms of serious art and knowledge—in other words, all forms of truth—are suspect and dangerous.
—Susan Sontag
Last edited by
Username on Fri Jan 04, 2008 12:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
