Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 20, 2013 10:07 pm

John Lilly, Ketamine and The Entities From ECCO

- by Adam Gorightly

One determining factor in Lilly's decision to continue experimenting with K was its measurability. Unlike other programming agents he had used in the past, K's effects were extremely predictable, in that you could determine exacting levels of dosage to correspond with the desired effect one wished to experience; whereas other mind expansion agents such as LSD and psilocybin are often more unpredictable in regards to the facilitation of desired preprogramming. This brings to mind a possible correlation between Ketamine and DMT, where each of these drugs — administered at certain exacting dosages — apparently summon forth, to the percipient involved, extraterrestrial or other-dimensional entities. High doses of psilocybin have effected this response in some users — Terrance McKenna, among others — who have communicated telepathically with alien intelligences under the mushroom's otherworldly aegis. But psilocybin's effects are quirky. Perhaps this is why the measurability — and predictability — of K so appealed to Dr. Lilly. In this manner the scientific method could be followed to achieve the desired mind-bending results.

In later experiments, Lilly failed to heed his own advice, becoming so enraptured in his Ketamine exploration that he would forego the earlier agreed upon "safety man" and started working "without a net." This led to an almost fatal consequence when one sunny day, under the influence of K, Lilly climbed into his hot tube. When he realized the temperature was too hot, Lilly futilely attempted to climb out, but in so doing his muscles lost their strength and he collapsed into bubbling currents. Lilly was totally conscious at this point, but due to the effects of K, he was unaware of the external reality of his drowning body. He was conscious only of his internal world. As fate would have it, a friend of Lilly's, Phil Halecki — who found himself driven by a sudden sense of urgency — decided at this time to phone Dr. Lilly. Lilly's wife Toni fielded the phone call and, at Halecki's insistence, went to summon John, only to find him lying face down in the water, breathless and blue. Fortunately, Toni was able to revive her husband using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a technique she had learned only a few days earlier from an article in The National Enquirer.

Nonetheless, this close brush with the grim reaper's scythe didn't deter Lilly from further solo flights on K; it only reaffirmed his deeply held conviction that his life was being watched over by higher powers of an extraterrestrial origin. Lilly referred to this network of sublime entities as ECCO, an acronym for "Earth Coincidence Control Office." Lilly was positive that all of these fortuitous coincidences in his life (such as Halecki's life-saving phone call) had been arranged by higher forces; and that whatever unfortunate folly fell into his path along the road to knowledge, ECCO would be there to guide him safely through the tunnel to the light.

But ECCO was not there only to guide Lilly unfettered through his mind-bending research; these extraterrestrial benefactors were also there to test Lilly, to help him overcome his deepest darkest fears with psychic-shock therapy. One evening after a kick-ass shot of K, Lilly sat watching TV when an alien representative of ECCO appeared and — with some advanced form of psychic surgery — bloodlessly removed John's penis, nonchalantly handing it over to him. "They've cut off my penis," Dr. Lilly exclaimed. His wife Toni came to the rescue and pointed out to John that his penis was still intact. Upon closer examination of his male member, Lilly saw that the ET's had replaced his normal human penis with a mechanical version that could become voluntary erect when he wanted it to. An hour later, after the effects of the K wore off, John Lilly found his normal human penis in place of the mechanical one, exactly where it had always been.

Later on, as the frequency of his use on K increased, Dr. Lilly began having contact with another alien intelligence agency, which he called (SSI), short for Solid State Intelligence. SSI was a supercomputer-like entity, much in the same techno-mystical vein as Philip K. Dick's VALIS. But unlike VALIS, SSI was of a malevolent nature, at odds with ECCO. SSI's apparent goal was to conquer and dominate all biological life forms on Earth. To combat SSI, ECCO enlisted Lilly in this archetypal battle of good against evil, charging him with the mission of alerting the world at large to these solid state beings of evil intent. To further confirm the dual existences of these two opposing alien intelligence networks, Lilly was given a sign, and message, in the autumn of 1974. Flying into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Dr. Lilly saw the comet Kahoutek out of the southern sky. Momentarily the comet grew brighter. At this point a message was laser-beamed into Lilly's mind, which said: "We are Solid State Intelligence and we are going to demonstrate our power by shutting down all solid state equipment to LAX."

Dr. Lilly shared his foreboding message with his wife Toni, who was seated next to him. A few minutes later, the pilot instructed the passengers that they were being diverted to Burbank due to a plane that had crash-landed near the runway and had knocked down power lines, causing a power failure at the airport.

As his haphazard use of K intensified, so did the warnings of imminent dangers regarding the survival of mankind, provided by ECCO via 3D Technicolor images beamed into Lilly's mind. These visions were of an apocalyptic nature; scenes of nuclear annihilation seen from an alien's eye view in outer space. The world powers needed to be alerted of this impending tragedy immediately to enable them to avert widespread global devastation, ECCO instructed, or it would be too late. I find it interesting that ECCO's message to Dr. Lilly was much the same as those delivered to the early saucer contactees: our planet was on a collision course toward destruction; all atomic weapons must be dismantled if our planet was ever going to have a chance of surviving in the future. The only difference was that the enemy was us, not "them." Nevertheless, rampant technological progress was to blame for the sorry state of the planet, regardless if it was being facilitated by alien intelligences, or humans.

After three weeks of hourly K injections, Lilly decided that he would travel to the east coast to warn political leaders and members of the media of the threat posed by SSI. In New York, he phoned the White House to warn then President Gerald Ford about "a danger to the human race involving atomic energy and computers." A White House aide fielded the call and, although quite aware, of Dr. Lilly's impressive credentials, was not convinced of the urgency of the matter, and informed him that the President was unavailable.

A young intern who had been assigned to Lilly during this time figured the good doctor had finally flipped his high intelligent lid and attempted to have Lilly committed to a psychiatric hospital. Once again ECCO intervened. Lilly had friends in many high places one of which was the director of this hospital, who saw to it that his old friend was released in short order. When the intrepid intern attempted to commit Lilly to another psychiatric hospital, the same scenario unfolded, and Lilly was once again released. The young intern could only shake his frustrated head in disbelief.

Still following the lead of ECCO, Dr. Lilly continued his ever-escalating injections of K in order to remain in contact with the "space brothers". Soon, though, his sources started to dry up due to concerns by his connections that Lilly had gone too far of the deep end. Consequently this led Lilly in search of other long acting chemicals that would provide him with the same effects as K, but for a greater duration of time. During the experimental trial of another drug of similar nature to K, Dr. Lilly received a phone call from his wife Toni requesting that he bring her spare set of car keys, because she had locked her others in her car. Since she was simply down the road a bit, John jumped on his ten-speed and proceeded to peddle down the road to make the delivery.

When Dr. Lilly decided to ride his ten-speed bike down the road to meet his wife, the drug had not yet taken full effect. But midway through his trip, Lilly was zapped by its intoxicating magic and instantly felt quite wonderful with the wind blowing deliciously through his hair; it was as if he'd taken a trip down memory lane to the days of his free wheeling youth. Unfortunately, this flashbackfull sense of euphoria came screeching to a disastrous halt when the bike chain suddenly jammed, and he was catapulted onto the harsh reality of the concrete pavement, puncturing a lung, breaking several ribs, and suffering cranial contusions.


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

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 20, 2013 10:22 pm

On another note, there are those who would suggest that the Beat Movement was part of a grand conspiracy; and the Beats themselves unwitting pawns in this game. In one of his many broadsheets self-published over the years, Kerry Thornley once posited this theory, without actually elaborating on exactly what this conspiracy entailed. Perhaps what Thornley was alluding to is the same theme found in Todd Brendan Fahey's Wisdom's Maw, which suggests that Ken Kesey as well as the Beats were part of an elaborate scheme concocted by the American Intelligence Community to infiltrate and supply the sixties counterculture with mind altering drugs, ostensibly to test their reactions, and--long range--to influence widespread social control. Theoretically, this was all conducted under the covert auspices of such infamous CIA mind control projects as Artichoke and MK-ULTRA. Such countercultural icons as Kesey and Leary--Fahey suggests--were chosen by the CIA and Military Intelligence as facilitators of this grand experiment, whose powerful side effects are still lingering to this day in the collective craniums of it's unwitting participants.

Kerouac--toward the tail-end of this life--was also of the impression that the sixties counterculture had been co-opted by sinister forces. Soddened by liquor, and dismayed by what he felt was the unpatriotic posture assumed by these long haired freaks (who, adding insult to injury, had credited his books for their hippie dippie philosophy) Kerouac feared a Communist Conspiracy was behind the tumultuous events of that era. One also gets the impression in later comments that he believed the Jews played a part in these behind the scenes manipulations. Kerouac--one of the more open-minded and tolerant souls of his generation--by the end of the sixties had turned into a slurring, often incoherent, commie bashing rummy, whose literary output dwindled as his intake of hard liquor increased. The last thing Kerouac wrote before his death was a screed directed at the hippies and the anti-war movement entitled, "After Me, the Deluge."

In a poem dedicated to his passing, Gregory Corso compared Kerouac's destruction by alcohol to the disastrous effects that Fire Water had exacted upon the Native American culture. This in retrospect is a fitting metaphor. The same forces that nearly drove the America Indian to extinction, were in fact the same powers that delivered Kerouac to an early grave. He drank for the same reasons the Indians did; to bury the pain, and to escape from the tragedy of a self-destructive civilization teetering on the edge of ruin.

Ginsberg, on the other hand, passionately embraced the sixties counterculture, growing long his hair and beard, donning lovebeads, and participating in love-ins, acid tests and anti-war demonstrations. At the outset of the decade, he participated in Tim Leary's psilocybin research at Harvard. On the momentous night of November 26, 1960, Ginsberg received a vision from on high instructing the mad poet that he would be The Messiah to herald in a psychedelic revolution. Under Leary's supportive guidance--and 36 milligrams of psilocybin--Ginsberg wandered downstairs naked, determined to alert the world's leaders that a new epoch was at hand: Instead of nuclear mushroom clouds, mushrooms of an entirely different nature would intervene, bringing love and illumination to a world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Ginsberg got on the phone and started placing calls to the Kremlin and White House, identifying himself to the telephone operator as God (he spelled it out for her, G-O-D). Unsuccessful in his attempts to reach Kennedy or Kruschev, Ginsberg got ahold of Kerouac and informed The King o' the Beats that: "I am high and naked and I am King of the Universe. Get on a plane. It is time!" It was the wish of both Leary and Ginsberg that the world's leaders get together in a United Nations type setting, and drop psilocybin all at one time. This, they agreed, would cause "...Everyone to plug in at once and announce the Coming Union of All Consciousness."


Beats

by Gorightly


http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/nother.htm
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 21, 2013 6:05 pm

The Lizard Brain Addiction Monster
by A. Orange

People can get high on many different things. Drugs and alcohol are just some of them. Other people might get high on making love. Sometimes, people stumble into a place where the kundalini energy rises. That means that a fire starts down below, in the loins and at the base of the spine, and it slowly grows and rises up your spine, until you explode. You peak out in a place where there is only one writhing body, with four arms and four legs, and the whole Universe seems to be making love to itself, and there is nothing but total ecstasy, and you are just totally zoned. (It's called Tantric Yoga, and it's a real yoga.)

Or a surfer may catch that perfect wave, and go into ecstasy, and for an instant, time stops, and the world crystallizes, and he is suspended on the edge of the entire Universe, with nothing but himself and the eternal perfect wave, the timeless ocean, the sky, and everything.

Some skiers swear that a mountainside of new powder can do it for them.

When that happens, people make the mistake of confusing the means of getting high with the actual high.1 And of course they want to go back there again, and again, and feel the ecstasy and the oneness with the Universe, again. So the drug or alcohol user thinks, "Well, I'll just take more and more, and stay high forever." The lover thinks, "Well, I'll just become a makeout artist, and have sex forever." The surfer becomes a beach bum and spends years trying to catch the perfect wave again. And the ski bums are doing the same thing, looking for the perfect mountain, the perfect powder, the perfect run... And Dead-Heads spend years following the Grateful Dead, trying to once again get that unbelievable perfect moment when they died and astral projected and plugged into Eternity.

It isn't bad to want to feel good. It isn't wrong to want to get high. We need to get high. We have a real genuine need to get high, just as real as our need for food. If we don't, or can't, get high, we go into depression. It is, sadly, just very harmful to our bodies to use chemicals to change how we feel, to get high. (I say sadly, because it really would be convenient if we really could get high on drugs forever, without the down side.) And it is sad to keep trying the same old thing, again and again, like playing some old worn-out broken record, when it isn't getting us high any more.

People say, "Well, if it happened once, it can happen again." Nope. Not necessarily. We only get those virgin highs once. A "virgin high" is the high you get the first time you take a particular drug. It is often much higher than anything you will ever get from that drug again. Apparently, our bodies can build up a drug tolerance almost instantly.

After that, we can get trapped in situations where we are feeling really bad, but think that something like a drug will make us feel better, that it will kill our pain some more. The odd thing is, in spite of the fact that we use tons of drugs to kill our pains, drugs are actually rotten pain-killers. They really are. Now I know full well that a non-addict can get hit with a fat dose of morphine and feel absolutely no pain at all for a while. But if you keep on using that drug, then it stops working, and won't kill your pain any more. Ah yes, it's called developing a tolerance. You end up still in pain, just feeding a habit. That's really a rotten pain killer. And we all know all about that.

But part of our brain gets confused. It can't seem to learn that what got us high before won't get us high any more. — Actually, let me rephrase that. It can learn, but like a mentally-retarded human, it is very slow. If you smoked and drank and did drugs for ten, twenty or thirty years, then that was a good long time for that slow old base brain to learn that smoke, drink, and drugs feel good, and to develop some really strong associations between those substances and pleasurable feelings. And it just might take a bunch of years to unlearn that stuff. So we get cravings for something that doesn't really make us feel good any more. Stupid, but true.

Look at the cigarette smokers. Most of what they are really doing is just killing, or avoiding, the pain of withdrawal. That, and masking the pain of what tobacco has already done to them. It isn't like they are getting high on the cigarettes or anything. They get a little bit of a rush, but not much of one. They get a little bit of relaxation from a cigarette, for a minute, but not much. Cigarettes actually taste bad, and hurt our throats and lungs, and make us feel bad. Then they make us feel even worse, as we get sicker and sicker. And yet those smokers will smoke those cigarettes until the cigarettes kill them. Four hundred and thirty thousand Americans die from tobacco every year. That is a lot of confusion. The alcoholics and the junkies have no monopoly on the kind of stupidity that makes people continue to feed an addiction even while it is killing them.

What part of our brain could possibly be that stupid? That's easy to answer: Base brain. Base brain is the back, lower part of the brain that attaches directly to the spinal cord. It's right there at the top end of your neck, in the back of your skull. Base brain is the oldest and most primitive part of the brain, speaking in evolutionary terms. Not only do dogs and cats also have that same brain, so do pretty primitive animals like frogs and lizards. (Sorry, I don't mean to insult frogs and lizards. It's just that when we are talking about brains, they don't rate very high on the Einstein scale.) "Lizard brain" is a popular slang term for that old brain.

Curiously, we also have a higher brain just plopped right on top of the base brain. As we evolved and got smarter, we added on more and more brain stuff, still keeping the old brain, and just tacking the new stuff on top of the old brain. The upper and forward part of our brain is so much more advanced that it might as well be someone else, compared to base brain. Sometimes, it is almost like we are two people, a split personality. (Now we really aren't that, a split or multiple personality. "Multiple Personality Disorder" — now properly called "Dissociative Identity Disorder" — is an entirely different thing, where someone's ability to solidify their personality was severely interrupted and so the parts that are normally not fused before age 8, continue to never fuse due to severe, life threatening trauma.) This is more like having two brains, and sometimes they disagree about what is good for us, and what will feel good.

There is a funny split in the human mind between logic and basic drives. Like, logically, a young couple can say that it would be inconvenient for the young woman to get pregnant right now. "We should finish college, and get established in our careers first." But base brain says, "The heck with that noise, reproduce." And so do the hormones. The basic drive is to just have lots of babies anyway. The gut urges are to just have sex and more sex, until she gets pregnant. "What, she still isn't pregnant? Another whole month has gone by, and she still isn't pregnant? What's the matter with you two? Are you going to just goof around until you get eaten by a lion? Reproduce now, while you have the chance! Have sex, and more sex, right now, and more, and more, until you get it right!"

The conflict is really between the higher brain == the prefrontal lobes, and the base brain == the amygdala, or limbic system. The base brain is a wonderful machine, and it is very good at keeping us alive. It is the brain that never sleeps, the brain that remembers to keep us breathing all night long, and the brain that monitors the heart and keeps it going at the correct rate day and night. And the base brain is also the thing that says it is time to eat, and time to reproduce, and base brain says those things quite often, like nearly all of the time.

Everything that a dumb animal needs to survive for millions of years is found in the base brain; ask any frog, turtle, or lizard. Base brains can handle the five basic F's: Feed, Fuck, Fight or Flee, and Feel Good. (Feel good and avoid feeling bad, especially including avoid getting eaten by a big toothy predator, which really feels bad.) But we great apes have grown huge higher parts of the brain, and we have the ability to think in other channels. And sometimes, what the higher brain thinks is the opposite of what the lower brain thinks. We can logically conclude that we will get greater long-term happiness if we refrain, at least for right now, from pregnancy, or overeating, or intoxication, or drug consumption, while base brain thinks just the opposite, "Do it right now." Base brain doesn't understand "tomorrow" very well. Base brain has always demanded instant gratification. "Food now! Sex now! Feel good now!" Base brain is totally incapable of logically thinking about the long-term consequences of drinking, smoking, and drugging. Base brain can't do that any more than the toad or frog in your back yard can solve math problems.

Medieval Christianity liked to explain the conflict between the higher brain and the base brain in terms of angels versus devils, of higher angelic desires versus bad low desires. Those medieval theologians declared that people were half angel and half devil. But I think that biology got a bad rap there: If old base brain had not been extremely good at getting our ancestors to eat and reproduce, then we wouldn't be here at all. Base brain, with all of its basic urges, isn't bad; base brain just isn't terribly intelligent. Again, ask Kermit the Frog.

This base brain / higher brain conflict is still a huge problem when we are dealing with problems like excessive consumption of, or addiction to, drugs and alcohol. In the addict, base brain has come to believe that more drugs and alcohol means more pleasure, and base brain is all for it. And base brain also associates cigarettes, dope and drink with pain-killers, and wants to grab for them at the first sign of hunger, pain, fatigue, or other physical discomfort, or even mental discomfort like nervousness, anxiety, stress, tension, or some other emotional upset. But base brain cannot think logically about the long-term consequences of such consumption; that isn't how base brain works. Base brain just wants its hungers filled right now, period, and its pain killed right now, period.

The only time that base brain is a big help in breaking habits and escaping from addictions is when strong negative feelings have built up, like from getting really sick, being seriously ill and in great pain, nearly dying, as a result of using drugs or alcohol. Then we build up a strong aversion to those things. Otherwise, base brain is all too likely to forget the pain, and just remember the pleasure.

You can even end up in a funny state where, after you have quit, just the smell of alcoholic drinks, like the smell of stale beer, makes you want to barf, because your body remembers what the stuff did to you, how sick it made you for so many years, but you still crave a drink anyway.

Or, after you've quit smoking, just the smell of somebody else's cigarette smoke makes your whole body cringe and rebel, because parts of you clearly remember what that damn stuff did to you, how it nearly killed you, but you still crave a cigarette anyway. Stupid, but true. Now that's one mixed-up system.

A big part of the problem is just what the addiction machinery in the brain really is. Some doctors were once contemplating destroying the addiction center in the brain. That sounds drastic, and it is drastic, but considering how many addicts kill themselves, it would be doing some of them a favor. Just insert some long, thin, wires into the brain, and burn out the brain cells that cause addictions and cravings. But the doctors found out that they couldn't do it. The parts of the brain that cause addiction and cravings are the same parts of the brain that cause us to eat food when we are hungry. That's really deep-seated, basic stuff, and we can't just wipe it out.


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

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 21, 2013 10:14 pm

Image

by Chitra Ganesh
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:46 am

http://news.discovery.com/human/psychol ... 130618.htm

Seattle Woman Decides She Needs Food After All

JUN 18, 2013 02:07 PM ET // BY BENJAMIN RADFORD


A woman in Seattle who believes she can live on air, sunlight, and water has decided that she should eat food after all, and has stopped her social and spiritual “experiment.”

According to a story on Fox News, “Navenna Shine, the founder and subject of the Living on Light experiment, plans to spend the next four to six months abstaining from food of any kind and living on only light, water and tea. According to her website Livingonlight.com, Shine started the experiment in an attempt to follow a group of obscure Yogis, who for thousands of years have claimed the ability to live on light.”

The claimed ability to survive without food (and sometimes without water as well) is called inedia, and those who attempt it are called “inediates” (among other things). One common version of inedia includes a belief called breatharianism, which teaches that humans can be trained to survive just on water and sunlight.

Shine turned her experimental flirtation with starvation into something of a social media event, filming herself on web cams and creating a Facebook page so supporters (and detractors) can follow along. She seems sincere in her effort, blogging about her symptoms including nausea, her conversations with God, and the messages she receives from the universe as her body fights off delirium.

Though the experiment was planned to last four to six months, she ends her fast tomorrow. According to The Seattle Times:

“Shine had dropped to 126 pounds from her original weight of 159 pounds on her 5-foot, 4-inch frame. She says she’s quitting on Wednesday in part because she’s run out of money, and in part because of the public reaction. “I was just asking a question, but there was just so much negative response that that means the question can’t even be asked,” she said. She also says that she didn’t want to be responsible for others trying “Living on Light” without having their “belief systems lined up.”

Shine seemed surprised and dismayed at the public reaction to her fasting experiment, framing it as a matter of striking a nerve of social and cultural taboos. The issue is not, as she put it, about anger over her exploration of alternative spiritualities nor asking “questions can’t even be asked,” but instead the humanitarian concern that she might starve to death during her misguided quest.

Still, the way in which she is ending her potentially fatal fasting leaves some concerns. Shine is not stopping because she has changed her mind about the fact that people need to eat — indeed she remains convinced that it is possible, just not under the scrutiny of the world (and, oddly, with more money).

By suggesting that ending the experiment is an altruistic public service or due to circumstances beyond her control, Shine is able to save face and keep her beliefs intact. But even a little shame is better than the alternative.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:35 pm

All they need is the air ...


Image
Breatharian leader Jasmuheen's website promotes living on air

Members of a little-known cult claim that all they need is the air that they breathe.

Breatharians claim to be nourished by prana, a Hindu term for the universal life force.

Their leader Jasmuheen, a 42-year-old New Age guru from Brisbane formerly known as Ellen Greve, says she has eaten little more than herbal tea, juice and an occasional biscuit since 1993. She instead draws energy from prana and meditation.

Yet the cult has been implicated in at least two deaths.

The most recent, Australian-born Verity Linn, 49, was found dead in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands on 16 September.

Police believe she was following the Breatharians' 21-day fast.

A diary belonging to Ms Linn recorded her last days as she refused to eat or drink, believing it would "spiritually cleanse" her body and "recharge her both physically and mentally".

Another woman died in an Australian hospital after following the Breatharian 21-day fast.

Pure energy

Breatharianism relies on light and taking in only tiny amounts of food and liquid.

Followers believe that the energy they save on metabolising food and fluid can be redirected into physical, emotional and spiritual energy.

"We are neither a religion nor a cult, just concerned citizens who have experienced from our association with the Ascended Masters, and many other great Ones and teachers," Jasmuheen says on her website.

"Our work is to share some cosmic, yet intelligent alternatives that offer pragmatic solutions to many of the challenges that face the world today."

She claims to have hit upon a solution to world hunger - that in time, we can all learn to live on air alone.

The Breatharians' findings - based on surveys of those who have completed the 21-day fast and interviews with alternative health practitioners - will be published in late 1999.

Jasmuheen plans to send the finished report to agencies such as the United Nations and UNICEF, "to provide a step-by-step programme to eliminate world hunger, improve global health and well being, [and] decrease pollution".

She hopes to overturn the "outdated" view of the majority of the world's population that 'if you don't eat, you must die'.

Spread the word

Many of the Breatharians' ideas are based on the teachings of St Germain, a 16th century European monk and alchemist, through his writings and "more recent channelled material".

His profile on the website is quite a read: "Many would know of St Germain as the writer of William Shakespeare's plays. Previous embodiments are said to include Merlin and Christopher Columbus".

The learned saint himself encouraged Jasmuheen to promote Breatharianism, using modern-day technology and media contacts to spread the word world-wide


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/454313.stm
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 7:51 pm

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales ... st-1905354

Book lifts the lid on the world’s biggest LSD factory - in Wales
29 Aug 2010 00:00


IT WAS the only international acid bust in the village – but it was a pretty big one.

These days, Llanddewi Brefi – is most famous for the adventures of Little Britain’s fat, gay comedy character.

But in the 1970s, the West Wales village was a secluded hang-out for some of the world’s biggest rock stars – thanks largely to an underground cottage industry making millions of pounds’ worth of mind-bending LSD.

Visitors included Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones – whose hellraising guitarist Keith Richards claimed he’d encountered a whole new repertoire of drugs while on a trip to the sleepy rural village.

But the party came to a sudden and abrupt halt in 1977 when police swooped on what turned out to be the world’s largest drug ring.

New details of the village’s spell as the acid capital of the world are revealed in a book by journalist Lyn Ebenezer, pictured above, in which he reveals who was making and taking the drug in the area and how the police’s so-called "Operation Julie" managed to arrange the bust.

The author, who was a reporter on the Welsh newspaper Y Cymro at the time, tells how Llanddewi Brefi became a desired destination for pop stars such as the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.

They had been invited to the village by local resident David Litvinoff in the 1960s.

"It is pretty certain that Bob Dylan stayed at Litvinoff’s house for six weeks during the summer of 1969, just after he’d been at the Isle of Wight pop festival," said Mr Jenkins

"Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones admitted that he’d been to Llanddewi Brefi too and that while staying there he’d used every illegal drug in existence and some which weren’t in existence!"

However, the Operation Julie book deals mainly with the famous police raid which brought to a grinding halt the enormous drug network, which had produced pure LSD worth millions of pounds in rural Wales.

It was the brainchild of a chemist by the name of Richard Kemp, who lived in a remote farmhouse near nearby Tregaron, with his girlfriend Christine Bott.

Together, they set up a lab in the farmhouse, quietly going about producing some of the purest LSD available anywhere in the world.

The scale of their production was staggering, and for a long time remained under the radar of the police.

Until, that was, a chance accident started the ball rolling towards one of the biggest drug busts the world had ever seen.

Kemp was driving his Range Rover when he crashed into another vehicle, killing the other driver.

The 4x4 was impounded, during which time police discovered traces of hydrazine hydrate – a chemical involved in the production of LSD.

Police started probing Kemp and his contacts – until the fateful day in March 1977 when they brought the whole empire crashing down.

"The police arrested dozens of people and found six million tabs of LSD – the largest stash of illegal drugs ever found," Mr Ebenezer said.

"More than 800 police officers took part in the operation and 120 people were arrested in total. LSD tabs with a street-value of £100m were discovered.

"This was the largest police case of its kind and brought Llanddewi Brefi, Tregaron and Carno to world attention overnight." The book draws on information from the inquiry that has never previously been released, as well as new interviews with some of the key protagonists, Mr Ebenezer’s own memories from his work as a reporter at the time.

"Those arrested were said to have been responsible for 90% of the LSD produced in Britain and 60% worldwide. That is the official line.

"It will become evident, however, that truth and fiction are still inextricably mixed over 30 years later.

"Depending on which side of the story of Operation Julie you believe, it is either the tale of an ideal that went wrong, greed and audacious enterprise on one side and of diligent, selfless and determined police work on the other, or the story of political in-fighting and lasting bitterness. Stories abound of undiscovered stashes of LSD and hidden fortunes.

"There are tales of tip-offs by disgruntled police officers and even a royal connection. There remain many unanswered questions.

"There are, for instance, accusations that statistics were deliberately massaged in order to strengthen the case for a national drugs squad," said Mr Ebenezer.

"And if chemist Richard Kemp had produced LSD worth £2.5m during his seven years of production, as was alleged, why was it that only £11,000 of his money was ever discovered?

"Were the dangers of LSD exaggerated? Much was made of Kemp’s ability to produce the purest LSD in history. Surely, if it was the purest, was it not also the safest?

"After all, the dangers of LSD lie in its impurities. No evidence whatever was produced to prove that Kemp’s LSD caused any deaths.

"David Litvinoff was not directly involved with the Julie story, but was very much a part of the drugs scene.

"He attracted many pop stars including the Stones, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and possibly Bob Dylan to his house. Albeit unaware of the fact, he was the harbinger of the influx of free spirits to the area.

"My motive in writing this book is not to be judgemental.

"Largely it is, rather, a story of how a quiet area of mid Wales was changed completely by in-comers who embraced a different culture and way of life. Yet many of those involved in the LSD conspiracy were accepted by the local community.

"Had they not been embraced – or at least tolerated – their illegal venture would never have lasted so long. It is still difficult to find anyone in the Tregaron and Llanddewi Brefi area who will condemn them.

"In fact, they are regarded as likeable rouges, much like the area’s own Robin Hood, the 16th-century robber and folk-hero Twm Shôn Cati.

"So, even though this book follows the main events of Operation Julie, it is a revised overview.

"It is also the story of rural communities that were changed completely, and remain completely changed.

"LSD may not have changed the world, as its proponents had hoped it would, but it did, albeit inadvertently, change forever a rural way of life."

* The book is published by Y Lolfa was launched this week and is available on its website www.ylolfa.com at £9.95


THE late 1970s saw Operation Julie, which netted some 1.5kg of LSD, enough for 7.5 million 1970s doses of the drug, or up to 20-30 million doses at today’s levels.

These were small tablets, or “microdots”, of high purity and potency, produced in a remote farmhouse in Wales.

The “conspirators” were arrested and jailed in 1978 following an intensive police surveillance operation led by Dick Lee who, along with undercover officers, subsequently resigned from the police.

Although presented as a great success, the operation started almost by accident.

In 1974, Gerald Thomas, a cannabis smuggler earlier thrown out of the group for unreliability, was arrested in Canada and gave the names of Richard Kemp, Christine Bott, and Henry Todd as being involved with “the biggest acid lab in the world”.

Kemp and Bott moved to Wales where they set up a lab in a remote farmhouse, whereas Todd and Andrew Munro, an inorganic chemist, set up shop in a basement in Seymour Road, London, producing inferior quality LSD in 100?g black microdots.

Kemp’s bad luck started when his Range Rover was involved in a fatal accident, and was impounded by police.

By chance, Dick Lee was visiting the area, noticed the owner of the vehicle, and found a note with reference to hydrazine hydrate, a chemical used in LSD synthesis.

From that point on Kemp and the cottage were put under surveillance.

Six million tabs of LSD were recovered by the police, the largest haul of drugs ever known.

A squad of 800 detectives were involved.

Some 120 people were arrested throughout the UK and France. Stashes of LSD worth £100m were unearthed.

Over £800,000 in money was discovered hidden in Swiss bank accounts. And 17 defendants were jailed for a total of 170 years.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 7:59 pm

"... The relationship dates back to June 1, 1951, and a transnational meaning of intelligence agencies and academics at Montréal's Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The subject of the meeting was growing concern in the Western intelligence community that the Communist had somehow discovered how to 'brainwash' prisoners of war. The evidence was the fact that American GIs taken captive in Korea were going before cameras, seemingly willingly, and denouncing capitalism and imperialism. According to the declassified minutes from the Ritz meeting, those in attendance --Omond Solandt, chairman of Canada's Defense Research Board; Sir Henry Tizard, chairman of the British Defense Research Policy Committee; as well as two representatives from the CIA --were convinced that Western powers urgently needed to discover how the Communists were extracting these remarkable confessions. With that in mind, the first step was to conduct 'a clinical study of actual cases' to see how brainwashing might work. The stated goal of this research was not for Western powers to start using mind control on prisoner; it was to prepare Western soldiers for whatever coercive techniques they might encounter if they were taken hostage...

"One of those at the Ritz meeting was Dr. Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill University. According to the declassified minutes, Hebb, trying to unlock the mystery of GI confessions, speculated that the Communist might be manipulating prisoners by placing them in intense isolation and blocking input to their senses. The intelligence chiefs were impressed, and three months later Hebb had a research grant from Canada's Department of National Defense to conduct a series of classified sensory-deprivation experiments. Heb paid a group of sixty-three McGill students $20 a day to be isolated in a room wearing dark goggles, headphones playing white noise and cardboard tubes covering their arms and hands so as to interfere with their sense of touch. For days, the students floated in a sea of nothingness, their eyes, ears and hands unable to orient them, living inside their increasingly vivid imaginations. To see whether this deprivation made them more susceptible to 'brainwashing,' Hebb then began playing recordings of voices talking about the existence of ghosts or the dishonesty of science --ideas that the students had said they found objectionable before the experiment began.

"In a confidential report on Hebb's findings, the Defense Research Board concluded that sensory deprivation clearly caused extreme confusion as well as hallucinations among the student test subjects and that 'a significant temporary lowering of intellectual efficiency occurred during and immediately after the period of perpetual deprivation.' Furthermore, the students' hunger for stimulation made them surprisingly receptive to the ideas expressed on the tapes, and indeed several developed an interest in the occult that lasted weeks after the experiment had come to an end. It was as if the confusion from sensory deprivation partially erased their minds, and then the sensory stimuli rewrote their patterns.

"A copy of Hebb's major study was sent to the CIA, as well as forty-one copies to the U.S. Navy and forty-two copies to the U.S. Army. The CIA also directly monitored the findings via one of Hebb's student researchers, Maitland Baldwin, who, unbeknownst to Hebb, was reporting to the agency. This keen interest is hardly surprising: at the very least, Hebb was proving that intensive isolation interfered with the ability to think clearly and made people more open to suggestion --priceless ideas for any interrogator. Hebb eventually realized that there was enormous potential for his research to be used not just to protect captured soldiers from getting 'brainwashed' but also as a kind of how-to manual for psychological torture. In the last interview he gave before his death in 1985, Hebb said, 'It was clear when we made our report to the Defense Research Board that we were describing formidable interrogation techniques.'"


(The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, pgs. 33-35)


Sensory deprivation was but one tool that Hebb's colleague, Dr. Ewen Cameron, developed while working at the Allan Memorial Institute both before and after he received official CIA funding. Other such techniques Cameron employed included "depatterning" and "psychic driving."

"In the case of Cameron's psyche driving technique, a patient would be isolated in a room --the 'sleep room' --and would be administered some combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (what is popularly known as 'electroshock'). Sometimes the shocks given were staggeringly high, and repeated more often than is usual in a therapeutic setting. The normal voltage is usually 110 volts; Cameron used 150 volts. The normal dosage was a single shock lasting a fraction of a second; Cameron's shocks lasted longer, up to one second (and thus an average of 30 times more powerful than normal) and were done 2-3 times a day as opposed to the more usual once a day, or once every two days. Electroshock causes a major convulsion, which is then followed by several minor convulsions. Cameron's was a variation on the already intense Page-Russell method, but taken up quite a few notches to the point where his patients became disoriented and confused. This was Cameron's aim, which was the opposite of what was intended by the already controversial electroconvulsive therapy method.

"The drug regimen was equally severe: a 'sleep cocktail' was administered to the subjects -- one can hardly call them 'patients' anymore --consisting of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal and Phenergan. The subject would be awakened several times a day for the electroshock treatment and for the drug concoction. The combination kept the subject asleep day and night except for the electroshock, during which time his screams could be heard all over Ward 2.

"This treatment typically would last from two weeks to a month, with some subjects being 'treated' in this manner for over two months. In some cases, they would lose control of their bowels, be unable to feed themselves or to tend to normal bodily functions. Many tried to escape, but were always captured and brought back to their ward by the doctors and orderlies, since they were in such feeble condition that escape was impossible, groping along the walls and pathetically urinating on the floor of the corridor.

"The effect of this treatment was to cause the subject to lose their memory, usually in three stages. In the first stage, much memory was lost, but not the facts of the subject being at the clinic, knowing he is at the clinic and why, and who the doctors and nurses are. The second stage involved the loss of what Cameron called 'space-time image'; the subject would not know where he was or why he was there. Understandably, this disorientation was extremely frightening. Imagine waking up in a hospital bed and not knowing what had happened, or why, and with no one in a position to tell you since keeping you in that degree of confusion was necessary to the 'treatment.' This nightmarish and Kafkaesque state of affairs with designed, remember, by man who had once tested Rudolf Hess for sanity.

"The third and final stage of memory loss is complete amnesia. There is only knowledge and memory of the present; there is no reference to past events or feelings. Cameron proudly pointed to the stage as the one where any schizophrenia has disappeared (along, of course, with a lot more!). The mind of the subject is a blank slate. He has been depatterned.

"The CIA, satisfied with this level of progress, then asked Cameron to go to the next level: to implant new behavioral patterns in place of the old, erased ones. To do this, Cameron turned to another technique he had developed, which he called 'psychic driving.'

"This method is, if anything, even more hellish than depatterning, and involves blasting the subject with tape recordings of verbal messages --usually specific for each subject --that played in a loop for sixteen hours a day for weeks. Normally, two tapes were used: the first was a 'negative conditioning' tape which concentrated on, obviously, the negative facts of the subject's life, continually reinforcing these unhealthy images. This would then be replaced by a 'positive conditioning' tape, also in a loop, also for sixteen hours a day for weeks, which would emphasize the desired behavior instead of the unwanted behavior of the first tape. Cameron's assistant in these endeavors -- one Leonard Rubinstein, whose salary was paid for entirely by CIA funds -- designed an enormous tape device that could play eight different tapes at the same time, thus 'psychically driving' eight subjects at once. The speakers for these tapes were placed beneath the subjects' pillows. They were inescapable, unremitting, endless; and, in some cases, augmented with the use of hallucinogens such as LSD...

"And this was not all. Cameron eventually (in 1957, and with more CIA money and official approval) turned his talents toward sensory deprivation...

"In Cameron's program, though, no one was allowed out of sensory deprivation until he said it was okay. In one particularly harrowing episode, he left a woman --who presented as simply suffering from menopause -- in sensory deprivation for thirty-five days... and this was after a prolonged period of depatterning and 101 days of psyche driving. Cameron wrote this one off: 'no favorable results were obtained.' We don't know what eventually became of this poor woman --whom we know only as 'Mary C.' --except for a notation by a CIA official at the time that it was impossible to tell if the sensory deprivation or the psyche driving had done the most damage."


(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pgs. 227-230)
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:06 pm

From the Eckhart Tolle thread:

American Dream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:30 pm wrote:
worldsastage » Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:13 pm wrote:I do believe it takes all kinds to make our reality what it is. I'm all for seeing how connected we each are and I do believe we are. At times such ideas have been very helpful in getting me out of a depressive funk and doing something that benefits others. However teachings like Tolle's also encourages a sort of passivity for those whose nature is such. I am action oriented but can accept that for others navel gazing is what works. At some point that navel grazing has to result in action otherwise it's just selfish mental masturbation in my view.

I couldn't get into Tolle. It brought back too much of my former cult, since they buy into some of this stuff while claiming to be action oriented. Their action amounted to naming and shaming evil by labeling and attacking everyone who disagrees with their POV. Thus evil was defined by the cult and only the cult. What this does is discourage activism, while encouraging insular group think and denigration of those who see things differently. The idea is that everyone has to believe the same thing, or have the same awareness etc., etc. in order for the world to advance. Not all spiritual groups are so....shall I say.... evil and controlling. It is a bitch trying to figure out which is which. Time is better spent doing something that helps the neighbor. In my view, ideas like Tolle's are the bait used to capture people who yearn for a spiritual ideal, who want a better world. Unfortunately often such people are broken down and molded into being something others believe will help usher in the new consciousness while millions continue to suffer.


Bingo! I suspect there is much in Tolle's teachings that mirrors classic thought reform/marketing/PR techniques. Not unlike some of the popular conspiratologists, Tolle draws from the tool kit of those "evil" forces he would purport to stand apart from.

Looking for "the Conspiracy"?

You may not have to look so far at all...

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

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 24, 2013 8:59 pm

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/05/ruins-people’s-lives

Ruins of people’s lives

The shadowy subculture of gang stalking.

BY NED BEAUMAN PUBLISHED 23 MAY 2013


Image
Darkened figures descend into the Chicago subway.

In 1919, the psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk published his famous paper “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia”, in which he wrote about patients who believed they were under the control of malign technology beyond their understanding. Sometimes, they claimed, this technology would cause “erections and seminal emissions that are intended to deprive the patient of his male potency and weaken him”. In typical Viennese fashion, Tausk concluded that “the influencing apparatus is a representation of the patient’s genitalia projected to the outer world . . . a machine independent of the aims of the ego and subordinated to the foreign will”.

Right away, we might be reminded of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which Tyrone Slothrop may or may not have been secretly conditioned to get an erection every time a V-2 rocket is about to strike London. Yet to find more patients for Tausk, we don’t need to look to fiction. “At first I believed they could only terminate my erection, but recently I also started believing that they could create my erection,” writes the author of a recent blog about electromagnetic persecution by the government. “Often I am given erections in co-ordination with the brain butchery, and occasionally voided of semen,” writes another in the same field.

Both these bloggers are part of an online community centred on a phenomenon called gang stalking. Gang stalking, according to one website:

. . is a covert investigation that is opened on an individual. The individual is then placed under overt and covert forms of surveillance. The person is followed around 24/7. Foot patrols and vehicle patrols are used to follow the individual around, as part of the monitoring process . . . The secondary goals seem to be to make the target homeless, jobless, give them a breakdown, and the primary goal seems to be to drive the target to forced suicide.

Gang stalking has been linked with, but doesn’t necessarily involve, remote mind control. No one has ever come forward as a perpetrator. But large numbers of people have come forward as victims.

Before the internet, if you had developed the belief that you’d been targeted in this way, you would have been isolated. Anyone hearing your story – whether a friend or a relation, or a doctor such as Tausk – would have tried to persuade you that you were suffering from paranoid delusions. But today you would find confirmation of your suspicions on dozens of websites, blogs and message boards. “When you read the methods used by gang stalkers to harass their victims,” writes one blogger, “it is helpful to know that the stories told by victims worldwide are remarkably consistent.”

You would also find information on developments similar to gang stalking that have been documented in the respectable media, such as a declassified Pentagon report on the “Bioeffects of selected non-lethal weapons” or Ealing Council signing up eight-year-olds as “Junior Streetwatchers”. You could even make some friends. In other words, you’d be part of a community – and, as the British psychiatrist Vaughan Bell points out in his paper “‘Mind control’ experiences on the internet”, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual stipulates that a belief cannot be classed as a delusion if it is “accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture”.

Reading about gang stalking online can be dispiriting, because one has the sense that someone such as Tausk really ought to be intervening. But I confess I also find it addictive. For instance, consider one blogger who believes even birds and animals are his enemies:

Birds, pigeons and crows, that can be controlled to fly (screaming) over me, to land in my garden when I walk into my kitchen and look outside, to crash into my kitchen window and car front window while driving. Birds, pigeons, that come sit, walk, on the roof of my house when I am upstairs having sex. Cats walking by like being programmed. Barking of dogs, flying away ducks etc, not by mind control but by beaming these animals with laser beams (directed energy weapons).

An entire menagerie of animal spies – if that isn’t in Pynchon, it should be. One might also recall Kafka or Don DeLillo, not to mention Mark Lombardi, the American artist whose work consisted of diagrams of various conspiracies involving the Vatican or the World Finance Corporation.

On another website, I found a collection of photographs of household objects – folding chairs, velcro straps, long underwear – that their owner believes to have been damaged during secret incursions into his home. The pictures have such eerie power that you could easily imagine them on a gallery wall next to a William Eggleston or a Laura Letin - sky. Elsewhere, the idea of harassment through the “everyday stimuli” of “red, white, yellow, strips, pens clicking, key jangling, loud coughing, loud whistling, loud smacking of clapping of hands together, cell phones, laptops, etc” evokes Sartre’s metaphysical nausea.

Still other online writers veer towards the psychedelic visions of Philip K Dick, proposing that the gang stalkers are really “lower astral entities, some aliens/non-humans, and Neg entities in general [who] are known to feed on the energies created by lower frequency emotions, since that’s what they resonate with, farming us for them in the same way we farm animals for their meat, milk, eggs and parts”, or, alternatively, normal humans wearing “frequency suits”, which “are invisible to the naked eye, but they seem to transport either your etheric layer, or another such layer from place to place”.

This is dangerous territory, however. Yes, there are precedents for appreciating the special energies we find in work by people who deviate from the psychological norm, going back to Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922). After reading it, the painter Paul Klee wrote: “In our own time, worlds have opened up which not everybody can see into, although they too are part of nature. Perhaps it’s really true that only children, madmen and savages see into them” – a remark the open-mindedness of which is not quite enough to outweigh its condescension. At Lausanne’s Collection de l’Art Brut and London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital there are whole museums devoted to such art.

None of the people describing their gang stalking experiences on the internet think of themselves as making art, however. They are serious. They want their writing and photography to be taken seriously. In most cases it is harmless to aestheticise modes of expression that are not deliberately aesthetic, otherwise there could be no such thing as Pieces of Intelligence: the Existential Poetry of Donald H Rumsfeld. (And there are grey areas: although Henry Darger’s The Story of the Vivian Girls, one of the cornerstones of the very idea of outsider art, was certainly intended as a creative work, there is no reason to think it was ever intended for public consumption.)

But human misery is different. A comparison here might be what’s sometimes called “ruin porn”. I can spend hours looking at beautiful photographs of derelict houses in Detroit or condemned council estates in London, but at the back of my mind I feel guilty about it, because I’m aware that these aren’t just evocative scenery, they’re also places where people less fortunate than me actually had to sleep every night. Gang stalking websites, similarly, are the ruins of people’s lives and I shouldn’t be cruising them for ephemeral thrills. I feel the same way about a lot of amateur YouTube videos that go viral: some of those “zany characters” wouldn’t be behaving like that on camera if the US had a functional mental health-care system. This is what the philosopher Mark Reinhardt, in his essay on the idea of “beautiful suffering”, calls “a kind of morally obtuse obscuring or exploitation of pain”.

Gang stalking is more resonant than these other examples, because here we find ourselves counterpoising two different methods of making sense of the inferno in which we all live. To compare notes on gang stalking with like-minded strangers on the internet is to take part in an investigation, almost a forensic science, a project to expose what Pynchon calls “other orders below the visible”, instead of merely sitting in your house with the blinds closed because you’re worried that everyone is out to get you. And to appreciate the artefacts of this subculture on an aesthetic level is not only to look sidelong at despair: it is also to play on sensibilities that were first sharpened in us by the work of Pynchon, DeLillo, Dick and so on: writers who were themselves trying to confront a world so large, so secretive, so random, so pitiless that not much human feeling can survive in it.

These two postures differ in the important respect that one comes from a state of abjection and the other from one of literary privilege. All the same, they are both ways of coming to terms with life. I would like to say that in future I’ll spend less time on gang stalking websites, but my own work is so derivative of the aforementioned authors in its preoccupation with conspiracies that I will inevitably find myself going back to these sources to forage for inspiration. Then I will launder them in my work like dirty money. Perhaps the challenge, then, is to prove that an aesthetic attitude and an empathetic one need not be mutually exclusive – that even if I’m planning a novel about remote-control spy-ducks, I can forage and feel at the same time.


Ned Beauman’s latest novel is “The Teleportation Accident” (Sceptre, £8.99
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 24, 2013 10:37 pm

http://csp.org/nicholas/A5.html

LSD and Ego Dissolution

I'd been itching for some time to try a larger lsd dose (8 hits, each most likely of a pretty typical strength for the U.S.) than I had in the past and a four-day weekend provided the opportunity.

Most of the trip went beautifully. On a walk in the woods, I experienced some profoundly transcendent moments. I felt as though I embodied a whole universe of pure consciousness, shaped into the particular experience of the trees, snow, rocks, and sky about me. I was thinking a lot about striving to achieve a unity between my thoughts, actions, perceptions, and language and that this unity would be equivalent to allowing the divine to express itself most fully through my being. For quite some time, this unity seemed to be achieved.

At one point, I decided to record some of my thoughts on a tape (I was too far-gone to write). I pushed record and said "hello" several times into the microphone. When I played it back, my hellos sounded like a strange chanting. I noticed a wavering in my voice that took on a linguistic character all its own -- and which was in no way related to the word "hello" or to my intention in saying it. It was as though my voice expressed a vibration that reflected the presence of that core human consciousness I felt very much in-touch with. I hummed/chanted for a while more, giving it a fully expression. It was quite astounding and moving. Later, however, talking to a friend, I felt that same quality of "vibration" manifested in all of my actions -- I could see the pattern manifest in the way I spoke, the things I spoke about, the way I walked from room to room. Suddenly, I felt out-of-control and went to lie down on my bed in an effort to calm myself.

It seemed an increasing amount of "J" was being replaced by this random stream of human consciousnes. The process - which I felt then was divine, yet cruel and terrifying now - seemed to be attempting to dissolve me. I called to my friend, I tried to explain, but it was difficult to speak and to concentrate. There were quite a few moments when I was so absorbed in fighting the dissolution that I remained silent and still for what seemed like long periods of time.

As the dissolution continued, I felt as though my body was becoming posessed by random personalities that flowed in from the stream of core human consciousness. I remember looking at my friend with the consciousness of others, touching him as though he was some remarkable alien thing. The urging toward dissolution become so intense that I was sure that "I" would not return from the trip. I was terrified - I didn't want to die. I thought I was literally losing my mind, and losing it permanently. I managed to express some of this to my friend; he held me while I moaned and cried in the grips of what I was sure was death and madness. Everything around me seemed utterly alien; once, when my friend tried to talk to me, I felt I had lost the ability to understand language.

My friend was eventually able to get through to me, to talk me back to a state of semi-sanity. It took a tremendous amount of will on my part to cling to his words and make sense of the and, as I did so, I felt I was the whole of the universe clawing its way out of darkness and madness toward a divine radiance and sense of health and salvation. This continued for some time; it was utterly exhausting, and I didn't know how long I would be able to bear it. The feeling of dissolution had taken on a physical character - a searing iciness seemed to be taking my body over. My friend continued to reassure me that I'd be okay. Eventually, I began to feel like it. I had made it "to the light", it seemed, and felt a peace return and saturate my being. Concentrating on the light, I was able to manifest it in greater and greater degrees. It seemed I had turned my soul - which was also the soul of the universe - away from drowning in a river of fragments of human consciousness toward something that I could only call the genuinely Divine.

The ego-dissolution continued now, but peacefully. Whatever parts of me left were replaced by that Divinity. Visions of joyously dissolving into the sun and the sky accomanied the experience and there was an unutterable feeling of the infinite and the sacred. I encountered the stream of human consciousness again, but this time I looked on it with what I felt to be the love of God. It was beautiful, touching, precious beyond all description. It had been nearly twelve hours since I'd dosed, and the effects were subsiding. I focused on reshaping my own self/ego in that divine image.

The profound and terrifying ego-loss experience induced by 8 hits of lsd had unanticipated effects. Over the next several months, I became increasingly "religious", perfectly confident that my soul had literally touched the divine. Subsequent lower-dose experiments induced religious and mystical experiences that I would have thought inaccessable at all but the highest doses. While this appeared a positive and fortunate trend at first, the experiences soon became distinctly more serious and somehow "darker." For instance, near Christmas, I experienced a haunting vision of Christ as an enflamed and swollen sun rising above a lifeless desert. I understood the sun as a symbol of Christ's passion and, far from radiating a loving and forgiving warmth, the sun appeared agonized, enraged, harsh, and cruel. Now the sun became a heart and the heart was split down the middle but continued beating, flooding the desert with the blood of Christ's passion. Inasmuch as the blood enriched the soil, making it fertile for life, the heart or Christ was in the unspeakable agony of crucificionand it was this very agony that was the life within the blood. If becoming such a martyr is my spiritual destiny, I thought, I cannot bear it. I panicked, much as I had during my ego-loss experience, losing myself in a blind and icy fear that seemed to pervade my whole being.

After a few more such experiences, I decided to stop using psychedelics for a while. I had, I felt, begun to lose touch with reality to a dangerous degree: I was growing increasingly paranoid and prone to increasingly severe panic attacks, a flood of long-buried memories, some traumatic, some trivial, occured to me on an almost daily basis. I was haunted by strange and disturbing mental imagery (often bloody and violent) that I could make little sense of and that seemed to frequently contain powerful "Jungian" overtones, and I even experienced a few genuine hallucinations - again, usually of rather disturbing content - while completely sober. The situation worsened to the degree that ego-loss - which I interpreted as punishment from God for refusing to become a wandering homeless ascetic - almost always coincided, to some degree, with the panic attacks. As soon as I tried to find "grounding" within myself to help me ride-out the attack, all sense of personal identity would vanish, leaving nothing of me but raw panic and emotional agony. I was convinced I was becoming insane. This whole period culminated in a brief stay in a local mental hospital, I was put on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. Gradually, I started getting better.

That which had the most powerful healing effect, however, was the reading of certain post-Nietzchean philosophers (ie, Martin Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida) to whom I was introduced by a favorite teacher. As I made inroads into understanding some of the writings of these philosophers, I began to understand how the content of so many of my most powerful psychedelic experiences had been determined by certain Western philosophical presuppositions whose validity had been called into question literally centuries ago but which were nevertheless very much alive and influential among those people I'd encountered in various"hippie" or "alternative" subcultures. The capacity which I was developing to move my thinking away from the thinking determined by those presuppositions revealed to me that my entheogenic experiences had been not so much genuine revelations of the divine but rather intensely vivid experiences of both a collective and a personal mythology which had I discovered and developed over the past four or five years - a mythology which, because it was so pervasive among those with whom I associated, I had taken for truth unquestioningly. Realizing that the content of my entheogenic experiences - including the prescriptive "lessons" learned from those experiences -- might have been radically different had my "set and setting" been radically different allowed me to examine that content more rationally; in so doing, its grip on my psyche was loosened.

The healing process is far from over, but I no longer feel that I'm teetering on the brink of insanity at every waking moment - my psyche is gradually reconstructing itself and is thereby regaining a coherence which I had, for a time, lost. Nevertheless, I still struggle at least on occasion with panic and periods of severe depression; flashbacks are not infrequent, and both my physical senses and my emotions frequently seem painfully overstimulated. Most disturbing is that I now often feel unfamiliar and alien to myself - as though much of "who I am" was literally and permanently "erased". At the same time, I think that, if I manage eventually to regain a sense of being grounded within myself, I will have, in that process, 'lived' authentically and fully and to the depth of my being.

In summary, I would urge extreme caution in approaching entheogens for spiritual reasons. One's grasp of reality can slide away right beneath one's nose, without one ever realizing it until it's far too late to recover. Always keep as clear a head as possible -- and if anything threatens that clarity, heed it as a very serious and very dire warning.

JT, American man.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 25, 2013 10:24 am

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

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 25, 2013 6:40 pm

The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws… against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations

Ronald K. Siegel; Louis Jolyon West (1975). Hallucinations: Behavior, Experience, and Theory
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 25, 2013 6:52 pm

Frequently Asked Questions

http://www.rand.org/about/faq.html

I've heard a lot of rumors about you guys. Are any of them true?
Sure, some of them are. And many are false. Here's a sampling of the ones that come up most often:


RAND planned to use LSD to stop antiwar protestors
In the early 1960s, we did examine the short- and long-term effect of LSD on personality change. Volunteers from RAND's research and support staff enjoyed their "trips" in a controlled environment at UCLA.

Long-Lasting Effects of LSD on Certain Attitudes in Normals: An Experimental Proposal — 1962
William Hersche McGlothlin
Full Document

Short-Term Effects of LSD on Anxiety, Attitudes, and Performance — 1963
William H. McGlothlin, Sidney Cohen, Marcella S. McGlothlin
Full Document
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 25, 2013 7:00 pm

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