Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 27, 2018 1:30 pm

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719 Ashbury St.

I saw this listing about a month ago on some San Francisco site. The house at 719 Ashbury St, in the Haight/Ashbury is for sale. It doesn't mention this in the realitor listing, but the other site said it used to be a "Hells Angels hangout..." during the Summer of Love. I do know that it's right down the street from the old Grateful Dead house, at 710 Ashbury.
.......but hey, it isn't every day you get a chance to buy a house with such an extensive Frisco/biker/hippie pedegree! I wonder if it still smells like 60w, reefer, DMT, and patchouli oil???


marciapolo said...

I lived here as a roommate from 1978 to 1979. It had been the Hell's Angels house and it was owned by the same landlady who rented to the Grateful Dead across the street. The couple who rented it were there for about 2 years before I moved in. They had cleaned it up - every square inch of the floors were covered with cigarette burns, and there had been mattresses laid end to end in every room. The cockroaches were fierce - they even tented the whole building & they still came back every 6 months. When you turned on the light in the kitchen, the floor moved. I am sure they STILL come back, 2.3 Million be damned. There was a makeshift stage in the basement, as the landlady, Dottie Ivory was a singer & had had a club in the Fillmore. Rumor was that Jimi Hendrix & Janis Joplin had jammed there (at different times). Before the Hippie era, it and the Dead house, had been Board & Care homes - we found old brochures in a closet - I still have some. Before I moved there, the roommates were part of the Order of Templis Orientalis - Aleister Crowley's bunch & they had made it the OTO house. There was still a pentagram painted on the door to the room Grady used to stay in.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2012 AT 1:26 AM



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

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 09, 2018 6:14 am

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

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 15, 2018 8:20 am

http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2018/10/n ... atter.html

NON-DUALITY VS NON-DUALISM CHATTER

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This has come up in several conversations now. Like everything else, Non-Dualism and talk of non-duality has been made into an argumentative gimmick in recent times. It has become a knee-jerk strategy to shut down discussion and can be used as a psychologistic tactic of argumentative gaslighting in order to turn the tables on a given interlocutor. It is also quite a reactionary approach to discussion and reveals how even the highest truths of metaphysics can be appropriated for purposes of some crass Wittgensteinian language game by other means. New Agey types are especially guilty of it. However, those who use this argumentative tactic reveal their fundamental ignorance of greater epistemological as well as ontological questions, not to mention causality itself.

While certain Buddhist and Hindu Vedanta texts can sometimes give the impression that a blanket non-duality is the ultimate state of things and we shouldn't speak about anything else, in the Islamic tradition of non-dualism this is not the case at all. The greatest exponent of non-dualism in the Islamic tradition of mysticism is Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240). While most usually only read and reflect on his Fuṣūs al-Ḥikam (the Bezels of Wisdom), it is in his opus magnum the Futūhāt al-Makkīyah (the Meccan Openings) where the real unpacking of his metaphysical worldview occurs. In his Futūhāt, a standpoint epistemology predicated on an infinite chain of being/existence and causality self-disclosing (tajallī) from God is insisted upon with a constant refrain by him that 'things should be put in their proper place'. This approach to non-dualism -- known as waḥdat al-wujūd in Arabic (the unity of being) -- is critical, finessed and in conspicuous distinction to the blanket and uncritical non-dualist talk we hear in some contemporary circles (or even in many Buddhist and Hindu ones). 'Tension' (i.e. a dialectic) is also at the backdrop of this perspective on non-dualism where the word for existence/being in Arabic (wujūd) is treated and glossed from its verbal root of w-j-d ('wajada' i.e. to find) to indicate the greater situation of things since to find is also to lose (and to find again), ad infinitum.

That aside, when we take Non-Dualism and make it into an argumentative crutch we are not only committing discursive category errors and fallacies of a blatant sort but also denying agency, both moral and otherwise, whether to ourselves or to others. When we do this we are then projecting our own limited ideational monochromatisms upon the greater questions of being/existence which arguably no single created mind can ever contain. And this is among the problems that occur when talk of Non-Dualism as opposed to the reality of non-duality is made into an argumentative tactic.

From the point of view of a Shiʿi Sufi such as myself, non-dualism is another way of saying tawḥīd (the unicity of God). However, this non-duality only applies to the Essence of the All-High and not to the created essences of Its creation. While the self-disclosure (tajallī) of God occurs within all the Names and Attributes, which is all things, yet the non-dual Essence of the One simultaneously remains ontologically aloof and transcendent from the self-disclosures and theophanies of its own Names and Attributes. As much confusion and contradiction has occurred even within the school of Ibn ʿArabī himself over this question, believe it or not, when one reads his Futūhāt al-Makkīyah this was also the perspective of Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī. With the Shiʿi Imāms (ع), the real Hierophants as far as I am concerned, the question of non-dualism becomes even more nuanced and finessed than even Ibn ʿArabī and his elaborate metaphysical system especially since the Path of these Imams (ع) rests on the pillars of Tabarrā and Tawallā which are both the steeds that elevate to the final station of Clarity (maqām al-bayān), i.e. the station of the Blaze-Flux (fuʾad) which is Existence/Being.

Now, the Ahl al-Bayt's (ع) non-dualism is perfectly exemplified in the discourse between ʿAlī (ع) and Kumayl known as the Ḥadīth al-Haqīqa. The dialogue about Ultimate Reality is the centrepiece. However, there is also a set and setting involved within three dimensional spatiotemporality in which the dialogue occurs, not to mention there are specifically two interlocutors involved in it: ʿAlī (ع) and Kumayl. Some transmissions even believe that this dialogue occurred during a respite in the Battle of Ṣiffīn, so understand!

--
"When colorlessness became the captive of color
A Moses went to war with Jesus
" ~ Rumi, Masnavi.

A TALE ABOUT WAHDAT AL-WUJUD (The Unity of Being) FROM THE MASNAVI

Once upon a time a wandering dervish came upon a grove owned by an elderly, retired man in the twilight of his years. The elderly man had spent years tending to his garden with much love and care, growing in it all kinds of sumptuous fruits and vegetables. Recently having been graced with a realization of the Unity of Being (wahdat al-wujud), the dervish thought to himself, "I am hungry, and there is no blame if I jump over this man's fence and help myself to the fruits of his garden since all is God!"

So the dervish proceeded to jump over the old man’s fence and, without asking his permission, began to greedily help himself to the fruits and vegetables of the old man's garden.

After a while the old man saw what the dervish was doing and so began to yell at him from across the way: "hey you, what are you doing? Why are you eating from the fruits of my garden without my permission?" The dervish responded, "this is God's garden, these are God's fruits and I am God eating God!" The old man angrily retorted, "is that right?" The dervish imperiously responded, "yes, that's right!"

So the old man proceeded over to the other side of his house to fetch his big, heavy walking stick. He returned straight back over to the dervish and began to now beat him mercilessly! The dervish cried, "what is wrong with you, old man? Why are you beating me like this?" The old man responded, "well, this is God's garden, these are God's fruits and I am God beating God!"
--

Peace be upon those who follow the guidance!
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 27, 2018 12:00 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 01, 2018 7:08 am

Mozart and the Stars

Gary Lachman October 31, 2018

Raine herself saw the Neoplatonic tradition, with its vision of the One, the varied forms of the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, and the struggle of the individual soul to free itself from material bondage – its exile in the world – and return to its source, as the guiding idea behind the symbols and metaphors that inform the Romantic lyrical tradition. What this poetry was about fundamentally was the soul, and its journey here, in an often dark world. Ultimately this vision went back to Plato. But she knew that Neoplatonism was not the sole source of the knowledge of the imagination she discovered in Coleridge, Yeats and other poets. It was one of many sources rooted in the past, such as Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and also the wisdom of the East, that fed the subterranean stream of the lost tradition. The tradition of the imagination has appeared in many forms, each related to the others, but each also unique. But each also fed and drank at the same source.

All of these traditions offered a different way of knowing the world and a different way of understanding our place in it, than that of the quantifiable, measurable view. In a general sense we can say that they spoke of a world that was living, conscious, interconnected, and receptive to human entreaty. Human beings themselves were a part of this world and shared in its spiritual, vital character. We could communicate with it. We participated in it. We could speak with the spirits of nature and commune with the gods. It was a world that we can only dimly envision now, through our imagination – or remember it from our childhood – but it was a world in which imagination was the fundamental medium linking all together.

But with the rise of the new quantitative way of knowing, all this changed. The gods and spirits were evicted from the world. In order to understand the laws of planetary motion, we had to reject the idea, expressed eloquently by Dante, that it was the angels, or love, that moved the stars. Yet, Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion which we use today to send our probes out into the further reaches of space, was himself a passionate devotee of our lost tradition.

If someone responsible for the knowledge that allows us to send interstellar probes out beyond our solar system and into the infinity of space was a student of our lost tradition, it behooves us, I believe, to try to understand why this should be so. It is also a reminder that in trying to revive or restore or renew this lost tradition, the aim is not for it to replace the kind of knowing we associate with science and the practical business of life, but to complement it. Both are absolutely necessary and it is only by embracing both that we are fully and truly human.

The true source of this tradition of imaginative knowledge, however, is the imagination itself. All gods exist and have their origin in the human soul, William Blake tells us. He goes even further. The entire world we perceive with our senses is a product of imagination – not in the sense of it being “fake” or “unreal” but in the sense that our inner world, our mind, for sake of a better word, has precedent over the outer one and is indeed responsible for it. As the essayist and philosopher of language Owen Barfield – a friend of C. S. Lewis and a brilliant expositor of the ideas of Rudolf Steiner – said, “Interior is anterior,” meaning that our inner worlds come first, before the outer world. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what modern science tells us today. For it, the outer, exterior, physical, material measureable world comes first and is, in some way they can’t explain just yet – but they are working on it – responsible for our inner ones.

I don’t accept this and I don’t believe the people in this room accept it. But that is the situation today. And it is because that is the situation today that we have what this conference is concerned with: a crisis of the ego. What I hope to do in this talk is to show that by regaining this lost knowledge of the imagination, by becoming aware of and participating in this tradition of the imagination, we may be able to overcome this crisis. With a grasp of what this knowledge of the imagination truly means, we can pass through this difficult time, this “time of troubles,” as the historian Arnold Toynbee spoke of the crises that challenge civilization, and begin to work on the real challenge, that of taking the next step in the evolution of consciousness.

For that is what I consider our current crises to be. The environmental, social, political, economic and other planetary challenges facing us are the hurdles we have to leap, the barriers we have to surmount, in order to make the shift into the next stage in human consciousness. Or, rather, it is by making that shift that we will be able to face these challenges successfully. The two are intertwined. Toynbee saw “challenge and response” as the motor of history. If a challenge facing a civilization is too great, it fails and goes down. If it is too easy, the civilization becomes complacent and decays. But if the challenge is “just right”, then the civilization finds the will and creativity to meet it, and continues to grow. I call this the “Goldilocks theory of history,” and it is something, I think, that we can apply to human consciousness itself. If you know the English fairy tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, you will know that out of three choices, she always finds what is “just right.”

There are no guarantees and it is up to us to pull it off. But if we don’t, I see little hope of a bright future. I don’t mean to be gloomy here, just realistic. The environmental challenges facing us are enough to suggest this, and the political ones are no help either.

But how can a tradition of imagination, however important, help deal with the kind of real, solid, hard, physical crises involving climate, wealth, social justice and so on that face us today? To answer that I will need to take a look at what I mean when I speak of imagination.

When we think of imagination we usually see it as some kind of “substitute” for reality. We think of fantasy, day-dreams, wish-fulfilment musings offering unsubstantial realizations of a life much more interesting, fascinating, exciting – in general in all ways much better than our own. We think of imagination as “make believe,” as pretence, and sigh wistfully about “having our dreams come true,” and are usually woken up with a start and the admonition that we have let our imagination “run away with us.” We drift into a fantasy of some more satisfying way of life, then sigh and admit that it was “just our imagination.”

Or we think of imagination as a tool for being innovative, for coming up with novelties that will keep us at “the cutting edge” of our profession. It helps to bring us the latest in technology, and keeps it “state of the art” and “fresh from the drawing board.” Imagination in this sense can be applied to anything, from computers to lipstick, from automobiles to swim suits. It is responsible for fashion – or perhaps we should say that a lack of imagination is responsible for that.

Of course we also give imagination an important, essential place in the arts. This is where it is most respected. Great literature, great painting, great music are all dependent upon the powers of the imagination, as are the lower ranks in these pursuits. This is perhaps the one realm in which the quantitative way of knowing will allow its qualitative way some freedom, although of course we know that many serious people see the products of imagination in this way as little more than ways of “escaping reality.” We say that people who spend too much time reading fiction or watching films are guilty of escapism, of running away from life – although much of the fiction and the films made today seem themselves something to run away from.

But ultimately, when it gets down to business, however powerful and moving a novel, painting, symphony, or even a film may be, in the end it, like the other substitutes for reality, is “unreal.” They are fiction, even if the novel, such as War and Peace, is about “real” events, or the painting depicts an historic scene. And if it is, like music, a non-representational art, then it is in the end really nothing more than nice sounds, vibrations of air that, for some odd reason, give us a sense of joy or comfort or what have you.

The point here is that no matter how powerful or meaningful we find a work of art, in the end, for the quantitative way of knowing, that power or meaning is less real than the paper, ink, canvas, paint or vibrations of air that convey it. Paper, canvas, ink and vibrations can be measured; meaning can’t.

This prejudice toward the unreality of the imagination is a difficult thing to excise. It is emphasized in the very definition of the word, at least in English. The Oxford Dictionary calls it a “mental faculty of forming images of objects not existent.” The Cambridge Dictionary calls it “the ability to form pictures in the mind that you think exist or are true but are in fact not real or true.” Merriam-Webster calls it “the ability to imagine things that are not real.”

We get the point. There are two things I want to say about this. The first is that although “imagining” in the sense of making a mental picture of something is, of course, a great part of “imagination,” it is not the only thing that is important about it or the only “power” possessed by imagination. The way I see imagination, it is not a faculty or a power in a specific sense, in the way that, say, our eyes have the “power” of sight or our ears the “power” of hearing. It is the means by which we have any experience at all. You can have 20/20 vision and hearing like sonar, but if you lack imagination you will be blind as a bat and deaf as a log. Imagination is something so fundamental that we cannot point to one limited expression of it and say, “That’s it. That’s imagination.” It is a kind of “intuitive glue” that holds all of our experience together; without it, everything would break apart into disconnected fragments. We can’t imagine what it would be like to be without imagination, because we would need imagination in order to do so.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead spoke of the fundamental elements of our experience as things “incapable of analysis in terms of factors more far-reaching than themselves.” These are things so basic that we can’t get under or away from them. We can’t analyse anything without already taking them for granted. Imagination, I think, is one of those things. It is so much a part of memory, self-consciousness, thought, perception, and the rest of our inner experience that it is almost impossible to pry it apart from them or any of them from each other. We can talk about these elements of our inner world as separate phenomena but we soon find that they blend into each other and that to demand an unyielding, fixed definition of “imagination” or any of these other imponderables would actually make them more obscure. We recognize what they mean tacitly, implicitly, and to throw the spotlight of analysis on them too harshly causes them to fade from our grasp. They have their own character, their own shading, contour and shape, but they run in parallel with each other.

The other thing I would say regarding a definition of imagination is that the one I do find most profitable to follow comes from Colin Wilson, a British writer and philosopher whose work has been an enormous influence on my own. He saw imagination as “the ability to grasp realities that are not immediately present.” Not, as our official definitions have it, as a means of creating “mental images” of non-existent things. But a means of grasping reality itself. I would only add to Wilson’s definition the fact that we often need imagination to truly grasp the reality that is right in front of us, staring us in the face.

Wilson knew this, and it is this kind of passivity before the outer world that our consciousness often exhibits – what he calls “robotic consciousness” – that he spent a lifetime analysing in order to overcome. But what he meant by “realities that are not immediately present,” is that we are often hypnotized into accepting whatever “reality” may be in front of us at the moment as the whole of reality, or at least of the reality available to us at the time. We are, he says, “stuck” in the present, hemmed in by our immediate experience in the same way that we would be hemmed in by four walls if we were locked in a room. Plato, in fact, knew this ages ago, when he compared human beings to prisoners chained and forced to live in a cave, and who take the shadows they are compelled to see for “reality.”

Plato believed the pursuit of philosophy was a way of exiting the cave. He is right. It is, and the Neoplatonists whose vision informed Kathleen Raine’s Romantic poets knew it. But sometimes we can find ourselves outside the cave and in the bright daylight spontaneously. It is in such a moment that imagination in the sense of “making real” “realities that are not immediately present,” comes into play. And even here, the notion that imagination, instead of “make believe” – which is how we usually understand it – is really about “making real,” is expressed quite clearly. Anytime you “realize” something – that is, make it real to you – you use your imagination to do so. That is what “realizing” something means: making it real.


https://garylachman.co.uk/2018/10/31/mo ... the-stars/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 06, 2018 9:26 pm

WHITEY BULGER: I WAS A GUINEA PIG FOR CIA DRUG EXPERIMENTS

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James “Whitey” Bulger, who wrote this feature for OZY last year, was found dead in prison on Oct. 30, 2018.


In 1957, while a prisoner at the Atlanta penitentiary, I was recruited by Dr. Carl Pfeiffer of Emory University to join a medical project that was researching a cure for schizophrenia. For our participation, we would receive three days of good time for each month on the project. Each week we would be locked in a secure room in the basement of the prison hospital, in an area where mental patients were housed. We went in from 9 a.m. Tuesday to 9 a.m. Wednesday. We were injected with massive doses of LSD-25.

In minutes the drug would take over, and about eight or nine men — Dr. Pfeiffer and several men in suits who were not doctors — would give us tests to see how we reacted. Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.

The men in suits would be in a room and hook me up to machines, asking questions like: Did you ever kill anyone? Would you kill someone? Two men went psychotic. They had all the symptoms of schizophrenia. They had to be pried loose from under their beds, growling, barking and frothing at the mouth. They put them in a strip cell down the hall. I never saw or heard of them again. They failed the Babinski test.


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https://www.ozy.com/true-story/whitey-b ... ents/76409
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:26 pm

Black Boy · Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o3Fbqr9Guc

Black boy
Lost in the dust
And found in the heavens
You understand what I'm saying?
That your destiny is in eternity
You never were originated
And you'll never be destroyed
Your destiny is with the people of the earth
Who came out of you
And now they are returning
So does your job to prepare yourself
For what is to come
What is past is past
But it'll last forever
Because it prepared for you
The future that you have before you
When I was a little boy in Mississippi
We sang every morning when we went to school
And I could feel the energy of all my students
We enjoyed school so much
Because we sang every morning before we started
At sundawn we would play a game called "hide and seek"
And in that game
One person would say this riddle
Last night, night before, 24 robbers at my door
I got up, and let 'em in
Hit 'em in the head with a rolling pin
And then we could go
And seek out the first person we could find hiding
And that person became it
And then they would go and sing
Last night, night before, 24 robbers at my door
I got up, and let 'em in
Hit 'em in the head with a rolling pin
Now, when I was maybe 30, something
I looked up at the stars one night
And it startled me because I felt something
And no one told me that the stars have feelings
And so it took me out of the world that we were all
Sequested in
And it allowed me to go on to the world of eternity
And I've been there now, 50 years coming
And it's taught me
This, rolling pin gives us that authority
Because it is the only symbol in the hands of Orion
In ancient Egypt, Archimid
It was called a scroll
In the Bible, in the fourth and fifth chapter of the revelation
It's called a man with a book in his hands
But we found out it was the rolling pin that we were talking about
The 24 robbers are the 24 stars surrounding the constellation called Orion
And so, I got up, and let 'em in
Means that he crossed the milky way
Which is the galaxy that we are part of
And I hit 'em in the head with a rolling pin
Meant that, in that rolling pin is the knowledge of our eternity
I think that, it's what it means to be a black boy
To be lost, to be envious, and selfish
To be misguided and confused
But, somehow, to realize, that you're the whole package
And it's your responsibility to find your eternity on this earth


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

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 10, 2018 8:56 am

Hippies in the USSR: An Interview with Juliane Fürst


ImageBroadly, I would say that from 1967 onward we have the first signs of hippie-ism in the Baltic States and Western Ukraine, mainly because they were better connected to Western culture via Eastern European publications and family connections. We also have the first traces in Moscow, particularly among the children of privileged families who, often because they had friends with firsthand experience and parents with the means to import jeans and records, began to dress like hippies. They even adopted the moniker of “hippie,” unaware that American hippies rejected the term and instead preferred the label “freak.” Hippies also started to appear in the Soviet press. Pravda published its first article about hippies in 1967. These articles were ambivalent about the Western phenomenon: hippies were anti-capitalist and anti–Vietnam War, which was encouraging, but they were still misguided. According to Soviet doctrine, only Marxism was to change the system they rebelled against for good. Soviet youngsters, however, read those articles as an instruction manual that told them to listen to cool music and how to dress in the hippie way. The regime initially ignored its domestic hippies or denied their existence. I found a few documents dating from 1969 describing this youth as “so-called hippies” because it was hard for the Soviet authorities to accept that there were hippies among Soviet citizens.

Tell us about your research with the KGB archives. To what degree was the KGB instrumental in allowing this movement to exist?

I worked with the KGB archives in Estonia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. The richest information came from the summaries to the Secretariat of the Ukrainian KGB. The original reports by informers are still not available or were not kept. There is no doubt that the KGB did not like hippies because they flew in the face of Soviet aesthetics and behavioral norms. But, either out of sheer ignorance or because the KGB was not sure about what to do with them, hippies ranked well below dissidents and nationalists on their agenda. Hippies only worried them when they started to assemble and travel in large numbers. This is how the system of control worked: the KGB were afraid when people moved, which meant that they could not keep an eye on them via the established channels like work or the housing authorities. Their worst fear was not knowing where these people were and what they were doing. This explains why, in the end, they allowed the movement to exist in certain spaces, which became alternative, albeit observable, worlds.

For example, there is a place called Gauja near Riga in Latvia, not far from the house of Misha Bombin — the leading Riga hippie at the time. For some reason, hippies were allowed to establish a summer camp there (something they had tried to do in other places in previous years), and several thousand hippies assembled every year from 1978 to sometime in the early 1990s — not all at the same time, but people would come and go. Clearly, this was something the KGB knew about. I interviewed Misha Bombin, and he told me that he never made a deal with the security organs. I believe him because he suffered greatly from KGB repression, and he would later end up in a psychiatric institution several times — a common Soviet way to deal with dissidents and non-conformists. There was probably an informal understanding similar to one established with regard to the Leningrad Rock Club, which, as we now know, the KGB was absolutely instrumental in setting up. This type of arrangement meant: “You can have your way of life in your own space, but we are watching you. We let you live as long as you are not making much of a ruckus.”


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hip ... ane-furst/
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 11, 2018 9:46 am

Excitingly Bizarre and Complicatedly Magical

Chapters are dedicated to psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis. The chapter on magic mushrooms — McKenna’s workhorse and main recommendation — features the book’s highlight, which echoes the absurdity and mania of Hunter S. Thompson’s drug stories: after consuming magic mushrooms, a sobbing Lin became convinced that he was an alien being, whereupon he “deleted parts of [his] internet presence […] and thr[ew] away [his] MacBook.”
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 15, 2018 12:17 pm

Competitive Psychedelic Users Are Chasing 'Ego Death' and Losing Their Sense of Self

More and more psychonauts are looking for the ultimate high, but some are ruining their minds in the process.

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Psychedelics have a long therapeutic history, and are currently being studied at Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University, and NYU, while—combined with professional support—they've been shown to help alleviate depression, addiction, and anxiety in the terminally ill. However, dangers remain when using them heavily and unsupervised, especially if users have existing mental health problems. Heightened anxiety and psychedelic-induced PTSD are both common side effects—but perhaps the most common is the feeling of manic depersonalization that can set in, and never leave, after ego death. The majority of psychonauts I spoke to reported experiencing this.

Sean, 22, from Oregon tells me that, after his ego death, it was like there was a "frequency shift" inside him. "I honestly thought I was developing psychosis," he says. "I couldn't believe what I saw, and what the world was. Nothing made sense, and nothing had a point. I became very anti-social and it didn't take much to send me into a panic."

Tony developed even stronger symptoms, saying that just existing in his body became so taxing that one night he literally got sick. "I had to look at myself in the mirror for a long time so I'd know what my face looks like," he explains. "I had to tell myself my name over and over again until I started to develop a sense of identity. I saw how temporary this world is and I struggled to find a reason to live."


Spiritual awakenings can be ugly, explains Michael: "The truth can leave you miserable. You lose interest in things, people drift away, you question your career. It's been years since [my ego death] happened—I still think about it daily. I wasn't ready for the experience. I was left in a state of manic insanity—I kept thinking the trip wasn't over."
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 16, 2018 12:08 pm

https://garylachman.co.uk/2018/11/16/thinking-allowed/

Thinking Allowed

Written by Gary Lachman

Recently I was interviewed by Jeffrey Mishlove for his Thinking Allowed series of podcasts. This is the first of what will most likely turn out to be several such conversations. We talked about Rudolf Steiner in this one, and yesterday Jeffrey interviewed me about my book Dark Star Rising. The next installment we have planned is a chat about Madame Blavatsky. I enjoy Jeffrey’s interviews; he clearly knows the subjects and he guarantees a good discussion by asking intelligent questions. Here’s one place in which thinking is definitely allowed.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Nov 18, 2018 9:37 am

The Fall To Earth: David Bowie, Cocaine And The Occult

The Quietus , January 11th, 2016

Image


The Unmaking of a Star #3: Cocaine and the Kabbalah

I just wish Dave would get himself sorted fucking out. He’s totally confused, that lad... I just wish he could be in this room, right now, sat here, so I could kick some sense into him.
Mick Ronson, 1975


Cocaine was the fuel of the music industry in the seventies. Audiences were still more likely to have smoked dope, or swallowed the ‘downers’ known as Mandrax in Britain and Quaaludes in the USA. Rock stars in search of a cure for the burdening necessity of sleep could rely on the artificial energy of amphetamines (with the attendant risk of psychosis). Where casual sex and the dance floor collided, there was likely to be amyl nitrate or, in America, PCP (alias angel dust). But the drug that kept rock ’n’ roll buzzing, sealing deals, deadening sensibilities and providing a false sense of bravado and creative achievement, was cocaine. Bowie’s arrival in America in 1974 coincided neatly with the rapid growth of the cocaine-producing industry in Colombia, which within two years had corrupted that nation’s political structure to such an extent that the most notorious traffi ckers (such as Pablo Escobar Gaviria) were effectively beyond prosecution. Like heroin at the start of the decade, cocaine flooded into America, despite the efforts of federal law-enforcement agencies to stem the tide.


Bowie was, and has been, more candid about his drug use during this period than most of his contemporaries, and various associates have fleshed out the picture. ‘I’ve had short flirtations with smack and things,’ he told Cameron Crowe in 1975, ‘but it was only for the mystery and the enigma. I like fast drugs. I hate anything that slows me down.’ So open was his drug use that the normally bland British pop newspaper Record Mirror felt safe in 1975 to describe Bowie as ‘old vacuum-cleaner nose’. His girlfriend in 1974/75, Ava Cherry, recounted that ‘David has an extreme personality, so his capacity [for cocaine] was much greater than anyone else’s.’ ‘I’d found a soulmate in this drug,’ Bowie told Paul Du Noyer in 2002. ‘Well, speed [amphetamines] as well, actually. The combination.’ The drugs scarred his personal relationships, twisted his view of himself and the world, and sometimes delayed recording sessions, as Bowie waited for his dealer to arrive. As live tapes from 1974 demonstrated, they also had a profound effect on his vocal range. Yet the effect on his creativity was minimal: cocaine took its toll on his internal logic, not his abilities to make music.

‘Give cocaine to a man already wise,’ wrote occultist Aleister Crowley in 1917, ‘[and] if he be really master of himself, it will do him no harm. Alas! the power of the drug diminishes with fearful pace. The doses wax; the pleasures wane. Side-issues, invisible at first, arise; they are like devils with flaming pitchforks in their hands.’ Bowie’s ‘side-issues’ were rooted in his unsteady sense of identity; he talked later of being haunted by his various characters, who were threatening him with psychological oblivion. When he described the Thin White Duke of 'Station To Station’, he was effectively condemning himself: ‘A very Aryan, fascist-type; a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion at all but who spouted a lot of neo-romance.’ Michael Lippman, Bowie’s manager during 1975, said his client ‘can be very charming and friendly, and at the same time he can be very cold and self-centred’. Bowie, he added, wanted to rule the world.

It was not entirely helpful that a man who was bordering on cocaine psychosis should choose to immerse himself in the occult enquiries that had exerted a more intellectual fascination over him five years earlier. The sense that his soul was at stake was exacerbated by the company he kept in New York at the start of 1975: Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, a fellow Crowley aficionado; and occult film-maker Kenneth Anger. In March that year, he moved to Los Angeles, where he was reported to be drawing pentagrams on the wall, experimenting with the pack of Tarot cards that Crowley had created, chanting spells, making hexes, and testing and investigating the powers of the devil against those of the Jewish mystical system, the Kabbalah. He managed to survive the fi lming of The Man Who Fell To Earth by assuming the emotionally removed traits of his character in the movie. But back in California, as he tried to assemble a soundtrack for the film and also create the Station To Station album, he slipped back into a state of extreme instability. Michael Lippman remembered ‘dramatically erratic behaviour’ on Bowie’s part. ‘Everywhere I looked,’ the singer explained to Angus MacKinnon in 1980, ‘demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one’s emotional plane.’

That was the emotional landscape against which he wrote the songs on Station To Station: in retrospect, it is surprising that the results were not more extreme. By the time the album was completed, Bowie was suffering severe, sometimes nearly continuous hallucinations, which ensured (perhaps fortunately) that his memories of this period remain sketchy. The impact on those around him was more immediate; when the singer left the Lippmans’ residence at the end of December (and quickly launched a lawsuit against his recent protector), his traumatised manager could only express relief, coupled with fear at what might happen next. Bowie attributed his survival to an unnamed friend, who ‘pulled me off the settee one day, stood me in front of the mirror and said, “I’m walking out of your life because you’re not worth the effort”’. This jolted Bowie enough to propel him through a major tour, still flirting with the worst of his curses, before he chose quite deliberately to crash-land in Berlin, and offload all his burdens, nightmare by painful nightmare.


http://thequietus.com/articles/07233-da ... ocaine-low
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 03, 2018 8:17 am

"Yet the claim that altered states of consciousness took you a “million miles away from reality” was question-begging. It foreclosed the idea that altered state of consciousness could offer a perception of the systems of power, exploitation and ritual that was more, not less, lucid than ordinary consciousness. In the Sixties, when consciousness was increasingly besieged by the fantasies and images of advertising and capitalist spectacle, how solid was the “reality” from which psychedelic states fled in any case? Wasn’t the state of consciousness susceptible to spectacle more like somnambulance than alertness or awareness?"

— Mark Fisher, Acid Communism
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 03, 2018 8:34 pm

Magick and Politics with Gary Lachman


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr0Zw4tDDVA


Gary Lachman is the author of twenty-one books on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to literary suicides, popular culture and the history of the occult. He has written a rock and roll memoir of the 1970s, biographies of Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, C. G. Jung, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, P. D. Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson, histories of Hermeticism and the Western Inner Tradition, studies in existentialism and the philosophy of consciousness, and about the influence of esotericism on politics and society.

Here he describes several threads of thought linking contemporary politics to the practice of influencing world events via parapsychological influence. In particular, he focuses on a movement known as "chaos magick". He also describes Donald Trump's longstanding interest in the work of Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking. Additionally, he describes the theoretical foundations of the philosopher Julius Evola -- as well as the Eurasian ambitions of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Dugin.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is past-vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of the Pathfinder Award from that association for his contributions to the study of consciousness.

(Recorded on November 15, 2018)
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 06, 2018 4:20 pm

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