Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Sep 22, 2017 1:24 pm

How to Hack Your Brain (for $5,000) By CASEY SCHWARTZ SEPT. 21, 2017

EDEN, Utah — One morning last month a group of roughly 60 people, including doctors, C.E.O.s and internet entrepreneurs, gathered under a big white dome to hear the mission statement of their host, a 45-year-old man named Jamie Wheal. As he paced back and forth in front of an altar bearing shiny Buddha heads, Mr. Wheal talked about the perils of information overload in our content-rich era. “A literate person in the European Middle Ages, ” he said, “consumed the same amount of content in their entire lives as we do reading a single edition of the Sunday New York Times.” Sinewy and tanned from a life of outdoor pursuits, Mr. Wheal was offering attendees the chance to “upgrade” their nervous systems to meet this incontrovertible information overload. How? With “flow.” But what is flow? First popularized decades ago by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is an elusive state cultivated by artists, athletes and others, that of being so absorbed in what they’re doing that they lose track of time and thought, finding themselves guided rather by instinct and intuition. It has also been referred to as the Zone — not to be confused with the diet of the same name — or just “being in the moment.” And for those who have experienced it, there is no denying its magic. Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, who turns 83 this month, is a deeply philosophical academic formerly of the University of Chicago (now at Claremont Graduate University) and still publishing. In 2004 he gave a Ted Talk that has been viewed over four million times. Mr. Wheal has taken a somewhat brisker, more commercial approach. He has advised members of the United States Navy Special Operations, top-ranked athletes and executives of technology companies on “optimizing performance” through flow, receiving six-figure fees for some of his consultations. His five-day retreat, at a sprawling, privately held property known as Summit and convened the day before the solar eclipse, cost almost $5,000 and was a sort of beta test for spreading his gospel to a larger public audience. (He also offers free assessments and videos on his website.) Attendees were housed in white tepee-like tents, with portable toilets set up down a dirt path. The camp had been erected quickly by the “glamping” company Aether Camp, to Mr. Wheal’s specifications. Mr. Wheal, who said his father was a test pilot for the British royal navy, came to the United States from England at age 8 and speaks rapidly in a mashup accent, dropping idiosyncratic phrases and erudite references to the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, to Cincinnatus and Aldous Huxley. At moments he is given to phrases that are not immediately comprehensible, like “We are broaching the possibility of midwifing humanity into the infinite game.” But his larger message came through clearly. In our digital age, loud with bottom-feeder commentary, the ping of incoming emails and bleating social media, the pursuit of flow is all the more urgent. “Honestly, have we abdicated our purpose just because of these insistent micro asks?” Mr. Wheal said. “Have we just completely ceded our center, completely ceded clarity, and it was all just based on 20-something brogrammers trying to crack our attention spans?” To fulfill his flow-finding mission, Mr. Wheal wants to bring what he calls his Dojo Domes to locations around the world. Next year, he and his partners hope to build a one-million-square-foot complex in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a medical emphasis, combining brain-imaging technology with simpler equipment. Mr. Wheal began to envision gatherings of this sort in 2007, while he was teaching at Esalen, the spiritual retreat in California. With Steven Kotler, a journalist, he founded the Flow Genome Project, based in Austin, Tex., and dedicated to gathering the latest science behind flow states. Its board of advisers includes neuroscientists, filmmakers and a kiteboarder. It was his book, “Stealing Fire, ” written with Mr. Kotler and published earlier this year, that attracted many of the flow campers to Utah. In it, Mr. Wheal and Mr. Kotler consider the question of peak human performance, describing how so many powerful companies and individuals are now trying to optimize their own brains, in ways both legal and illegal. They offer case studies from the Navy SEALs and Google, arguing that what the world today faces “wicked problems, ” unprecedented and complex, that require creative solutions, the kinds that are most likely to come not from staid meetings in conference rooms but rather from “non-ordinary states.” “Flow, ” they write, is associated with six neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, norepinephrine, anandamide and endorphins. Knowing the neurochemical profile of flow means, in theory, people can devise ways of achieving it more often, more reliably and more quickly. The new generation of flowsters are excited, perhaps, that using the advances of neuroscience, they might not have to meditate every day for 10 years to gain access to these layers of their brains. “This was a significant investment of time and money for me — this tells you how compelled I was to come here, ” said Alexandre Lang-Willar. At 28, Mr. Lang-Willar is in some ways the embodiment of Mr. Wheal’s target demographic: the high achiever who grasps the brass ring, only to discover he craves something more. Mr. Lang-Willar quit his job as a Goldman Sachs analyst and has created a dating app with his father called “Invite and Meet, ” centered on live activities, that will be introduced later this year. Reading “Stealing Fire, ” Mr. Lang-Willar said, he became convinced that nothing less than a “cultural awakening” was underway. By 8 a.m. each morning, the flow campers lay prone and shoeless in the Dojo Dome, moving back and forth on brightly colored foam rollers. Other daily activities included balancing and bouncing on big yellow balls; acro-yoga, in which partners learn to lift each other in the air; and strapping into special contraptions, like Mr. Wheal’s 360 Swing, which allows those courageous enough to propel themselves, standing up, all the way around the swing’s axle in a complete loop. All of these undertakings were in the service of honing a crucial element in flow, what Mr. Wheal refers to as “embodied cognition”: integrating our whole minds and bodies through specific exercise, based on the science showing that physical movement directly affects how we think and feel. “They are tapping into spiritual intelligence that before now was only really talked about in a religious context, ” Kristen Ulmer said, sitting outside the Dojo Dome one morning. Ms. Ulmer, formerly the top ranked extreme skier in the world, has also written a book, “The Art of Fear.” She went on: “A lot more people are saying they’re spiritual but not religious — but what does that really mean? I would say sports and movement are the most oft way we access a spiritual experience and transcend our ego, but they’re the least discussed and least understood.” On the third night of camp, attendees gathered in the Dojo Dome for a night of heavy breathing. On their backs, as the lights changed colors and music pulsed from the speakers, they practiced a technique developed by the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, involving intense hyperventilation for 15 minutes. People were transported into altered states, gyrating their pelvises, bursting into peals of unrestrained, almost feral laughter, even leaping to their feet to dance. The group had succeeded, Mr. Wheal announced afterward, in “defragging our nervous systems.” In addition to exercise, lectures and breathing, there were some fairly Xrated activities on the program. One evening after dinner, Mr. Wheal spoke about a set of sexual practices that he has found particularly effective for transporting oneself well outside of humdrum daily rhythms. (They are further detailed in a chapter of “Stealing Fire” called “Taking the Kink out of Kinky.”) All of these are what Mr. Wheal calls, apologetically, “hacks”: techniques for busting out of the overwhelmed modern condition into a place of creativity, passion, focus, tranquillity, vitality and self-refinement. “The genius of what we’re doing here is we’re combining ideas about how to get into flow with actually doing physical things to experience it, ” said Kora Kinard, 29, an orgasmic meditation practitioner from San Francisco who attended. “The flow state and the orgasm state are very connected.” Indeed, Mr. Wheal, having wearied somewhat of the term “flow, ” prefers “ecstasis, ” an ancient Greek term for “stepping beyond oneself.” “It’s a giant irony of my life that everyone wants to come and talk to me about flow and I have no interest in having that conversation, ” he said. “I don’t want to be hemmed in.” The neuro-chemicals that define flow or ecstasis are powerfully alluring, and Mr. Wheal warned they are not always used for good. He argues, for instance, that Donald J. Trump instinctively knew how to manipulate them in gathering support for his presidency. “Trump hacked ecstasis, ” Mr. Wheal said. “Light, sound, movement, repetition, scapegoating the other. People said if you haven’t been to his rallies, you’re missing what’s actually happening in this movement. And what does Hillary say? ‘I’ve got a policy binder.’ While Trump pulled all the strings.” Politics aside, Mr. Wheal suggests that we seek daily not a fleeting nonordinary hour or two, but rather, a permanently altered mind-set. A trait, not a state, a means of incorporating these methods into our lives so that flow, or ecstasis, is threaded through all our months and years. Flow camp ended with a shoeless closing ceremony, with participants sitting cross-legged in a circle passing a tiny sculpture of Tara, the female Bodhisattva, from person to person and sharing memories of their experiences that week. The room was thick with emotion and warmth. But the last thing Mr. Wheal wants to produce, he said, are more “bliss junkies and epiphany whores, ” for whom he reserves a particular antipathy. It’s not enough, in other words, to eat magic mushrooms, experience oneness with nature and humanity, cuddle a Buddha statue and then go right back to how things were. Or, for that matter, to parachute into Burning Man — where many of the flow campers were heading next — melt down your ego on the playa, and then fail to integrate the experience into the rest of your life. “Everyone lines up for the peak experience, ” Mr. Wheal said. “But no one does their push-ups on Monday morning.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/styl ... -flow.html


.....

hmmmm ... when did this get moved to the Data Dump?
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 22, 2017 1:50 pm

There are strange things happening everyday...


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

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 22, 2017 3:22 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:53 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 28, 2017 1:23 pm

Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried

Kenneth Anger, underground film-maker and documentarian of Hollywood’s dark side, may be the last surviving link between black magic, Howard Hughes, Rudolph Valentino, Alfred Kinsey, Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Mickey Mouse. For Esquire, Mick Brown spends 48 hours in LA with a legend of the counterculture

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Following Parsons’ death, Anger lived with Cameron for two years, intensifying his study of Crowleyian magick. Anger describes his beliefs as “paganism” which, he says, “is just an appreciation of nature. It has nothing to do with so-called ‘black magic’”. For many years he has been a member of the OTO, but is reticent about his own “magickal” practices: the OTO, he points out, is after all a secret society. He is not, he says, “doing magic circles all the time, although I have done it on occasion”. But he follows Crowley’s practice of “Liber Resh”, a ritual meditation for greeting the sunrise. He affects a cheery wave: “Hello sun!”

For a while in the Fifties, Anger lived in Crowley’s former home Boleskine on the shores of Loch Ness. (When Crowley first moved there, he complained to the local council about the “prostitute problem” in the area.

A mystified official was dispatched to investigate and reported there were no prostitutes. “That,” Crowley replied, “is the problem...”)

In 1955, Anger and Alfred Kinsey visited Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. In the years since Crowley’s eviction, the farmhouse had fallen into a state of near dereliction. “It was owned by two brothers who hated each other. One was a communist and one was a fascist, so I had to pay an exorbitant amount of money to each to get access to the place.”

Local peasants, fearing a revival of Crowleyism, greeted them with a traditional curse – a mutilated cat on the doorstep. Anger spent a summer removing the whitewash that had been slapped over the erotic images Crowley painted on the walls, filming and photographing them. “There was a door to the kitchen, about 8ft tall, and on that he’d painted the image of the Scarlet Woman, nude, rather outrageously holding a golden phallus, and a cake – the Cake of Light – which was like his Eucharist. I photographed that.” Anger sighs.

“I wish I’d taken it [away] but it was just too complicated.”

There was, he says, “a distinct presence” about the place. “There were unexplained rattlings on the tiled roof as if someone was running back and forth on it. And on one occasion, my light just turned over and crashed. Just little things. I don’t need to be convinced, because I saw them. These things happen.”

The ruined “abbey” is still there, but the spectre of Crowley has been diminished by a new sports stadium that has been constructed behind it. Anger sighs, “It ruins the whole atmosphere.”

***

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Convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil, sometime guitarist in Love, on the steps of the San Francisco house known as "The Russian Embassy" where he and Anger lived from 1966 - '68

Cowley’s Thelemite teachings have been a major influence on Anger’s films, most notably in what is generally considered to be his magnum opus, Lucifer Rising. Ten years in the making, in it Anger intended to elevate Lucifer from his place in Christian belief as the fallen angel, to his pantheistic role as “the bringer of light”, or “the original rebel”, as Anger has it.

Anger began the film in the mid-Sixties. The first person cast as Lucifer was a five-year-old boy called Godot – the golden-haired son of Vito Paulekas and his wife Szou, two original LA hippy freak-scenesters – who died tragically after tumbling through a skylight.

Lucifer Two was a guitarist named Bobby Beausoleil, who had briefly played with the seminal rock group Love. Anger shot 30 minutes of footage before the pair fell out. “He was behaving like demons in people do,” Anger would later recall. Beausoleil vanished but reappeared with Charles Manson, and in 1970 was convicted of the murder of a music teacher named Gary Hinman, for which he is still serving a life sentence in jail.

In the late Sixties, Anger moved to London, bringing the troubled project with him. Through his friend the art dealer Robert Fraser, he was introduced to the Swinging London circle that included The Beatles, Rolling Stones and film director Donald Cammell, whose 1970 film Performance, about a spent rock star (played by Jagger) in search of his “demon” stands as the defining record of the darkening spirit of the times. Cammell, whose father had been a close friend of Aleister Crowley and written a biography of him, enjoyed telling friends how “The Beast” had bounced him as a child on his knee.

Cultured, erudite, exotic, mysterious – Anger became something of the presiding magus among Fraser’s gilded circle. He was a house guest at Redlands, Keith Richards’ house in Sussex, where Anita Pallenberg (“a very amusing girl”) would recall waking one morning and looking out of the window onto the lawn to see Anger furiously pacing a magical circle. Keith and Anita were said to be contemplating a pagan wedding ceremony with Anger officiating, but had a change of heart.

It was Anger who introduced Marianne Faithfull to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, a surrealist satire about the Devil wreaking havoc in post-revolutionary Moscow. (Written between 1928 and 1940, the book was not published until 1967). Faithfull, in turn gave it to Jagger, inspiring The Rolling Stones’ 1968 song “Sympathy for the Devil”.

Anger wanted Jagger to take on the mantle of Lucifer for his film but Jagger demurred, apparently happy to sing about Lucifer, but squeamish about the prospect of playing him. “I think he was just busy with other things,” Anger says diplomatically. Faithfull would later describe Jagger making a funeral pyre of all their occult reading in the fireplace of their Cheyne Walk mansion, and the singer was said to have taken to wearing a wooden crucifix for some time afterwards. Faithfull did appear in the film, as the demon Lilith, rising from a sarcophagus. Donald Cammell played Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld.

Jagger contributed a short piece of synthesiser music that Anger used on Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969). But the principle candidate for the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising became Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

Anger had first met Page in 1973 at a Sotheby’s auction, where both were bidding for a manuscript by Aleister Crowley: “He, of course, had more money than I did.” Page was able to indulge his interest in Crowley to the point of buying Boleskine and accumulating an extensive collection of his artworks.

Page provided some music for Lucifer Rising, although it was not used in the final version. His interest in Crowley has reportedly cooled and he now keeps Crowley’s paintings, Anger says, “in the closet, which is strange... Jimmy is very skilled on the guitar, but I have no idea what somebody like him does with his life when not working. I hope he’s having a good time. But he has an unfortunate complex for someone who’s so rich – and he’s earned a hell of a lot of money – and that is he’s a miser. And I find that a very unfortunate trait.

“I’ve met a couple of rich misers, including the senior John Paul Getty [named in the 1966 Guinness Book of Records as the world’s richest private citizen]. He got so annoyed at his freeloading Surrey house guests calling New York and talking for hours that he installed a pay-phone.” Anger laughs. “Well, who could blame him?”

The soundtrack for Lucifer Rising was eventually created by Bobby Beausoleil, from inside the Oregon prison where he is incarcerated.


http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/news/a ... eth-anger/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Oct 01, 2017 9:45 am

Travels with Synesthesia: “What’s Left?” October 2017, MRR #413

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I stood on an outdoor train platform surrounded by snow in my fever dream. The sky was black, speckled with white, either stars or snow. The ground was white flecked with black, and as I looked more closely at the snowy ground I grew distraught. It was like looking at white skin dotted with black pores, only the skin was like a sheet of greasy virginal Crisco and the black pits were putrefaction personified. I was deeply disturbed by the dual view, the juxtaposition of silky white as seen from a distance and black rot seen up close, and this ugly double vision had a smell, like burned hair.

It was a nightmare actually, the product of a bad case of measles when I was seven years old. When I startled from the terror of that dream, the combined view persisted well into my wakefulness and I had to shake myself, blink a number of times and crane my head back and forth, to finally dispel the affect. The fever produced a couple repeats of the nightmare while I was sick, but it was more upsetting when the night terrors returned when I was no longer ill. For a few years afterwards I had the horrible dream intermittently, complete with the frightening double vision and associated smell that continued after the dream woke me. I had to get out of bed each time and move around my room to make the hallucination dissipate.

It was my first experience of synesthesia. The twisted visual dream was intertwined with the smell, two senses linked together as one, the visual creating the olfactory. I was so freaked out about the double vision thing and preoccupied with preventing future nightmares that I didn’t notice the connection until well after I had managed to suppress the dream’s reoccurrence. I accidentally singed my hair as a fourteen-year-old adolescent pyromaniac playing with freelance rocket making and the stench immediately triggered a brief episode of double nightmare vision.

My second instance of synesthesia happened after I turned 18. I had just registered for the Vietnam draft, enrolled at Ventura Junior College in anticipation of transferring as a junior to UC Santa Cruz, and started hanging out with some high school friends now attending college who were part of Campus Crusade for Christ. They gently badgered me to attend prayer circles and bible studies, triggering my latent Catholic guilt feelings about everything from masturbation to experimenting with drugs. One Saturday afternoon, as I walked through the lemon and avocado groves near my home in deep, troubled contemplation, I was visited by god.

At least that’s how it felt at that moment. Everything around me became brilliant, clear, and sparkling. I felt immersed in everything around me, and simultaneously elevated above it all. I had a sense of personal calm, but not of peace. And there was a burning firewood and slightly fruity smell. I had the sensation of being in the presence of something vast and powerful and absolutely frightening, something with which I was in communion, something that was about to change my life. For the first time I understood the meaning of the word awe, a feeling of reverence and respect mixed with fear and trembling. It was not in any way a pleasant sensation. I was simultaneously overwhelmed, exalted, and terrified.

Thus began my brief stint as a born-again Christian, where being touched by god was inextricably linked to the smell of the burning bush. It quickly evaporated into my longstanding atheism as I ultimately tried to explain away my experience. The smell, well I was in the middle of a lemon grove so maybe there was some brush burning nearby. I eventually started taking psychedelics and noticed the similarity between those chemical experiences and my spiritual one, including lots of drug-induced synesthesia. But to call my mystical experience biochemically based doesn’t say much as all our experiences are ultimately biochemical in origin. Only when I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Living with a Wild God much later did I reconcile myself to the possibility there are still mysteries to the universe to which I’m not privy.

I may never have been touched by god but I have been hammered by the migraine devil, a surefire cause for my synesthesia nowadays. I started getting migraines when I was around 43. They were rare, and both classic—with prodrome, aura, and excruciating headache—and intense, incapacitating me for 8 hours minimum. I became dissociative to the point of verbal and mental incoherence until I just went to sleep for the rest of the day, to wake sometime later with a horrific migraine hangover. Over the years, my migraines increased in frequency and decreased in severity, so that I now get one every month or so, each just a little bit of an aura and no appreciable, immediate headache. I have tried botox treatments and now do a micro-dose of an anti-convulsant drug.

A recent migraine started with sensitivity to light, then a dizzying head rush when I stood up, quickly converting to a sparkly scotoma complete with scintillating lights and jagged black-and-white anasazi lines, all sharply bordered into a blindspot that slowly floated across my vision. I had errands to run, but I took the time to let the brief aura dissipate. It did not automatically turn into a headache, but the disassociation started on the drive down the hill to a nearby commercial neighborhood. Everything appeared simultaneously vaguely familiar and utterly strange. I seemed to be in a Tyrolean Alpine village, odd and quaint, at the bottom of a deep, dark mountain ravine. And the crisp air was saturated with the odor of burnt metal.

The Greek prefix syn- means united, with, together, at the same time. Thanks to my migraines, I experience low level hallucinations and synesthesia intermittently, where my senses run together. Nothing like my childhood fever dreams or my adolescent altered states of consciousness, yet still a departure from reality. Even without the outright instances of synesthesia, I grasped that my sense of smell was somehow linked to my other senses, as when the shape of the trees in Golden Gate Park seemed connected to the park’s loamy smell, triggering vivid childhood memories from when I lived with my parents in San Francisco between the ages of three and six years old.

I realized early on that the real world wasn’t what it seemed to be, and might actually be much more than it seemed. I certainly didn’t arrive at the absurd belief that we create our own reality or that mind is the only reality, and I’m particularly disdainful of the post-truth assertion that simply believing something makes it so. Climate change, like gravity, is real, whether we believe in it or not. But it would be too facile to claim that my ability to juggle different points of view comes from these experiences of altered reality I’ve had throughout my life. I haven’t become any less tolerant of fascism simply because I can understand fascist ideology or comprehend where a fascist is coming from.

I also don’t doubt that my unconscious capacity to synthesize sensory input in part accounts for my artistic and literary creativity. But as a conscious basis for originality, synthesis is overrated. Both Alice Yaeger Kaplan and Kevin Coogan cited the French fascist Robert Brasillach who wrote that Communism and Fascism would one day be seen as “the two poetries” of the twentieth century. We now seem to be inundated by attempts to synthesize leftwing and rightwing ideologies in efforts to “go beyond” Left and Right. These calls to transcend the orthodox Left/Right political model almost all come from the Right, it must be noted. Current Left/Right crossover politics should also be pointed out for having originated in nightmare with the goal of ever greater nightmare. The separate totalitarian horrors of Communism and Fascism only anticipate greater horrors in some terrifying synthesis to come. This political combination is entirely voluntary. My fever dreams and migraines are not something I wish to relive, and even my spiritual experience was unpleasant. Plus, they were not of my choosing.

But enough about the sick joke that equates poetry with indiscriminate terror and mass murder.


https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/201 ... 7-mrr-413/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 04, 2017 4:46 pm

A Fateful Hunt for a Buried Stash of the Greatest LSD Ever Made

In the 1970s, a quiet pocket of rural Wales became the psychedelic hub of the world. We went back in search of the chemists, dealers, and thousands of hidden blotters.


I ask Mr. Ebenezer whether he knew of any other strange happenings in Llanddewi-Brefi, and his eyes light up as he begins talking about a mysterious man who appeared toward the end of the 60s, a decade before the LSD. "He was an amazing man. Bloody mad but highly intelligent. A fugitive from the Krays apparently, and he had a scar from ear to ear."

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The man in question was David Litvinoff, an enigmatic and mercurial character in 50s and 60s London with as many connections to the worlds of rock 'n' roll and fine art as he had to the aristocracy and the criminal underworld of the Kray twins.

The English jazz and blues singer George Melly described Litvinoff as such: "The fastest talker I ever met, full of outrageous stories, at least half of which turned out to be true, a dandy of squalor, a face either beautiful or ugly, I could never decide which, but certainly 100 percent Jewish, a self-propelled catalyst who didn't mind getting hurt as long as he made something happen, a sacred monster, first class."

One night in 1968, Litvinoff had a disagreement with one of his gangster associates and was badly beaten up. Shortly after that he vanished. When he re-appeared some months later, it was in the Llanddewi-Brefi village shop, begging the shopkeeper to let him take some provisions for free because he hadn't gotten himself any cash yet. He had moved into a small whitewashed cottage with a slate roof on the edge of the village, called Cefn Bedd (which translates as behind the grave).

Soon, Litvinoff's famous friends were arriving from London to visit him in this little village that he called his "Celticlimboland," where "nothing is the norm and quite rightly so." Between the years of 1970 and 1972, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Marc Bolan, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and many more all made their way to Llanddewi-Brefi, much to the amusement and confusion of the locals. One time Litvinoff rounded up a group of excited older women in the post office after telling them he had Cliff Richard in the car outside, only for them to shrug with disappointment when it was actually a bewildered Keith Richards.

Notorious parties would take place at his home, a mixture of London friends and any young locals who were brave enough. "On sunny days," writes Keiron Pim in his biography of Litvinoff, Jumpin' Jack Flash, "he would hoist his stereo's speakers up into the branches of the trees by the cottage and blast music out across the fields while he and his friends went skinny-dipping in the river or lounged naked on sofas in the meadow, smoking hash."

When Mr. Ebenezer visited Litvinoff at his cottage one afternoon, he noticed an invitation on the side to Jimi Hendrix's funeral in Seattle. There was a boiled sweet attached to it: The message inside said the sweet was laced with LSD and instructed anyone who couldn't attend the funeral to take it on the same day. In a series of events that led to Litvinoff leaving the village for good, he offered the sweet to a local policeman who was doing the rounds one afternoon. He spent the rest of the day splayed across Litvinoff's sofa, hallucinating and shouting nonsense into his walkie-talkie.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pakq ... -ever-made
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 04, 2017 10:28 pm

David Litvinoff


Criminal connections
Keith Richards wrote of Litvinoff that he "was on the borders of art and villainy, a friend of the Kray brothers, the East End gangsters."[10] The novelist Derek Raymond said, "Used to know Litvinoff's half-brother David quite well. He managed to kill himself. Which was probably just before he would have been murdered."[11]

In Notorious, John Pearson writes that Litvinoff was homosexual and that one function that he performed for Ronnie Kray, who was also homosexual, was to procure boys for sexual services for Ronnie's friends. Such activities also provided useful material for blackmail purposes.[12] Art dealer Christopher Gibbs said "He didn't have an affair with Ronnie Kray, but he used to pick up boys with him sometimes. I remember being flagged down, in Sloane Street, aged 18 or thereabouts [c. 1956], by this car with Litvinoff in it and these frightfully sinister-looking people. One of them was Kray."[13]

Through Ronnie Kray, Litvinoff met Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud who were friends and used to gamble at Esmeralda's Barn, the gambling club in which the Krays had a stake. According to Christopher Gibbs,[9] the man in Freud's painting Man in a Headscarf (originally The Procurer) (1954) was Litvinoff before he was slashed across the face in an attack (sometime before 1968) by an unknown assailant.[3][4] The Krays were happy to take the credit for the attack as it bolstered their reputation.[3] Pearson claims that Freud gave the work its original name in reference to Litvinoff's function. The painting sold for £1,156,500 at Christie's in 1999. At one time, it had been thought to be a self-portrait.[14]

Mim Scala recalls that around 1960, Litvinoff was the Faginesque head of a small group based at the Temperance Billiard Hall, 131-141 King's Road, Chelsea, that included Eddie Dylan, Brian Masset and Tommy Waldron. According to Scala, "what Litvinoff liked best were little boys, particularly naughty, runaway Borstal boys."[15] Scala described him as "physically quite ugly: thin lips, a huge nose and a prematurely bald head" but with the ability to "talk the birds out of the trees, money out of pockets, boys into bed, and gangsters out of killing him".[15]

After Litvinoff ran up a debt at Esmeralda's Barn, he did a deal with Ronnie Kray whereby he let Ronnie have the end of the lease on Litvinoff's flat in Ashburn Gardens, near the Gloucester Road in Kensington, as well as the use of Litvinoff's young male lover who also got a job at the Barn. Litvinoff continued to live in the flat and the arrangement suited everyone very well.[16]

After the Redlands raid
In February 1967 the British police raided Keith Richards' home at Redlands in West Wittering after having received a tip-off that illegal drugs were being used at a party there. Litvinoff is not thought to have been at the party but according to multiple sources, took it upon himself to find out who the police informer was. Nigel Waymouth confirmed: "After the bust, no one knew who had fingered them. David Litvinoff applied some of his East End methods to see who was culpable".[19] Nicky Kramer, a member of the trendy Chelsea set, immediately came under suspicion and Litvinoff and hard-man John Bindon interrogated him fairly roughly before deciding that he was not the man they were looking for.[8] Supposedly, they held him out of a window by his ankles.[20]

Work in the film industry
In May 1968 the Kray twins were arrested on charges which included conspiracy to murder. In the autumn of 1968[21] shooting started on the film Performance, (released 1970) written by Donald Cammell and co-directed by Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, and starring James Fox and Mick Jagger. Litvinoff got the job of "dialogue coach and technical adviser". He had been a friend of Cammell since childhood, and through knowledge gained from his friendship with the Kray twins, he was able to introduced the cast and crew to London's underworld.[13] Marianne Faithfull said "They hired real gangsters ... and a genuine mob boss as adviser. This was David Litvinoff. Part of Litz's job was to be James Fox's tutor in infamy."[13]

John Clark, art director on the film, said: "I did a lot of work with Litvinoff. He was very good on details. All the things for Chas's apartment: the colours, ashtrays, phones. Litvinoff was a shadowy character. He had this massive razor slash across his face."[13] According to Chris Sullivan in The Times, it was Litvinoff who recruited real life criminal John Bindon to act in the film. Bindon had once bitten off a man's ear in a fight and then given it back to him in a cigarette box.[22] Writing about Performance in The Independent, David Thompson calls him "the most brilliant nutter anyone had ever met ... the catalyst – he just brought the whole thing together".[23]

Wales
Sometime in 1968, Litvinoff rented Cefn Bedd cottage in Llanddewi Brefi. A stream of notable 60s figures seem to have stayed at the cottage including Eric Clapton, the artist Martin Sharp who designed the album covers for Cream, and Nigel Waymouth who was one of the owners of boutique Granny Takes a Trip. There was speculation that a bearded man with long hair and an American accent named Gerry was actually Bob Dylan, but Christopher Gibbs has said that this was really Litvinoff's "sidekick", Gerry Goldstein.[8] Local legend also has it that the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and even Yoko Ono visited and that Litvinoff distributed signed Stones LPs.[8] One local saw an invitation to Hendrix's funeral on the cottage mantlepiece.[9]

Litvinoff left Llanddewi Brefi around the end of 1969[9] after being tipped-off about possible police interest in the cottage, returning to London and then going to Australia.[8] On his return he stayed with Christopher Gibbs.[9] In 1977, Operation Julie busted a large LSD manufacturing and distribution network operating partly from Llanddewi Brefi. Although this network is believed to have only been operating from 1969, and there is no evidence of any involvement by Litvinoff, media reports have linked it with his time in Llanddewi Brefi and the music industry figures that he brought to the village.[24][25]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Litvinoff
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 07, 2017 10:19 pm

Trigger Warning

The Laughing Gnostic —
David Bowie and the Occult



Image


The Smear of Destiny


In 1973, Bowie was allegedly influenced by the bestselling book "The Spear of Destiny", cobbled together by Trevor Ravenscroft in 1972.
As the ideas behind his scribblings only enlarge the factual nonsense of Louis Pauwels’ and Jacques Bergier’s "The Morning of the Magicians" I shall try to diplomatically describe this rubbish in terms of content.

Ravenscroft admitted that there were no historical facts that had inspired him but that he derived his insights from private hallucinations. His book is a hardly suppressed adoration of the Hitler Youth and a show of admiration for Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner and other anti–Semites.
The work is spiced up with long quotations of "Mein Kampf" and attempts to equate an alleged Hitlerian Magick with Crowley's sexmagick. There are women in trance releasing ectoplasmatic beings through their vaginas, purportedly influencing the group around Hitler. Ravenscroft rambles at length about the Nazis’ expeditions to Tibet, sent off by Heinrich Himmler's "Ahnenerbe" in search of the original Aryan.
Himmler is seen as an empty receptacle for extra–human forces, e.g. evil. Without any factual relevance, Ravenscroft trots out fantasies about the secret force Vril invented by Golden Dawn member Edward George Bulwer–Lytton for the 1871 sci–fi novel 'Vril' with the idea of a coming race destined to supplant the current humanity, and a so–called Thule Society.

While in reality the Thule Society was a purely political organisation, a lot of occultists and conspiracy aficionados prefer to conjure up a delirium of seemingly realistic occult connotations out of all this (e.g. the "mystics" in Bowie's 'The Supermen' are the leaders of Nazi Germany: "Where all were minds in uni–thought / Power weird by mystics taught / No pain, no joy, no power too great / Colossal strength to grasp a fate").

Where the book is not pseudo–anti–Hitler it seems to be vaguely pro–Rudolf Steiner. Maybe Bowie was inspired by the more than generous descriptions of Steiner’s instructions in Ravenscroft’s book? Steiner’s way of yoga is in direct opposition to the eastern way.
Soon more on this. Image


Image

David Bowie and the Swastika
[Bowie photo by Andrew Kent]




Ellic Howe once told me, the present author, over a fine dinner: "Never trust an Occultist."


ImageOccultists in general consider themselves as 'subjects' — while non-occultists are 'objects' — à la Aleister Crowley's "the slaves shall serve". A lot of occultists view themselves as a superior being or a 'chosen one', while everyone else is as nothing. This sort of occultist lives in a world ruled by good and evil. Of course, many occultists might reach a level that is beyond that — but nevertheless the world below their abyss is only black and white, for them. Most occultists are trapped in such relationships; all are victims and transgressors, masters and slaves, Gods and sub-humans, and this is very much reflected in their choice of language and imagery they choose to use.





"Do I have to give your money back when I'm the Fuhrerling?"



Already in 1969, Bowie had said about England: "This country is crying out for a leader. God knows what it is looking for, but if it's not careful it's going to end up with a Hitler. This place is so ready to be picked up by anybody who has a strong enough personality to lead." [Bowie interviewed by Kate Simpson, in 'Music Now!', December 1969.]

"I was interested in the symbols of the Nazis. I think they are the most powerful set of symbols that have been invoked in terms of political history. The swastika. They took a Buddhist symbol, the Eastern symbol of the sun, and turned it around so it became a symbol of the dark.
That intrigued me about the Nazis. Who was the magnus
[sic]? Who was the black magician?" [David Bowie, 'Arena' magazine, 1993.]


So there were fascist subtones in the Ziggy Stardust area. The obvious "Z" lightning in the stage show resembled a S–rune (SS was the nazi Schutzstaffel / Protection Squadron or Defense Corps), and subtly reminded one of Nazi military troops and how the populace subjected themselves to the master leader.

"He was the naz[z]
with God given ass
He took it all too far but boy could he play guitar."
('Ziggy Stardust', 1972].

Later, everything would become a mirror. In 1993, Bowie took to painting the Ziggy Stardust's/Aladdin Sane's red–blue zig–zag lightning–flash directly onto his face for a portrait on the cover of the music magazine "Q" (May 1993) — Also on the cover of the bootleg double CD "Birthday Bash" (1997).
David Bowie, Q, May 1993
David Bowie, Birthday Bash, Madison Square Garden, New York, January 9 1997


There were possible references to totalitarian ideology already in pre–Ziggy Stardust songs. 'The Supermen' (1970) infers the idea of a master race with regimented militant behaviour: "The supermen would walk in file / Guardians of a loveless isle". "Where all were minds in uni–thought" while 'The Saviour Machine' (1970) described a futuristic fascist being in a theocracy where the word of God is "law". Was that Aleister Crowley's "Love is the Law, Love under Will"?

Image[On the right: screenshot from Lenie Riefenstahl: "Triumph des Willens" (Triumph of the Will), 1935.]
Lenie Riefenstahl, Triumph Des Willens (1935), Aleister Crowley Love is the Law, Love under Will, David Bowie The Supermen


It had been reported that Bowie had a strong interest in the saga of King Arthur ("I had this morbid obsession with the so–called 'mysticism' of the Third Reich" in the 1970's. "The side of it that fascinated me was the apocryphal tales of the SS coming to England and searching through Glastonbury for the Holy Grail").

Allegedly those Knights had been sent off on a quest for the Holy Grail. In magical and sex–magical interpretations, this grail is the vagina containing semen and vaginal fluids. Consuming this elixir (the Elixir of Life, as it is called, or "psychosexual fluids") gives rise to the Homo Superior, the God in Man, and the Man in God ("the Golden Ones" (Warriors) in 'Oh! You Pretty Things', 1971).

PATRICK SALVO: "As for yourself, you obviously don't believe in organized religion but you were once a Buddhist. You practiced it and that would be organized to an extent."
BOWIE: "Well that's why I'm not a Buddhist anymore. I wrote a song called "The Supermen" which was about the Homo Superior race and through that I got interested in Nazism. I'm overwhelmed at their methods–diabolical. I have no room in my head to entertain their theory, the gross effects, the terrible disregard for human life, especially for particular races and religions. You knew Roman Catholics were next. The Pope bought Hitler off. It was the whole thing about the Magic Wine. Hitler wanted to develop an Aryan race. For what reason? To fight Homo Superior. He was dreadfully afraid of Homo Superior and his aims to develop a race of Aryan people was a misrepresentation of that good feeling of Homo Superior. Because if it was such a depressed era, spiritually and morally that it came out all wrong. I'm sure Hitler could have gone the other way. But mind you this is a mad planet, it's doomed to madness. We might have freaked the world so much, twisted it off its axis, its practical and mental axis so much that the way these new children could be influenced by their grandparents might have ticked something off in their head that you may well find that we have given birth to Homo Superior prematurely." [Interview' Magazine, March 1973]

Glastonbury had a history of mystical connotations going back ages. Allegedly, Christ was there — or at least the cup from the Last Supper, the Holy Grail containing Christ’s blood. St. Patrick is supposed to be buried in Glastonbury, and King Arthur lived nearby. In the 1950s and 60s, many books dealt with the quest of extraterrestrials or Atlanteans for cosmic power at the site of the ruined Benedictine Abbey, i.e. Glastonbury. In 1971, a serial of Glastonbury festivals began. Of course, Bowie sang there, to thousands: "Where all were minds in uni–thought / Power weird by mystics taught." ('The Supermen.')

Angie Bowie commented: "Arthur? He wasn’t fixated on Arthur, he never even mentioned him. Grail? Well, he hung out with Ken Pitt who loved dressing up as a [***]. Maybe he liked the rakish slant of the officer’s hat or the feel of a lash on the thigh, who knows? I wasn’t there. Before my time. Ken Pitt was interested in [***] dress–up and things occult! There are only twenty or thirty international legends; to what or which was he supposed to attach his new belief system if not Arthur? [It’s] the only distinct legend which features the English doing something apart from running around covered in Wode or empire building." [My interview with Angie Bowie in 2003]



Me: "Did he believe he could become God with the help of occult practices?"
Angie Bowie: "David wants to be a dictator, not God. His fixation is with himself and he strives to ignore his own self–loathing." [My interview with Angie Bowie in 2003]


http://www.parareligion.ch/bowie.htm
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 11, 2017 10:16 am

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

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 17, 2017 10:37 am

How horrifying is it that the dubious character of "James Shelby Downard" (a likely cover for a cabal centered on the notorious racist and Nazi sympathizer Michael A. Hoffman II) was promoted by Robert Anton Wilson as far back as the Cosmic Trigger days in order to seed the Sirius conspiracy ideas that have haunted us for decades?


When Downard Met Discordia

Image

During the period RAW was experiencing all of his Sirius synchronicities, a Fortean researcher named William Grimstad sent him an audio cassette series entitled Sirius Rising, a recording with James Shelby Downing that “…set forth the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all…[that] the Illuminati were preparing Earth, in an occult manner, for extraterrestrial contact…. The only trouble is that, after the weird data we have already surveyed [in Cosmic Trigger], the Grimstad-Downard theory may not sound totally unbelievable to us….”

At the time, Downard was an obscure and little known figure outside the small circle of Fortean/Conspiracy researchers who gravitated around him that included Bill Grimstad, Michael Anthony Hoffman II and Charles Saunders.


Image


http://historiadiscordia.com/when-downa ... discordia/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 18, 2017 9:49 am

Hoffman/Downard and R.A.W. very much served to promote one of my favorite flavors of delusion:


Synchronicities

A synchronicity can be defined as "meaningful coincidence" between similar patterns recurring in close temporal proximity. A classic example of a synchronicity is thinking about someone you haven't talked to in a while, and then having them phone you up out of the blue some short time later. In this instance the quality of the synchronicity can be mapped in terms of probability and coincidence. The longer it has been since you have talked to that person (say one to ten years), the lower the probability they will call for no reason; the shorter the time span between your thought of them and the phone call (say one minute to a few hours) the, the higher the coincidence rate. Thus, when you have low probability patterns suddenly recurring out of the blue with a high coincidence rate (close temporal proximity), the greater the impact of synchronicity for the person experiencing it. The synchronicity may be amplified if the coincidence is sparked by a third random event which appears to have nothing to do with anything (no contextual relevance) on the surface. For example, say your friend's name is Bob, and you happen to be eating a bag of "Bob's Maine-Style Potato Chips," (which you picked out of the blue, for no special reason), and while you are eating them your mind wanders to your old friend Bob, who then calls on the phone.� This experience could also be called a "coincidence," but when these coincidences are parsed through our logical analysis filters, the spontaneous recurrence of specific pattern of data multiple times within two or more separate domains (Bob:Chips, Bob:Memory, Bob:Phone) over a short duration create the most meaningful synchronicities.

Within the context of psychedelic activation of the cortex, the tendency to make meaningful connections out of even wider ranges of random data becomes amplified, and in this state even the most unrelated bits of perception can be pieced together into one large meaningful coincidence. This state can lead to paranoia (anxiety or fear of being watched, followed, trapped, manipulated, persecuted, etc.) or the thrill of discovery (Gnostic bliss, esoteric enlightenment, occult unveiling, mystical revelations, etc.). There are many schizophrenics who receive hidden messages from meaningful coincidences, and at the most extreme end of this disorder the data that is parsed is perceived as a coded transmission from God, or the Devil, aliens, ECCO (John Lilly's Earth Coincidence Control Office), or whatever supernatural other they believe is sending them secret signals. However, the encoded messages and hidden meanings which arise from these states are meaningful only to the people who experience them, and often sound perfectly crazy when they try to explain it to anyone else. And upon closer examination it would appear that these secret messages are not actually coming from an external source, but are actually being pieced together from "random noise" via an excitation of activity in the syntactical pattern-matching routines of their own temporal lobes.

So does that mean that ECCO doesn't exist? Probably. Does that mean synchronicities don't exist? No, they certainly exist, but we make the synchronicities in our head based on the connections we form between patterns in our neural tissue. Our brain is wired to parse synchronicities for a reason, so the art of finding meaningful coincidences between things has definite survival value. In fact, the ability to find meaningful connections between otherwise random events are the foundations of both deductive reasoning (logic and science) and spiritual belief (faith and intuition). The concepts of coincidence, probability, luck, and fate are intimately tied into our notions of self, God, spirituality, and the "existential meaning" of being. Hence any object which amplifies the levels of meaningful connections derived from otherwise random data (such as psychedelics) will be perceived as spiritual in nature, possibly even supernatural in origin (food of the Gods anyone?). Yet it is my assertion that these are not supernatural powers imparted by a spiritual force, they are merely our normal everyday powers amplified by a chemical excitation of the associative cortices. And to go back to my "Logic Mill" metaphor, the quality of the "meaningful connections" produced in the psychedelic state will vary with the dose range. At lower doses the meaningful connections and synchronicities are still hung on a logical-yet-loosely-associative framework; at higher doses the meaningful connections start to loose touch with actual reality, and spin off into illogical and paradoxical associations based solely on the user's own internal ideation. Both of these events can be extremely "meaningful" in the emotional and existential sense, but the quality of "meaning" produced is dependent on how well these new associations can be integrated into the user's pre-existing ontology upon returning to sobriety.


Hyper-associative States, Synchronicities, Isomorphisms, & The Universal Pattern, from Psychedelic Information Theory (Alpha version), by James Kent
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 19, 2017 7:04 am

http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=pit05/

Psychedelic Rules

James Kent
Chapter 05: Psychedelic Information Theory

In this chapter I would briefly like to go over what I call "The Psychedelic Rules." While these are not hard scientific rules they are in large part agreed upon to be true by people familiar with the psychedelics, and some have become basic axioms of the psychedelic experience. Many of these rules will be invoked in later chapters to discuss anomalies and seeming contradictions in the types of experiences people can have on a psychedelic journey. Listed in no specific order, the Rules of Psychedelia are as follows:

1. A single drug can do many things. If there is one rule you need to know above all about psychedelics, this is the big one. It is difficult to explain how utterly true this statement is, but the range of experience produced by psychedelic drugs is almost limitless. Every possible facet of human emotion and experience is accessible within the psychedelic experience, and even facets that you never dreamed of can pop right out of nowhere. While practice can get you familiar with the territory, no one really knows exactly what they are going to get when they enter into a psychedelic voyage. Tears, laughter, mania, joy, catharsis, sleep, visions, voices, paranoia, peace, exalted bliss, torturous hell, close encounters with aliens, devils, angels, visits from strange and unknown entities... All are possible outcomes of the psychedelic trip, and you may experience them all within the course of a single psychedelic session. It is truly a roller coaster ride into the unknown. Do not take this path unless you know the rules up front. Which brings us to...

2. Psychedelics are Non-Specific Amplifiers. In "LSD Psychotherapy", Stanislav Grof, M.D. wrote, "LSD and other psychedelics function more or less as nonspecific catalysts and amplifiers of the psyche." This is a truism held-over from the heyday of psychedelic research in the late 1950s and early '60s and is still widely accepted as true and accurate to this day. What this means is that psychedelics have the power to amplify any specific facet of the human psyche depending solely on the situational context or some combination of both the conscious and subconscious focus, desires, and intent of the user. I hope to demonstrate within the course of this book how this amplification actually takes place within the mind and brain, how it can actually be controlled by the user as it happens, and how it can either enhance or delude perception based on the subjective context. Which brings us to:

3. It all comes down to ingestion context, or: "Dose, Set, and Setting." I've already discussed Dr. Leary's observation of this very important rule, but it cannot be over-emphasized. The tone and content of each psychedelic session all comes down to the amount of the particular drug you're taking (Dose), the frame of mind or mental state you're in when you take it (Set), and where you happen to be and who you are with when it starts to kick in (Setting). By paying careful attention to each of these details a user can attempt to program the boundaries and desired outcome of the trip, thus minimizing bummers, freak-outs, or messy intrusions that could move a psychedelic trip into sour territory. But nobody can foresee everything, and sometimes even the best planned trip can go into unknown territory and get very weird very quickly. So it is important to remember...

4. Psychedelics Dissolve Boundaries. It's no secret why the '60s counterculture picked up on the "acid" part of lysergic-acid diethylamide (or LSD) as the slang handle for the drug. LSD was said to dissolve boundaries, all kinds of boundaries: class boundaries, race boundaries, gender boundaries, and even more abstract things like the boundary between self and other, subject and object, waking and dreaming, the ego and the transpersonal self, even the boundaries between life and death. Under the influence of a boundary-dissolving psychedelic the concept of the "ego" or "independent self" slowly vanishes as consciousness grapples with heavy concepts like "the illusion of self" or "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" (or ICOAT for short). For people seeking communion with a higher mind this is a good thing, for other people the dissolution of personal boundaries and the vanishing of the self is the scariest part of the experience. The ability to cope with this fundamental aspect of the trip (boundary dissolution, the transcendence of the self) may very well be at the heart of all "positive" psychedelic trips, and the fear of this specific experience (letting go, loosing control) may underlie all "bummers" or negative trips. Which is why you need to...

5. Relax, Submit to the Experience. When things get crazy there's no use fighting it, you're in it for the long haul and you did it to yourself. Trying to struggle against an uncomfortable experience will only make it worse. The sooner you learn to relax and just go with the flow the better off you'll be. Just because it is weird beyond belief doesn't mean there is any reason to be uncomfortable with what you are feeling or seeing, you should just let it do it's thing and try not to get in the way. Some people have a natural resistance to giving up control of the experience, but it's for the best, really. If you get scared just sit still and wait it out. Since psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers, if you choose to fight an experience your mind may exaggerate the conflict or amplify the source of anxiety, thus putting you in an aggressive/paranoid feedback loop. Should you choose to relax, your sensations of peace and calm will only be enhanced by the psychedelic. So whatever you do...

6. Don't Freak Out. No matter how weird it gets you must not give into to the urge to totally freak out, like yelling and screaming and getting violent, especially if you happen to be in an unsafe and uncontrolled environment. Freaking out will just land you in the emergency room and that is the last place you want to be in this state. The main trick to warding of bad trips is simply remembering to stay calm, take a deep breath, clear your mind, and push through whatever is giving your grief. You can feel fear, pain, paranoia, danger, menace, death, nothingness... but as long as you stay calm and keep breathing you'll be just fine. If you focus your attention on your own breathing and autonomic systems you'll find that the slower and deeper you breath, the more calm and relaxed you will feel. This is all you need to know to undo even the most hellish downward spirals. Take a deep breath, relax. Clear your mind. Take another one. See, you're feeling better already, and remember...

7. It Will Eventually End. No matter how much it may seem so at the time, you will not be stuck in the psychedelic state forever. Like all things the psychedelic state is fleeting and generally cannot be maintained for long periods of time. The time it takes to have a trip may feel like a lifetime, and the memory of the experience will stay with you forever, but the truly odd perceptual bits in the middle, those will fade away in a few hours, I promise. It is extremely rare for people to have any lingering perceptual effects from a psychedelic trip, even the notorious flashbacks are extremely rare if downright mythical. While some people with psychotic tendencies are more at risk for having severe adverse reactions, the average person recovers from a psychedelic trip quite quickly. So don't worry, just try to get something out of it while it lasts.

The only thing I would like to add in summation to these rules is that the key to getting the most out of psychedelics is to be safe and have some kind of intent for the trip. Having a pre-planned focus or ritual for the trip is not essential, but it does help set the tone for whatever will come next. I have also found it helpful in early experiences to find a "ground object" like a watch, or a photo, a polished stone, or anything small and interesting you can return your focus to when things start to get beyond your grasp. The ground object may be a childish notion — like a trail of breadcrumbs to keep from getting lost in the forest — but it can be like a little piece of the "old world" you cling to when everything else falls apart and the "new world" unfolds before your very eyes. It may sound silly now, but if you know what I mean, well, you know how important the little things can be when the foundation of reality starts to come entirely apart.

And believe it or not, that is it. That is all the rules. Within these boundaries just about any outcome you can think of is possible.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 21, 2017 10:36 am

Trigger Warning


Augustus Sol Invictus is a self-proclaimed “god” who kills goats and has serious issues with women



“I’m not human”

Abuse of any kind, be it emotional, physical or psychological, typically implies a feeling of superiority and entitlement. But in his claims to power and supremacy, Invictus aims a little bit higher than your average narcissist.

That’s not entirely surprising, coming from a man who would name himself “majestic unconquered sun.” Invictus got his name legally changed from his birth name, Austin Mitchell Gillespie, in 2006. He avoids saying he chose the name. Saying, “it was given to me,” he endows it with the mystical weight of destiny that he’s tried to apply to every aspect of his life. But he’s said the process is akin to Catholic confirmation, in which recipients of the sacrament do in fact choose their names, based on a saint with whom they feel a special affinity.

Some of Invictus’ self-aggrandizement is mundane. For example, he’s called himself a genius in speeches and writings, including the notorious renunciation letter where he abandons his earthly possessions and forfeits his U.S. citizenship. But beginning with that letter, his egotism begins to make a distinctly supernatural shift, and he starts to refer to himself in writings as a prophet and a divine warrior sent by the gods.


Image
Baphomet declares Invictus a god,
from Canto XXVII of his poem `Aeon.'
(screenshot of text)


In 2013, the same year he hitchhiked to the Mojave on his pilgrimage, he sent an email to his religious association declaring himself an Ipsissimus. In Aleister Crowley’s A∴A∴, an Ipsissimus is the highest possible achievement, equivalent to a god among men.

Some in his order were very unhappy about his claims. Crowley expressly forbade any Ipsissimus from revealing their status to anyone. Some Thelemites interpreted the move as blasphemous, attention-seeking behavior. It wasn’t the only time he and his fellow believers butted heads.

“I’m sure you’re aware of some of the crossover between fascism and the occult, but that’s always been his thing,” said Invictus’ friend from the O.T.O. “His understanding of Thelema was always a little perverted.”

One of the more macabre subjects on which Invictus took a stand was human sacrifice. In a letter to the O.T.O. after his membership was terminated, Invictus confirmed that he had “spoken of it favourably to a Brother,” and defended his reasons for doing so. After returning from his pilgrimage, he got a real taste of what sacrifice felt like when he filmed himself slaughtering a goat as an offering and drinking its blood. According to two of his former associates in the O.T.O., the killing was botched, and the goat suffered a drawn out, brutal death.

When Invictus announced himself a god to his order, he also circulated a 220-page poem, which he decreed was a new sacred text for the religion of Thelema, right up there with some of Crowley’s most important work. The poem, “Aeon,” documents a 30-day vision quest exploring the Enochian Aethyrs, in which the gods praise Invictus’ divinity and outline his destiny. It’s similar to much of what he talks about in his speeches today—bringing about a Great War, restoring the “Ancient Ways” and exterminating those he deems unworthy. It ends with a vision that Invictus interprets to be the future, with Invictus at the center of group of disciples, playing the role of Jesus in a scene that openly imitates the Last Supper.

“He's just delusional and thinks he's on some great quest,” said a friend who was close to Invictus at the time he was declaring himself a god. “He sees himself as this one day triumphant hero. He's obsessed over it.”

Though Invictus’ friend in the O.T.O. was offended at the time, he also interpreted these actions as part of a larger, elaborate pattern to conceal what he perceived to be feelings of vulnerability.

“At his core he is a highly emotional, insecure person who has learned to manipulate the people around him very well,” he said.

Whatever it was that motivated Invictus to claim some otherworldly power at the time, he still had faith in his omnipotence when he stayed with Ashley Kopf.

On his first night at her apartment, he became ill and vomited in her bathroom. Kopf thought it might have been due to his strict paleo diet and cautioned him, “You know, you need your nutrients. Maybe you’re sick because you’re a human being and you need to eat normal food.”

“And he was like, ‘I’m not human,’” Kopf recalled. “And I was like, ‘What do you mean, you’re not human?’ And he just was like, ‘I’m not human.’…He kind of shut down at that point. He seemed very offended by it. By me saying that he was a human. It was like an insult or something.”



https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/11/augustus-sol-invictus-self-proclaimed-“god”-who-kills-goats-and-has-serious-issues-women/
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