rigorousintuition.ca

seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 13, 2015 10:28 am wrote:I just couldn't find my stash this morning...thus I have lost my mind


I will find it though ..it doesn't have legs.... it did not get up and walk away

Tantric Tragedy – 06.18.15

A talk with journalist Scott Carney about renegade gurus, spiritual ambiguity, and his book Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment.

http://www.podbean.com/site/UserDownloa ... 061815.mp3

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Diamond-Mou ... 592408613/

http://expandingmind.podbean.com/e/tant ... dy-061815/

Exclusive: Cook Up LSD With A Clip From ‘The Sunshine Makers’

Tyler was now in full Deadhead outlaw mode, running from the cops and the court cases piling up against him.


"I went right back dealing to my Florida friends," Tyler says. "One of them beeped me all night when I had just flown in with a gram. He wanted a tenth. I gave 1300 hits to him. The narcotic officers came in two van-loads at 3 AM in the morning with black masks on. It was like in the movies."

The feds were going after LSD dealers with a passion. (It's still a schedule one drug according to the United States government, by the way, making it a priority for DEA agents and narcotics cops.)

"They brought me in a room and I told them I considered LSD a sacrament, and I would never help them in anyway," Tyler says. "No formal charges were filed and they released me on my own recognizance. I traded some paper for a car, got a friend to register it, and we went on tour."

Tyler was now in full Deadhead outlaw mode, running from the cops and the court cases piling up against him.

"I blew both of those cases off for two years," he says. "When they finally caught me again in Florida, they offered me 18 months in prison, or three years probation to plead guilty. I pleaded guilty and then went to take care of the other case. They eventually gave me three more years concurrent probation after I requested a speedy trial. I also had a failure to appear on top of it all, and they gave me probation for that, too."

With a light slap on the wrist for his youthful indiscretions, Tyler was ready to go back on tour. But with two felony convictions, he was setting himself up for a big fall because of how the three strikes law was configured. Tyler was just one of many Deadheads living this type of life, but in the eyes of law enforcement, he was a big drug dealer, flying across the country and sending large quantities of LSD through the US mail.

"I only sold to my friends. I wanted it for myself and felt like I could help them get it since I knew where to get it," he says. "This guy named Jeff Rhodes was my friend and I sold to him. Jeff was arrested. I told him that they would give him probation for his first offense in Florida, but he was secretly setting me up. He recorded all our conversations. They had 26 audio taped conversations of me and him talking."

Through Rhodes, the feds assembled a serious case against Tyler.

"I eventually told Jeff that I was leaving Florida," Tyler says. "They could have arrested me. I had sold him 4000 hits up to that time. I ended up sending 9045 hits to an address and that guy—who knew me my whole life—cooperated. I called every one I knew and told them I gave them permission to go against me in case it ever came about."

Tyler was dealing with the feds now, and the feds didn't play—especially with LSD.

"I was charged with conspiracy to possess with attempt to deliver ten grams or more of a substance or mixture containing a detectable amount of LSD," Tyler explains. "I pled guilty because my dad was involved and the only defense I saw plausible was calling it a sacrament and using the band as a witness. I elected to place no burden on Jerry and friends and plead guilty. My dad wanted me to tell, and I am proud that I have gotten no one in trouble—ever."

Tyler's father died while serving a ten-year sentence of his own.

"At my sentencing, I was calm. I knew I was going to prison for a long time. I thought it would be 21 to 27 years but it was minimum mandatory life," Tyler says. "To me at the time, it didn't matter. My sister was there and started crying. The police that made the arrest high-fived each other openly in the court room. When I walked away into the elevator, I shed some tears because of my sister. Then I was OK after that."

"I am optimistic that the president will step in and help. He has done it for some people that I know. Maybe this year I can get a break." -Tim Tyler

And so began Tyler's long, strange trip inside the belly of the beast. At the age most kids are graduating from college, he was looking at life in the federal pen. A gregarious Deadhead surrounded by brutal gangsters, thugs, bank robbers, and drug dealers, Tyler's seen his share of sticky situations. Still, he endures.



Tim Tyler in prison. Photo courtesy Tim Tyler

Soviet synthesizer bridged occultism and electronic music




You don't play the ANS synthesizer with a keyboard. Instead you etch images onto glass sheets covered in black putty and feed them into a machine that shines light through the etchings, trigging a wide range of tones. Etchings made low on the sheets make low tones. High etchings make high tones. The sound is generated in real-time and the tempo depends on how fast you insert the sheets.

This isn't a new Dorkbot or Maker Faire oddity. It's a nearly forgotten Russian synthesizer designed by Evgeny Murzin in 1938. The synth was named after and dedicated to the Russian experimental composer and occultist Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872–1915). The name might not mean much to you, but it illuminates a long running connection between electronic music and the occult.

You can find traces of the occult throughout the history of electronic music. The occult obsessed Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo built his own mechanical instruments around 1917. The famous Moog synthesizer made an early appearance in Mick Jagger's soundtrack to Kenneth Anger's occult film Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969. And in the late 1970s Throbbing Gristle built their own electronic instruments for their occult sound experiments, setting the stage for many of the occult themed industrial bands who followed. The witch house genre keeps this tradition alive today.

It's little the surprise otherworldly sounds and limitless possibilities of synthesizers and samplers would evoke the luminous. But there's more to the connection. The aim of the alchemist is not just the literal synthesis of chemicals, but also synthesis in the Hegelian sense: the combination of ideas. Solve et Coagula. From the Hermetic magi of antiquity, to Aleister Crowley's OTO to modern chaos magicians, western occultists have sought to combine traditions and customs into a single universal system of thought and practice.

Electronic music grew from similar intellectual ground, and it all started with Scriabin.

Scriabin's Synthesis

Scriabin is remembered by classical music scholars for his pioneering work in atonality and multimedia. As almost all of Scriabin's biographers note, he was deeply influenced by Theosophic Society co-founder Madame Blavatsky's highly syncretic form of occult thought, and Theosophy informed some of his most famous works.

In his final symphony, Prometheus: Poem of Fire, Scriabin used tool he built himself, called the "tastiera per luce" to project colors in sync with the music. He used tables of correspondence from Theosophy that associated different colors and tones with different planes of reality, such as spirituality and reason. Scriabin's obsession with associating colors with particular tones lead to suggestions that he had synesthesia. But after Prometheus, he abandoned Theosophy's tables of correspondence and created his own, leading scholars B. M. Galeyev and I. L. Vanechkina to conclude that Scriabin did not actually have the condition. Yet a drive to synthesize aspects of the occult with sound, light and other senses into a single art form remained.

Scriabin synthesized his own indiosyncratic form of mysticism influenced by Theosophy, the Russian Symbolist movement and thinkers like Friedrich Hegel (the granddaddy of synthesis), Konstantin Bal'mont, Prince Evgenii Trubetskoy and Vladimir Solovyov, according to a paper by Emanuel E. Garcia. This line of occult thinking inspired his unfinished magnum opus Mysterium.

Mysterium was to be what today we'd call a multimedia arts festival. Here's how John Bell Young described the would-be event:

Scriabin’s dream was to stage the Mysterium in the Himalaya. He conceived it as a grand purification ritual where bells were to be suspended from clouds. Thousands of participants, clad in white robes, would intone his melismatic mantras with the fervor of the dervishes, expending every bit of their available energy in the service of his artistic idealism. He envisioned an orgy of the senses, and to this end created a choreography of lights, odors, colors and exotic dances. This was to have gone on for a week, leading to the apocalypse and the end of time. Thus transcended, the physical world, and ego itself would dematerialize; man would be reborn as pure concept. He even went as far as to purchase a plot of land in the Himalaya, fully expecting to realize this magniloquent event.

The apocalyptic vision seems to be plucked right from Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, which predicted that modern humans would be replaced by a more evolved race.

American Dream » Tue May 28, 2013 2:12 pm wrote:Secret London: LSD experiments at the World Psychedelic Centre

http://greatwen.com/2011/11/30/secret-l ... ic-centre/


Michael Hollingshead has been described as ‘an English trickster and con man of the first order’ by one commentator, but he described himself as ‘The Man Who Turned on The World‘.



Hollingshead was the British man who introduced LSD to Tim Leary in December 1961 on the recommendation of Aldous Huxley. Hollingshead was working in New York when he came upon a quantity of LSD. Huxley suggested he send it to Leary, who was already experimenting with administering psilocybin to patients during his psychological research at Harvard. Leary loved it. The LSD revolution began.

After working in America with Leary – he even lived in his house – Hollingshead was sent to London in September 1965 with enough Czechoslovakian lysergic acid to produce 5,000 trips, thirteen boxes of psychedelic literature – The Psychedelic Experience, The Psychedelic Review and The Psychedelic Reader – and plans for ‘a psychedelic jamboree’ at the Royal Albert Hall featuring the Stones, the Beatles and Leary himself. Although this is sometimes presented as Hollingshead playing the role of John The Baptist to Leary’s Psychedelic Christ, Barry Miles’s ‘London Calling’ suggests that Leary was just trying to get rid of the increasingly drug-addled Hollingshead and is said to have remarked upon his departure, ’Well, that writes off the psychedelic revolution in England for at least ten years.’



Hollingshead promptly set up his base at his flat in Belgravia’s Pont Street, which he renamed the World Psychedelic Centre, and redecorated with the key elements needed for a good trip: bowls of fruit, handwoven cloth, open fire, bread, cheese, wine, candles, incense and goldfish. A chill out space, basically.

This was one of only two reliable sources for LSD in London at the time, so visitors were plentiful and Hollingshead began welcoming key figures from the scene – including Roman Polanski, Alex Trocchi, William Burroughs, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Donovan and the Rolling Stones.



Guests were invited to take part in LSD sessions designed to make the most of the experience, with ‘lots of cushions, some excellent tapes and hi-fi equipment, a slide projector, and several chillums’. The LSD was dispensed after midnight inside grapes impregnated with 300 micrograms of the drug. The atmosphere was key. Hollingshead writes:

Shortly after dropping the acid, I played a tape of Buddhist Cakra music, followed by Concert Percussion by the American composer, John Cage. Next I played some music by Ravi Shankar and some bossanova. Interval of fifteen minutes. Then some music by Scriabin and part of a Bach cello suite. Interval. Some Debussy, and Indian flute music by Ghosh. Interval. Bach organ music and some John Cage ‘space’ music. Interval. The Ali Brothers and Japanese flute music. We also looked at slides projected on to the ceiling Tantric yantras, Vedic Gods, the Buddha, Tibetan mandalas.

There were also regular readings from Leary’s work

While Hollingshead dispensed LSD to his visitors in these carefully controlled conditions, he was soon self-medicating with cannabis, speed and heroin to control the fierce highs he experienced from taking strong doses of acid at least three times a week. The tabloids soon got wind of these experiments with the ‘killer drug’ and after hosting a party of 80 hippies at which two undercover police officers were dosed with acid after sampling the spiked punch, Hollingshead was busted. Naturally, he attended his trial while tripping and was sentenced to 21 months at Wormwood Scrubs. There he met spy George Blake, who promptly took a trip on some of the acid Hollingshead smuggled in to the prison, before escaping and going into exile in the Soviet Union.

FEBRUARY 23, 2016
BY AYAN MANDAL

MANDAL: Innovation Inspired By LSD

“What if I had not taken LSD ever; would I have still invented PCR? I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.”

In 1986, biochemist Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction, a technique that allows biologists to quickly produce a large number of copies of a segment of DNA. The reaction starts with heat. DNA is warmed until its two strands separate, leaving two lonesome strings of genetic material. The next step is to replicate the DNA, but there is a problem: Normal DNA polymerase cannot function at the high temperatures needed to separate the strands. Herein lies Mullis’ genius.

An outdoorsy character, Mullis thought about thermophilic bacteria, bacteria that live in very hot environments, yet replicate DNA nevertheless. These bacteria produce a special kind of DNA polymerase that can function during PCR.

Now, it is difficult to overstate the impact PCR has had on modern science. Virtually every modern biology lab uses it. Key to this story, however, is the inspiration behind the discovery. Mullis, who developed as a thinker in the 1960s, credits the psychedelic drug Lysergic acid-N ,N-diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, as instrumental in developing PCR.

“I could sit on a molecule and watch the particles go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.” Do we take this inspiration seriously, or do we dismiss Mullis’ claims as the words of a crazed hippy?

First the science, then the philosophy. LSD works by pinding to receptors that will normally take serotonin. In some cases, LSD mimics serotonin, creating the same kind of cellular response. In other cases, LSD blocks serotonin because it has a higher affinity to certain receptors. At the more macro scale, we know that psilocybin, the active ingredient in “shrooms,” causes a number of areas of the brain to fire in synchrony with one another. In cognitive neuroscience, when two areas fire in synchrony, this is interpreted to mean that those areas are “connected.”

The effects of shrooms on the brain are thought to be very similar to the effects of LSD. With that assumption, one could say that psilocybin causes the brain to form unique connections that are absent in the normal brain. Perhaps this is the biological basis behind the increase in creativity we see in people who have taken psychedelics.

At the even broader, socio-cultural scale, we can identify LSD as a driving force for creativity and nonconformity in art, literature and music in the 1960s. With all this in mind, does this mean people interested in enhancing their creativity should take LSD? Well, probably not.

As one might expect, psychedelics come with a great deal of psychological risk. While LSD will not exactly harm your body in the way a poison might, there have been cases of people suffering from psychological trauma or hurting themselves while on a psychedelic.

Circling back to Mullis, it is important to note that he is by no means the ideal scientist. PCR was his only substantial contribution to science, and, since then, he has been vocal in denying climate change and refuting that HIV causes AIDS. Perhaps this same anti-conformist attitude allowed him to shift a paradigm in science in inventing PCR. While we need thinkers with unique inspirations to come up with creative solutions to longstanding problems, maybe we can use a healthy dose of conformity every now and then. By wandering too far into nonconformity, we run the risk of denying the traditions that govern our lives for good reasons.



Ayan Mandal is a sophomore in the College.

Paddy Chayefsky and the Wonders of the Invisible World Part IV


For this installment I'd like to begin breaking down Altered States's twilight language-laden plot line but before doing so a bit more background in the film is needed to put it into perspective. As many fans are undoubtedly aware, Altered States (both the novel Chayefsky originally wrote as well as the film) was chiefly inspired by the peculiar experiments of psychonaut John C. Lilly. Lilly is chiefly remembered in this day and age for his incredible work with dolphins (which inspired another film, Day of the Dolphins), but he was also one of the first scientists to seriously investigate sensory deprivation and, eventually, entheogens. Such research inevitably brought him to the attention of the US intelligence community, which pursued a vast array of fringe sciences at the onset of the Cold War, a prospect Lilly would try to disassociate himself from professionally time and again.

"In 1954 Lilly began trying to isolate the operations of the brain, free of outside stimulation, through sensory deprivation. He worked in an office next to Dr. Maitland Baldwin, who the following year agreed to perform terminal sensory deprivation experiments for ARTICHOKE's Morse Allen but who never told Lilly he was working in the field. While Baldwin experimented with his sensory-deprivation 'box,' Lilly invented a special 'tank.' Subjects floated in a tank of body-temperature water, wearing a face mask that provided are but cut off sight and sound. Inevitably, intelligence officials swooped down on Lily again, interested in the use of his tank as an interrogation tool. Could involuntary subjects be placed in the tank and broken down to the point where their belief systems or personalities could be altered?

"It was central to Lilly's ethic that he himself be the first subject of any experiment, and, in the case of the consciousness-exploring tank work, he and one colleague were the only ones. Lilly realized that the intelligence agencies were not interested in sensory deprivation because of its positive benefits, and he finally concluded that it was impossible for him to work at the National Institute of Health without compromising his principles. He quit in 1958.

"Contrary to most people's intuitive expectations, Lilly found sensory deprivation to be a profoundly integrating experience for himself personally. He considered himself to be a scientist who subjectively explored the far wanderings of the brain. In a series of private experiments, he pushed himself into the complete unknown by injecting pure Sandoz LSD into his thigh before climbing into the sensory-deprivation tank. When the counterculture sprang up, Lilly became something of a cult figure, with his unique approach to scientific inquiry --though he was considered more of an outcast by many in the professional research community.

"For most of the outside world, Lilly became famous with the release of the popular film, The Day of the Dolphin, which the filmmaker acknowledge was based on Lilly's work with dolphins after he left NIH. Actor George C. Scott portrayed a scientist who, like Lilly, loved dolphins, did pioneering experiments on their intelligence, and tried to find ways to communicate with them. In the movie, Scott became dismayed when the government pounced on his breakthrough in talking to dolphins and turned it immediately to the service of war. In real life, Lilly was similarly dismayed when Navy and CIA scientist trained dolphins for special warfare in the waters of Vietnam."

(The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate", John Marks, pgs. 152-153)

Lilly

By the 1970s Lilly had also become involved with the peculiar crowd that had gathered around the notorious medical and parapsychological researcher (and some time US intelligence asset) Andrija Puharich, groundbreaking physicist Jack Sarfatti, and legendary stage magician Uri Geller (among others). While this group, which included virtually every major psychonaut from the counterculture as well as a host of other rogue scientists and artists, has rarely been addressed in mainstream histories they would have a shocking degree of influence on popular culture for decades to come. Apparently one of the chief bonds many members of this clique shared was a belief that they had been contacted by some type of nonhuman intelligence.

"In the 1970s, however, when Sarfatti was still developing the theories that would later make him famous in the world of physics, he was hanging out with Puharich, Uri Geller, and other notables in the hothouse atmosphere of radical thinking about science, communication, information, and psychic phenomena. Sarfatti claims to have introduced Geller to Jacques Vallee --the French UFO researcher of Passport to Magonia fame --and both to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg would later produce Close Encounters of the Third Kind, using Vallee as a technical adviser... This same nexus of Puharich and Sarfatti is said to have influenced Gene Roddenberry in his development of the Star Trek television series. And behind all of this is the hugely influential figure of Ira Einhorn, usually referred to as 'the Unicorn' after the translation of his surname into English.

"For a while, Einhorn served as Sarfatti's literary agent (as he did with Puharich to get Beyond Telepathy reprinted). Einhorn was active in New Age pursuits, a kind of P. T. Barnum of hippiedom, making connections and networking, bringing together people he felt should be brought together to create a kind of explosion of new thinking that cut across traditional disciplinary lines. So you had filmmakers talking this physicist, psychics talking to soldiers, and spies talking everybody. Seminars were held, books and papers published. People like science-fiction author Philip K. Dick (who was discovered by Hollywood in the 1990s, unfortunately after his death) and Robert Anton Wilson could be found in kaffeklatsch with Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Saul Paul Sirag, and assorted G-men. There was a sense among these people that an event of momentous importance to the planet was imminent, and that they were in the forefront of whatever it was going to be.

"Many of them had already had paranormal contacts of some sort (a list that includes Sarfatti, Wilson, Dick, Geller, Puharich, and many, many others) and were certain that these contacts signaled the beginning of a more overt presence by these beings. These were people with government grants and contracts at the highest levels of the US military... And not only the US military. The Soviets were also involved, if only the peripherally. And much of this was going on relatively un-noticed by the American people at large. Although they had seen Uri Geller bend spoons on national television, and had read the stories and novels by Dick and Robert Anton Wilson, for instance, they had no idea that all this activity was being produced by a loosely-organized group of intellectuals operating half-in, half-out of the mainstream... And half-in, half-out of the US government."

(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pgs. 245-246)

Puharich (top) with the Pope and Sarfatti (bottom)

Lilly also claimed to have experienced some type of paranormal contact, apparently.

"In his book on the Israeli psychic Uri Geller, Dr. Andrija Puharich, a neurologist of some professional reputation which he is presumably not eager to destroy by going out on a limb, asserts that both he and Geller have frequently received communications from extraterrestrials...

"Dr. John Lilly, internationally known psychoanalyst, neuro-anatomist, cyberneticist, mathematician and delphinologist, gently hints that he has also received such communications. Academia, relieved that Dr. Lilly is only hinting and not saying it outright, happily ignores the potential breakthrough."

(Cosmic Trigger Volume I, Robert Anton Wilson, pg. 79)

Cults, Conspiracies and the Twisted History of Sleepytime Tea


Its calming combination of chamomile, spearmint and other herbs might seem benign, almost boring — the ideal formula for lulling you to sleep. But there’s a peculiar story lurking in your cup of Sleepytime tea, one that concerns involuntary trances, communication with aliens and a eugenics plot to eliminate the “inferior races” of our great nation.

The Use of LSD-25 in the Therapy of Children

Harold A. Abramson, M.D.


Apparently R.C. Murphy and T. T. Peck were among the first physicians to report at a meeting held at Princeton, New Jersey, under the auspices of the Macy Foundation that children may safely be given LSD-25. Murphy administered LSD to three children over a period of several months. One of these children was an 8-year-old girl who had a long-standing chronic resistive character disorder. From 1955 to 1956 she was treated for enuresis and had serious sexual conflicts. Routine psychotherapy for one year had resulted in no improvement. She was treated by Dr. Murphy with LSD, with the dose slowly increased to 300 mcg once weekly. Her enuresis stopped after the second LSD session in which she became disoriented and called continually for her mother. During the treatment, improvement was noticed by both relatives and friends as well as by the child herself. She became more outgoing, more generous and gave up the blind stereotypes which formerly controlled her life after several months of LSD therapy.