a spontaneous Tree of Life ascent and return 2

a spontaneous Tree of Life ascent and return

Robert Anton Wilson on Cabala - Tasting the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Life

There's a tale they tell at Military Intelligence in London, when the candles gutter low and the fog curls about the windows. It happened in 1914 (they say), when England was losing the first world war and it seemed only a miracle could save her. There was this writer bloke (they say), name of Arthur Machen, never popular or well known, a bloody Welshman in fact and a mystic to boot. Well (they say), this Welshman, this Machen, took it into his head to write a story about the kind of miracle England needed, so he imagined St. George himself leading a group of medieval archers to aid the English troops at Mons. And after the story was published in a magazine, some enterprising newspapers picked it up and reprinted it as fact. And (they say) the whole damned country was gullible enough to believe it. It did as much for national morale as the real miracle would have.

What is even weirder is the sequel -and the chaps at Military Intelligence only discuss this when the candles gutter quite low and the fog is very thick, of course. Soldiers at the front, in Mons, began claiming that they had actually seen the phantom archers created out of Machen's imagination. They insisted on it. Some of them were still insisting on it 40 years later. They said they had won the battle because of this supernatural assistance.

Fair gives you a turn, doesn't it?

Stranger still: Machen, the man with the contagious imagination, was a member of a secret society in London. This was known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and it claimed to know the long-hidden secrets of Cabalistic magic.

There were several other members of the Golden Dawn who made a bit of a name. Florence Farr, one of the great actresses of the period, was a member, and it was she who gave Bernard Shaw the ideas about life-energy and longevity dramatized in Back to Methuselah; those ideas are currently influencing life-extension research. Algernon Blackwood and Bram Stoker (Dracula's creator) were members; so was the coroner of London; so was an electrical engineer named Alan Bennett who later, as Ananda Maitreya, played a key role in introducing Buddhist ideas to the West.

The egregious Aleister Crowley; who claimed to have come to earth to destroy Christianity; was a member for a while, and I know a good World War I story about him, too. It was Crowley's habit to give his pupils a word to meditate on every year. In 1918, Crowley gave them a number instead of a word: 11. All year his pupils meditated on 11 for at least a half hour every day. . . And the war ended on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Did you feel another queer flash then?

The most famous Golden Dawn alumnus, however, was the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. In 1894 Yeats predicted that "the right pupils will be drawn to (the Golden Dawn) by dreams and visions and strange accidents . . .”

Cabala, the working philosophy behind the Golden Dawn, is the science of "strange accidents” – which are known as "mere coincidences" to the rationalist or "synchronicities" to Jungian psychologists.

Cabala (also spelled Qabala or Kaballah) was either taught by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, according to its own tradition' or was invented by a group of rabbis c. A.D. 200 as a means of transmitting the esoteric inner teachings of Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the Dispersion. Among the prominent medieval and Renaissance philosophers who were Cabalists one can mention Raymond Lull, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, Pico della Mirandola and Isaac Newton. Cabala became unfashionable in the 18th century and did not begin to make a comeback until the Brain Explosion of the 1960s -the drug culture, the consciousness movement, the importation of Oriental mind-sciences, the popularity of Jung and Leary and Castaneda.

One way to get into the Cabalistic head space is to reflect long and hard on the singular fact that we could not live-could not breathe, in fact-without the trees busily pumping oxygen into the air. Yet the trees are not "thinking" about producing life-support for us. To the rationalist, it seems that our need for oxygen has no real connection with the trees' production of that element; sheer chance (or, the more vehement rationalists will anthropomorphically say, "blind chance") happens to have produced trees, through natural selection, over many aeons. The fact that we exist is, to this philosophy, a total accident, a very strange coincidence.

And, to the same rationalist, Arthur Machen's imagination has no real connection with what was happening on the battlefield at Mons. The magical link between Machen's imagination and the "collective hallucination" of the soldiers is just coincidence – like the magical link between us and the trees.

To the Cabalist, the rationalist sounds like a man found in a closet by a jealous husband, who hopefully explains, "Just by coincidence, while you were away on business I happened to wander into this closet without my clothes on. . .”

To the Cabalist, the whole universe is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coincidental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Cabalist you must regard everything as being just as important as everything else. All that seems "accidental," "meaningless," "chaotic," "weird," "nonsensical;' et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.

An elementary Cabalistic training technique is to try every day to "regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God and your sou1." Even the license plates on passing cars are such communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.
Some will be thinking of Freud at this point; and indeed Nathan Fodor points out in Freud, Jung and the Occult that Freud was heavily influenced by a friend who was a Cabalist. The "dreams, visions and strange accidents" that Yeats thought would bring people into the ambience of the Golden Dawn are all Freudian "unconscious material.”

A more modern metaphor is to be found in current neurology; which points out that the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is where we do most of our conscious thinking, and it is linear; it breaks things down into sequences of A-causes-B, B-causes-C, and so forth. The right hemisphere, on the contrary; thinks in gestalt-meaningful wholes, comprehensive systems.

Cabala, like dope, is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the linear left brain and allow the contents of the holistic right brain to flood the field of consciousness. When you are walking down the street and every license plate seems part of one continuous message-one endless narrative-you are thinking like a very advanced theoretical Cabalist. (Or else you're stoned out of your gourd.) Practical Cabala (or Cabalistic magic) is the art of utilizing such holistic perception to create effects that will seem like "strange accidents" to the non-Cabalist.
A legendary example concerns an incident when the king of Poland was being urged by his advisers to authorize a pogrom against the Jews. One old Hasidic rabbi and the Hasidic rabbis spend most of their time studying Cabala-sat down, on hearing of this, and pretended to be writing something; but he did not write. Instead, he deliberately knocked his bottle over three times. His students, who saw this, thought the old man was getting a bit funny in the head. Then, a few days later; came news from the capital: The king had tried to sign the order for the pogrom three times, and each time he had-by "strange accident knocked over his ink bottle. "I can't sign this," the king finally exclaimed. "God is against it!"

Every Oriental culture has some equivalent to Cabala – some neuroscience of meditations, visualizations and yogic contortions calculated to shift consciousness, or part of consciousness, from the usually overactive left hemisphere to the usually underactive right hemisphere. Cabala differs from all these Oriental disciplines in being as systematic as any natural science-although far weirder:

The system of Cabala is contained in a kind of ontological periodic table of elements (see illustration). The purpose of this diagram has been nicely defined by the eminent contemporary Cabalist (and Jungian psychologist) Dr. Israel Regardie, who describes it as "a mnemonic system of psychology. . . to train the Will and Imagination."

The tree, as you can see, is made up of ten circles, called lights, and 22 paths connecting the lights. Each light represents a separate level of consciousness, and hence a separate level of "reality:' That is, to the Cabalist, each perceived reality is a function of the level of consciousness which perceives it, and how much reality you can absorb depends on how rich your consciousness is.
The paths, which are more technical than the lights, are techniques for getting from one light (one level of awareness) to another: '
The aim of the Cabala is to always know which "light" you are in, which is the level of consciousness that is creating what you are perceiving; and then to know the paths, or tricks, to get from one light (perceived reality) to another.

Dion Fortune, a Cabalist who also practiced psychoanalysis under her birth name, Violet Wirth, sums it all up by saying Cabala is "the art of causing change in consciousness by act of will"

The Tree of Life may be regarded as a map of those parts of consciousness which (a) are active in everybody-the lower parts of the tree; and (b) those which are only active in various orders of adepts-the higher parts of the tree.

The pragmatic theory of Cabala is that each action creates a new "universe," each experiment creates a new experimenter, each dance creates a new dancer. We are growing and evolving all the time, without noticing it usually; but a_ certain crucial points we can make a mental quantum jump to a level of awareness that puts us in a new reality we have never noticed before. Each of the lights on the Tree of Life represents such a quantum jump.

Concretely, we all start out in Malkuth, at the bottom of the tree, which represents the lowest level of awareness. This is what Freud called the oral stage: We simply drift and wait to be fed. Alcoholics, opiate addicts and most of the people on welfare for "psychological" reasons represent this state in its pure form, but we all contain it and relapse into it under sufficient stress. "I can't cope; somebody come help me:' Hear the infant's shrill cry. "Maaa-Maaa!" and you know what Malkuth is all about.

Above this is Yesod, the area of strong ego-awareness and what Gurdjieff called conscious suffering. This is where you struggle to be a real mensch, to be honorable, responsible, and self-sufficient. If you never get beyond this, you become what doctors called Type A and are a good bet for an early heart attack.

There are two ways to transcend Yesod's struggles. One takes you to Hod, which can be called the tactic _of the rationalist (Dr: Carl Sagan will serve as a model for this), and the other to Netzach, which is the strategy of the ordinary religionist (Jerry Falwell, say).

According to Cabala, both the rationalist and the vulgar religionist are unbalanced; in modern neurological language, the rationalist leans too much on the left brain and the religionist too much on the right brain. The synthesis, or balancing, brings you to the Middle Pillar and is represented by the light called Tiphareth-which charmingly enough means "beauty" in English.

Looking at the tree, you can see that the rationalist has a different path to Tiphareth from that of the religionist. The rationalist must go the path of nun ("fish") and the religionist the path of ayin ("eye"). Any book on Cabala will tell you what nun and ayin imply in terms of the psychological transformation involved. Fortunately, the tarot cards were either created or revised by a Cabalist and the meanings of nun and ayin are vividly conveyed to the unconscious by the two cards called, respectively. Death and the Devil. Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of psychology can grasp part of what is meant here-the rationalist must "make friends with" Death and the religionist with the Devil. This is what Jung means when he says each man must face his own shadow.

(Every path on the tree has a tarot card illustrating it, and the quickest way to make the tree clear to your unconscious is to layout the cards representing the paths' between each light. The next step is to redesign the cards in terms of your own understanding. Some Cabalists redesign the tarot every two or three years, as their understanding grows.)

Tiphareth, the balanced center between and above both rationalism and religion, means beauty, as we said above. It is the first light that does not appear in normal, statistically average consciousness, and is identified with everything we mean by rebirth or awakening. It is dhyana in the Hindu system, "Buddha-mind" in Buddhism, the "New Adam" in St. Paul's epistles, Cosmic Christ Consciousness to Christian Cabalists. It represents a total reorganization of the psyche for a higher level of functioning than most humans ever attain. When Dr. Timothy Leary says gnomically that "the nervous system sees no color, feels no pain;' he means that the nervous system on this level sees no color; feels no pain. You are floating, and this is the first light on the tree that really feels like a light. Acidheads will know.
Above Tiphareth are two more unbalanced lights called Geburah and Chesed. Roughly; Geburah is the stage of Nietzsche's superman: he who is much more conscious than ordinary people and knows it. In George Lucas's symbolism, Geburah means "being seduced by the dark side of the Force:' It needs to be balanced by Chesed, which is humility in the deepest, more ego-destroying sense. In Castaneda's lingo, Geburah is "taking responsibility" and Chesed is doing so while always remembering that "you are no more important than the coyote.”

Geburah says "I am God"; Chesed says, “And so is everybody else – and everything else!"

There are three more lights on the tree. These are known as the supernals and are much further from ordinary human consciousness than Tiphareth, Geburah or Chesed. Many Cabalists say that you cannot reach the supernals without the direct help of the Almighty. Even with such divine aid, reaching the supernals is known as "crossing the abyss" and is regarded as fraught with peril.

The first two supernals are Chokmah and Binah. You will note on the diagram that they are both unbalanced – off the Middle Pillar. Basically; Chokmah is direct contact with the masculine aspect of "God" and corresponds to whatever you associate with Jehovah, Jupiter; Brahma, Zeus, et cetera. Binah is direct contact with the female side of divinity and corresponds to Venus, Ishtar, Kali or the White Goddess that Robert Graves is always writing about. Cabala says that each of these Close Encounters has to be "balanced." That is, you have to get beyond both Big Daddy and Big Mommy to arrive at the ultimate light, Kether, the balanced center of all consciousness, which is beyond gender, beyond space, beyond time, beyond words and beyond all categories. In short, Kether is exactly what all the Oriental mystics are seeking: pure consciousness without a blemish of emotion, idea or image, and therefore infinite and formless.

Cabala is very complicated and very; very intricate; the above sketch is no more than a hint of what the Tree of Life contains, on about the level of a discussion of chemistry that tells you there are eight families of elements but does not go on to list the elements in each family. To discuss Cabala fully requires many books; and indeed there is one good-sized book, Liber 777, by Aleister Crowley; which consists only of listing the elements in each light and path of the tree, and Liber 777 consists of 155 pages with four columns on each page.
The purpose of such lists is to design rituals, and the purpose of rituals is to program your own experience as you navigate from one light to another. As Tim Leary once said, "Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences.” Cabalists agree.
For instance, suppose you have had a very powerful experience of the Punishing Father aspect of God, such as John Calvin once had. Within the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition, you might take this literally and proceed, as Calvin did, to establish a new religion. As a Cabalist, you will recognize it as a Chokmah experience and know that it needs to be balanced by a Binah experience.

You then look on the Tree of Life for a path from Chokmah to Binah. That turns out to be daleth ("door"), which corresponds to the Empress card in the tarot. If you look at the Empress you will immediately note that she happens to be a pregnant woman sitting in a field surrounded by vegetation. That should tell your unconscious what the path of daleth means. (By a "strange accident" or "mere coincidence" the Empress card, in most tarot decks, contains the women's-liberation symbol and always has, long before there was a feminist movement. That should help jar your consciousness. )

If the Empress card doesn't tell you enough, you look up daleth in any Cabalistic textbook, such as Crowley's 777. You will find that daleth is "in correspondence with" such things as the planet Venus, the color emerald green, the swan, the rose, sandalwood incense, the heptagram (seven-sided polygon), et cetera, and is most powerful on Friday. Thus, to get from Chokmah to Binah, you construct a ritual-a dramatized rnindchange operation-to be performed within a heptagram, on Friday evening as Venus is rising, using emerald green decorations, roses, swan feathers and sandalwood incense. If you follow all these correspondences, and know how to write rituals, and have had enough experiences with Cabala to have developed a powerful will and imagination, you should achieve Binah, the vision of the All-Loving Mother.

Similarly, there are favorable days, and perfumes, and geometric figures, and other accessories, for every type of brain change operation. Sunday is best for Tiphareth (Christ consciousness), Monday for Yesod (building a stronger ego), Tuesday for Geburah (accumulating powers), Wednesday for Hod (wisdom). Thursday for Netzsch (moral strength), Friday for Binah and Saturday for Chokmah.

This is only the skeleton of Cabala, however. Real Cabalistic practice consists of so familiarizing yourself with all the correspondences on the Tree of Life that everything you experience is filed and indexed by your brain as a Cabalistic "message.” Thus, if you walk out the door and see a palm tree, you immediately (by self-conditioning with Cabala) think of Venus and Hermes – because door is daleth is Venus, and palm is beth is Hermes. If you see a license plate with 333 on it, you remember that that is the number of egotism and deception, and you must ask what egotism and deception remains in yourself. In short, nothing is trivial; nothing is insignificant; nothing is meaningless. The whole universe, as Crowley says, becomes a continuous ritual of initiation.

A Zen Master was once asked, "What is Zen?" “Attention,” he replied. "Is that all?" asked the inquirer. "Attention,” the Zen Master repeated. "Won't you say anything else?" persisted the questioner. “Attention,” said the Master, one more time.

Cabala creates attention by using the Tree of Life to "key" every possible impression to one of the lights or paths and hence to a stage in the evolution of consciousness. The world becomes – as it was to Plato and Mary Baker Eddy and Sir Humphrey Davy when he tried nitrous oxide – nothing but ideas.

Theoretical Cabala is much concerned with words and numbers, and indeed insists that every word is a number. This is literally true in Hebrew, because all Hebrew letters are numbers, and the number of a word is the number obtained by adding its separate letters together. Cabala claims that any words having the same number are in some sense identical or "in correspondence with" each other.
For instance, achad (I am writing the Hebrew as if it were English, for simplicity's sake) has the value of 13. So does ahebah. What does this mean? Well, achad translates as "unity" and ahebah as "love,” so by the mathematical theorem that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other; the Cabalist calculates that love (ahebeh) equals 13 and unity (achad) equals 13 and therefore love equals unity. And, of course, when you love somebody you are in union with them: You are happy when they are happy; you suffer when they suffer.
Better still, it works backwards, too, according to some Cabalists: 31 is 13 backwards and therefore 31 is mystically the same as 13. And AI, the oldest name of God in Hebrew; has the value 31. Therefore, God equals love equals unity.

Which is all very nice and cheerful, and it's pleasant to have our first lesson in theorhetical Cabala coming up with such pleasant information.

Unfortunately; la (nothing) also equals 31. Is God therefore nothing? Or is it unity that is nothing? or love?

The theoretical Cabalist is not abashed. God is nothing, he says firmly – no-thing. And in this he is in agreement with the Buddhists and Hindus and, indeed, the most advanced mystics of all traditions. It only sounds queer to those primitives down at the bottom of the Tree of Life in Hod (rationalism) or Netzach (conventional religion); if you persist in Cabala long enough, the divine no-thing will make perfect sense to you.

Unfortunately; before you arrive at Kether – "the Head without a Head," the divine nothing – you will be sure to encounter even worse shocks in theoretical Cabala. Thus, neschek, the serpent in Genesis, the devil himself, has the value 358. You don't have to look far to find another Hebrew word with the value 358. It jumps up at you, as soon as you start studying Cabala. It is messiah.

In what sense is the devil the messiah? Some Cabalists have gone quite batty working on that one.

The charm of Cabala is that the universe adjusts-or in your excited and overstimulated state, appears to adjust-in ways that heighten such perplexities. When I first discovered the 358-equals-devil-equals-messiah paradox, I had to go to Los Angeles on business. Arriving at my hotel I found I had been given room 358. That's the sort of "strange accident" that Yeats was talking about, as one of the portals to Cabala. . .

For several years English biologist Lyall Watson has been collecting the products of Jung's "collective unconsciousness" – dreams, hypnotic states, mediumistic phenomena, automatic writing, et cetera. In his book, Lifetide, Watson offers a tentative summary of the data: "... there is a sameness in the tone, the word structure, the feeling, and the delivery of almost all the material. It has a dreamlike quality; and my feeling is that the vast majority of all the evidence I am looking at is a series produced by one prodigious dreamer" (italics added).

William Butler Yeats, trying to justify his interest in Cabalastic magic to rationalistic friends, came up with the same metaphor: "The borders of our minds are ever shifting, and many minds can flow into one another; as it were, and create or reveal a single mind. . . our memories are part of one great memory; the memory of Nature herself.”

This "one great dreamer" or "one great memory" can be accessed by Cabalistic practices, or by Zen meditation, or by LSD, or by a dozen other gimmicks. It has the quality of oneness in that it is the same no matter who accesses it or when-whether they are in India 500 B.G or Florence A.D. 1300 or in New York City today. It seems to be "timeless" or unconnected to our conscious notions of sequential time, as even so materialistic an observer as Freud noticed. One of the benefits of the psychological investigations of our times-from Freud and Jung to the LSD research of the '60s and the human-potential movement-has been to make most of us aware again, for the first time since the 17th century; that this level of the psyche exists in all of us and cannot safely be repressed or ignored.

The Cabalist, scorned by the 19th century as a crank or a charlatan, seems to be having the last laugh after all. There may be only one person in 10,000 – or in 100,000 – who seriously studies Cabala, but the avant-garde third of the population understands Cabalistic logic very well. If you show them the Tree of Life, and explain it, they might say that it is an alternative map of the charkas – if they are into Oriental mind-science; or an anatomy of the collective unconscious- if they're into Jung; or the circuits of the nervous system-if Tim Leary is their bag; but one way or another they will recognize it. It looked like gibberish to Yeats's contemporaries.

Military Intelligence never could figure out how the "angelic archers" escaped from Arthur Machen's imagination to the perceptions of the soldiers at Mons. But the readers of this magazine understand.

Don't you? 

from High Times, July 1981 - via the official rawilson.com

John Lilly: psychedelic scientist

CJ Stone reveals how a neuroscientist's research into consciousness lead him to take vast quantities of LSD and ketamine in his invention - the first floatation tank

Dr John C Lilly: psychedelic explorer and pioneer of interspecies communication  

via the Robert Anton Wilson Fans Facebook Group

Do Psychedelics Allow Interspecies Communication?

From the Daily Grail: The following is an excerpt from Paul Devereux's The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK), reprinted with permission. The Long Trip is...

...probably the most comprehensive single volume to look at the use of mind-altering drugs, or entheogens, for ritual and shamanistic purposes throughout humanity's long story, while casting withering sidelong glances at our own times - as Paul Devereux points out, our modern mainstream culture is eccentric in its refusal to integrate the profound experiences offered by these natural substances into its own spiritual life.

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Do Psychedelics Allow Interspecies Communication?
by Paul Devereux

Societies of the past have used the psychedelic experience to strengthen, renew and heal the spiritual underpinning of their social structures. The ever-deepening social unease that Western civilisation seems to be caught in is the real source of our 'drug problem': natural hallucinogens are not the problems in themselves, it is the context in which they are used that matters. If there were orderly and healthy structures and mechanisms for their use and the cultural absorption of the powerful experiences – and knowledge – we could separate these from the culture of crime that surrounds them now. In short, the problems are not in the psychoactive substances themselves, but in a society, which on the one hand wants to prohibit, mind-expansion altogether and on the other chooses to use mind-expanding substances in a literally mindless, hedonistic fashion.
Perhaps only a shock of some kind could break our society free from the patterns of thought and prejudices that lock it into this crisis. The desire for such a shock may be hidden within the widespread modern myth of extra-terrestrial intervention. In fact, we do not have to look to science fiction for a real otherworld contact: it already exists in the form of plant hallucinogens. If we see them in the context of a 'problem', it is only because they hold up a mirror in which we see our spiritual, social and mental condition reflected. And they hold that mirror up to us as one species to another just as surely as if they were from another planet. Indeed, that champion of the psychedelic state, the late Terence McKenna, argued that the ancestral spores of today’s hallucinogenic mushrooms may have originated on some other planet. (This is not as fringe an idea as it sounds, for even some 'hard scientists' – the late Francis Crick, co-discover of DNA, among them – have suggested that the germs of life may have had extra-terrestrial origins, brought to Earth by means of meteorites or comet dust.) The psilocybin family of hallucinogens, says McKenna, produces a "Logos-like phenomenon of an interior voice that seems to be almost a superhuman agency…an entity so far beyond the normal structure of the ego that if it is not an extraterrestrial it might as well be."
Other 'psychonauts' have emerged from the altered mind states enabled by plant substances with similar impressions. For instance, New York journalist Daniel Pinchbeck wrote about his various initiations with plant hallucinogens in his Breaking Open the Head (2002). In one ayahuasca session with Amazonian Secoya Indians he found himself wandering in a visionary space where he encountered beings that "never stopped changing" their forms. "The shaman and the elders seemed to be inhabiting this space with me… They sang, their words unintelligible, to these creatures, interacting with them… I had no more doubts that the Secoya engaged in extradimensional exploration." Or, again, two of the three molecular biologists brought to the Amazon to experience ayahuasca trances by anthropologist and writer, Jeremy Narby, felt that they had communicated with an "independent intelligence." Narby himself feels that in their ayahuasca altered states shamans plumb the molecular level of nature and that, to put Narby’s idea crudely, ayahuasca – with its trade-mark visionary snakes – has the ability to communicate information concerning the double-helix coil of DNA (The Cosmic Serpent, 1998). Indeed, to allow contact with the "mind of nature."
We have already noted that the idea that ontologically independent beings ('spirits') or intelligences are contactable through plant-induced trances is standard in most if not all shamanic tribal societies, but to posit such a thing in modern Western societies is viewed as tantamount to insanity, a nonsense notion to be dismissed out of hand. In other words, we can’t discuss it without forfeiting all credibility. This problem concerning the inability to explore certain ideas has been addressed by Oxford-based researcher, Andy Letcher. He uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to critique the models, the 'discourses' employed by the West in dealing with the content of altered mind states. These include pathological, prohibition, psychological, recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic discourses. Each has its own imposed boundaries; they are cognitive constructs. Letcher notes that some of these discourses or approaches to hallucinogenic substances ignore the subjective experience of the altered mind states involved, or else place it within an inner, psychological framework rather than it being a case of simply seeing more, of being in a wider frame of consciousness. He critiques even the entheogenic discourse as relying on a “God within” model, divine revelation that does not by any means occur in all altered states. However diverse they might be, all these discourses can be used within the norms of Western culture. Only one discourse crosses that "fundamental societal boundary," what Letcher refers to as the animistic discourse – the belief that the taking of, say, hallucinogenic mushrooms occasions actual "encounters with discarnate spirit entities." Because of the deep-rooted modern Western assumption that consciousness cannot occur in any other guise than human (the ultimate hubris of our species, perhaps) discussion of a conscious plant kingdom, or of that providing a portal through which contact with other, ontologically independent beings or intelligences can occur, is simply not possible within the mainstream culture. "It nevertheless remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research," Letcher rightly insists.
It is a remarkable fact that plant hallucinogens are hallucinogenic precisely because they contain the same, or effectively the same, chemicals as are found in the human brain, and so act on us as if we were indeed engaged in an interspecies communication. "The chemical structure of the hallucinogenic principles of the mushrooms was determined…and it was found that these compounds were closely related chemically to substances occurring naturally in the brain which play a major role in the regulation of psychic functions," Schultes and Hofmann have observed, for instance. This challenges the view held by many people that taking a plant hallucinogen is somehow 'unnatural'. Certainly, mind-altering plants take the brain-mind to states that are not “normal” by the standards of our culture, but the 'normal' state of Western consciousness cannot claim to be the one-and-only 'true' state of consciousness. (Indeed, judging by the mess we manage to make of our societies and of the natural world around us it may even be an aberrant or pathological state of mind that we are culturally locked into.)
"If one were to reduce to its essentials the complex chemical process that occurs when an external psychoactive drug such as psilocybin reaches the brain, it would then be said that the drug, being structurally closely related to the naturally occurring indoles in the brain, appears to interact with the latter in such a way as to lock a nonordinary or inward-directed state of consciousness temporarily into place… There are obviously wide implications, biological-evolutionary as well as philosophical, in the discovery that precisely in the chemistry of consciousness we are kin to the plant kingdom," writes Peter Furst.
These are probably the same kind of chemical changes that occur during the course of long and intensive spiritual exercises, but it takes a rare person to achieve sufficient expertise in such techniques to arrive at experiences that match those accessible through hallucinogen usage, which are certainly very 'real' in a subjective sense. It is a culturally-engineered cliché to dismiss such states as being somehow delusional. They are subjectively no more delusional than the experience of daily life. The human body is an open system, taking in material from the environment and expelling matter into it all the time, and we really shouldn’t think of taking in natural chemicals for visionary and mind-expanding functioning as any different, any less natural, than taking in gases from the air for their chemical benefits to the body, or chemicals and compounds in animal and vegetable matter to provide food, or fermented fruits and vegetable matter to provide delicious, refreshing or inebriating beverages, or vitamins to augment healthy functioning, or medicines when we are ill, or caffeinated teas and coffees when we want to be energised. "Ethnobotanists now realize that psychotropic plant species extend further than had been suspected, as though nature truly wanted the human species to get in touch with its floral neighbors," Richard Gehr muses. "As plant species die off at a furious rate, the issue is no longer what they are trying to tell us, but whether we will get the message in time."
That message may be to do with the need for us to change our minds, or, at least, to broaden our cognitive horizons. The plant kingdom could be urging us to allow the ability to 'switch channels' in consciousness terms to let them become a recognised and acceptable part of our emerging global culture. Hallucinogen-using ancient and traditional societies had and have exceptional sophistication when it comes to understanding and navigating alternate states of consciousness, whereas we are still quite primitive and inexperienced in this regard. The manual for using expanded consciousness is a textbook we have not read – or, more accurately, recalled. Not that simply widening our collective experience of consciousness will act like a magic wand and remove all problems and obstacles, but it would help us to make wiser, more whole-some decisions in coping with them. If Western civilisation is truly to advance, we surely must learn to operate within the multi-dimensional capacities of our minds, rather than using the police to conduct an indiscriminate war on the means of doing so. A workable balance has to be struck between protecting the well-being and the orderly functioning of society as a whole, and allowing the human brain-mind to explore its full potential. We are smart enough and complex enough and able enough to make it possible to do both. There are no excuses.
The Long Trip is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK
Title image: "Supernatural", by Adam Scott Miller

From the Daily Grail

Terence McKenna - Terra Lucida

Directed by Wes Richardson - www.wesrichardson.me with Terence Mckenna's - Terra Lucida (World of Iights) layered over the top, Terra Lucida is an experiment with psychedelic visionary McKenna. McKenna points to a realm of light beyond this current world-We are engaging an imaginatrix of unlimited revelation and post-DNA photon ecologies. McKenna indicates a portal for shamanistic journeying into worlds beyond life where Nothing really ends... The recordings were made circa 1989 in Petaluma, California with collaborator Britt Welin.

via Alienpunk

Alex Grey - the Bad Trip

Yeah that about captures it

The Eternal & The Ten Commandments by David Goddard

From The Tower of Alchemy by David Goddard 

I should edit my Mushroom Trip Report soon as 'compassion and absolute love' is a perfect description of the Eternal aka... home. I kept this in mind all day today, being grateful for having been able to experience it, and in all my contacts with people and customers today and it was the best day of the entire work season!

The Ten Commandments by David Goddard:

...

Another better version of the Ten Commandments is the Ten Commandrants by Lon Milo DuQuette

Michael Cera goes psychonaut

Redeeming that shit hypnosis movie, yay

It's all fun and games

Psychedelic Salon 351 Terence McKenna - What is Truth?

You can listen to or download it here at the Psychedelic Salon

It starts with a bang!

What is truth?
"What one is sure of, very little. I would think. Well, I'm getting ready to say nothin'! I guess that's what it is, everything is provisional. As to what I believe in, is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience, the primary datum, I'm very aware that everything else is a construct moving out from that. And so the primary datum is the first level of being, but to say I believe in it..."

"If you're not thinking than you are no more than the onrush of your metabolism and not greatly different from your cat or your dog."

"And so I live by questions, I don't see how you can live any other way."

"I actually try to create a complete explanation, but I always call them models. Because you have to throw them away, you have to keep adding to the model and then throwing it away."

And the quotes listed at Psychedelic Salon:

“Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most.”

“The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.”

“If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don’t. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don’t.”

“So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That’s why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.”

“I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.”

“I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.”

“Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.”

“The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for.”

 

“The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don’t see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It’s beautiful.”

“Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.”

“In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we’re walking around in you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn’t self-extracted itself yet. And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.”

Art by Spayce

Joe Rogan Podcast #298 Dennis McKenna

Fascinating talk between Dennis McKenna and Joe Rogan.

More Joe Rogan Podcasts here.

Pew Pew

 Trippin on acid

The Joe Rogan Experience | Jason Silva

Fascinating fascinating talk.

Daniel Pinchbeck interviews Joe Rogan

This is pre-2012 but great to see these 2 interesting guys together. 

I'm reading Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking open the head and am amazed for some reason that's it's so well written. I mean it's spectacularly good.

Have you had a “bad trip” on psilocybin mushrooms? If so, please take this anonymous Johns Hopkins survey, and please tell others about it.

Have you had a “bad trip” on psilocybin mushrooms?

If so, please take this anonymous Johns Hopkins survey,

and please tell others about it.

www.ShroomSurvey.com

I filled it in, I've only ever had one bad trip and tried to be as descriptive and helpful as possible! Please do the same, for science!
Via the Psychedelic Salon.

Timothy Leary Interviewed In Folsom Prison 1973

4 months of solitary confinement, followed by prison. The coward authorities thought they could break the man, instead while incarcerated he remained lighthearted, performed consciousness experiments and wrote, before escaping ;) Endless love for the man. 

"The best philosophers end up in prison." 

 In case you're not aware of the details: On January 21, 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for [possession of two marijuana roaches], with a further ten added later while in custody, for a previous [marijuana possession] arrest in 1965, twenty years in total to be served consecutively. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of the tests himself (including the “Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test”), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening. As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped. Leary claimed his non-violent escape was a humorous prank, and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone. For a fee, paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, out of the United States and into Algeria. More here.

Walking Between the Worlds: Links between Psi, Psychedelics, Shamanism and Psychosis An Overview of the Literature

Interesting article I got linked by a friend, read all of it (there's a lot!) here.

Sharing the intro and two excerpts here:

In folk lore there is a belief that many people who have an acute psychotic breakdown exhibit signs of psychic ability. Research into this folk lore is virtually non-existent, but some interesting work by Neppe (1980) and Persinger (Persinger & Makarec, 1987) psi suggests that there might be some foundation for it. My research into the pineal gland is now exploring this same area from a neurochemical perspective.

The pineal gland makes a neurohormone called melatonin which is one of the key regulators of the circadian and seasonal biological rhythms. It also makes a mono-amine oxidase (MAO) inhibitor called pinoline (Methoxytetrahydrobetacarboline (MeOTHBC)) which acts on the GABA receptors and whose chemical structure is virtually identical with the harmala alkaloids, which are key ingredients in the ayahausca drink used by Amazonian people specifically for inducing a state of consciousness in which they state that they go out-of-body, experience travelling clairvoyance, divination and shamanic healing. The suggested neurochemistry for these effects implicates serotonin. Serotonin (5 Hydroxytryptamine (5HT)) has frequently been implicated in certain aspects of psychoses. Pinoline is a neuromodulator which prevents, amongst other effects, the breakdown of serotonin. This results in an accumulation of physiologically active amines including dimethyltryptamine (DMT) within the neuronal synapses which may lead to hallucinations, depression or mania depending on the amines being affected (Strassman, 1990). DMT is the other main ingredient in ayahuasca. There are also interesting links with the serotonergic activation by psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA which have all been implicated in triggering psychotic episodes, and more specifically with inducing a state of consciousness which has many similarities with both an acute psychotic breakdown and with shamanism, which traditionally uses psychedelic plants in order to achieve the desired state of consciousness.

A key link between all of these various experiences is the dream state of consciousness. Psychologically, both the shamanic initiation experience and that of an acute psychotic breakdown share many similarities with the dream state. It appears that the normal every night experience of all human beings is connected with the more extreme experiences of psychosis and shamanism through the same neurochemical pathways that underlie all these experiences. And, as the research at Maimonides (Ullman et al, 1975) and since has shown, the dream state is a psychic state of consciousness par excellence. This suggests that the anthropological reports of psychic abilities being exhibited by shamans may have some foundation, and suggests that some people who have experienced a psychotic breakdown could be seen in other cultures as people with a particular and highly valued gift - the gift of walking between the worlds.

Geomagnetic Fields, Depression and the Role of Melatonin
One of the key factors in linking the pineal with psychosis is the work of Kay (1994). Admission to mental hospital varies with season and time of the month, and mental illness is more common the further north you go, i.e., into long light summers, and long dark winters.
Seasonal variation in the incidence of depressive illness has been recognised since Hippocrates (Lewis, 1934). Onset of depressive illness, admission to hospital, prescriptions of antidepressant medication and incidence of suicide have all been found to show a bimodal annual distribution with peaks in spring and autumn.
Kay (1994) has found, in a 10 year study of admission rates to Lothian psychiatric hospitals, that two weeks after a geomagnetic storm there was a significant rise (36.2%) for male admissions for depression phase of manic-depression and a smaller non-significant rise for women with psychotic and non-psychotic depression. There was no correlation between intensity of storm and admission rates, i.e. if any sort of storm happens, mild or severe, you get increased admission rate, which is consistent with a threshold event affecting predisposed individuals. The effect of geomagnetic storms could range from mild irritability to full-blown depression. Monthly total psychiatric admissions have been positively correlated with solar radioflux levels and indices of geomagnetic ionospheric disturbance.
Kay suggests that geomagnetic storms partly account for the bimodal annual distribution of depression by acting either through desynchronisation of pineal circadian rhythms, or via an effect on 5HT-ergic and adrenergic systems leading to depressed mood and secondary disruption of pineal melatonin synthesis. Alteration in geomagnetic field (GMF) activity is associated with decreased serotonin NAT activity and decreased melatonin synthesis. Geomagnetic storms in spring enhance the suppressing effect of increasing daylight on melatonin synthesis, leading to a phase advance in the circadian rhythm, while the effect of storms in autumn tend to be partially compensated by the pineal response to decreasing light intensity. This is consistent with a Southern Hemisphere peak for psychotic depression admissions in September and October, and a peak in Sweden in April.
The main innervation of the pineal is via adrenergic systems so magnetic fields may affect pineal functioning via this mechanism. Sandyk (1990a) associates depression with decreased melatonin secretion and suggests that melatonin regulates dopaminergic, cholinergic and GABA-ergic functions.
It is also possible that the association between geomagnetic storms and depression could be due to an indirect association with changes in meteorological factors. Atmospheric ionisation and barometric pressure have been shown to affect measures of 5HT activity. Prolonged exposure to abnormal magnetic fields may also have an effect, acting through a similar mechanism to geomagnetic storms. Depression admissions have been associated with exposure to 50Hz e-m fields in the home.

Role of Circadian Rhythms, Melatonin and Manic-Depression
We have two circadian clocks - one is a biological clock which includes the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, the locus ceruleus and the dorsal raphe nucleus - food is the zeitgeber for this clock; the second clock includes the retina, hypothalamic suprachalasmic nuceus (SCN) and pineal gland - light is the zeitgeber for this clock. The two clocks are normally in synchrony but in view of the independence of the two clocks asynchrony is possible, and the affective disorders may be caused by such a dysfunction (Maurizi, 1984).
Disturbances of the noradrenergic activity of the central nervous system (CNS) have been related to affective disorders, which are also accompanied by depressed melatonin secretion and sleep disturbances. Manic-depression is associated with a sleep disorder: in the manic phase the person suffers from insomnia, in the depression state they sleep too much.
Melatonin is mainly secreted at night through noradrenergic stimulation of beta-receptors on the pinealocoytes. Melatonin secretion can therefore be inhibited by beta-blocking drugs. Melatonin secretion is depressed in mental disorders with sleep disturbances such as the manic phase of certain affective disorders, alcoholic abuse and dts with hallucinations.
There are mixed results regarding melatonin secretion in affective disorders - some find decreased nocturnal melatonin secretion in unipolar depressed adults, others do not. Lewy et al (1979) reports increased melatonin levels in bipolar subjects through a 24 hour cycle. Lam et al (1990) report decreased nocturnal melatonin production in bipolar patients compared with unipolar depressed and control subjects. Reiter (1982) suggests that manic-depressives have a low melatonin concentration during suicidal episodes and a high melatonin concentration during manic episodes.
Affective disorders involving circadian dysregulation may respond to interventions that restore a normal sleep-wake cycle. Robertson & Tanguay (1997) describe a boy with bipolar disorder. A trial of melatonin led to rapid relief of insomnia and aborted manic episodes for at least a two year period. Insomnia can be both a symptom and a precursor of mania (Wehr et al, 1987; Leibenluft et al, 1995). On the other hand, sleep deprivation therapy for depression is thought to exert its effect by resynchronising circadian rhythms, while antidepressants and lithium lengthen the pineal circadian cycle period re-synchronising a phase advanced cycle.
In addition, melatonin administration to clinically depressed patients gives negative effects (Carman et al, 1976). The treatment of psychotic depression with daytime melatonin increases psychotic symptoms and abolishes diurnal mood variation. The timing of this treatment would tend to exacerbate a desynchronised rhythm. De-synchronising circadian rhythms is therefore a possible mechanism for mood switching in manic-depressive illness, and manic-depressive patients have been found to be supersensitive to the suppressing effect of light on night-time melatonin synthesis, suggesting that in these people the pineal gland may be generally supersensitive to environmental factors including geomagnetic storms.
Brismar (1987) studied people on beta blockers because of angina, hypertension, etc. and found that those with depressed nightly urinary melatonin excretion suffered from CNS symptoms such as nightmares and hallucinations. Not many people suffer these effects. Another possible site of action for melatonin is the dorsal raphe nucleus. (LSD also acts on the dorsal raphe nucleus.) Melatonin could enhance 5HT levels by acting as a MAO inhibitor in the synapses of the dorsal raphe nucleus.
Abnormalities in circadian rhythm organization are consistent features in manic-depressive illness (Wehr & Goodwin, 1980). Wetterberg et al (1981) suggest pineal involvement. Manic-depressives have an earlier onset of melatonin secretion during depression, with this secretory onset being even earlier in mania (Lewy & Kern, 1984). Manic depressives are also super-sensitive to light with 50% reduction in melatonin production on exposure to 500 lux. Normally one needs 2500 lux for this suppression whereas manic-depressives have complete melatonin suppression at 1500 lux (Lewy & Kern, 1984). It is possible that supersensitivity to light with alteration in retinal perception of light could contribute to a phase advance of those rhythms that are entrained to the light-dark cycle and thus lead to alterations in those function that are influenced secondarily by such rhythms (for review see Kripke & Risch 1986; Rosenthal, 1986; Thompson, 1987).

Thus melatonin, as an integral aspect of our circadian rhythm is implicated in manic- depression.

the T

Via Relaxed Focus

Terence McKenna - The Message

Terence McKenna talks about culture, 5 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms and self empowerment, from the question and answer session of his lecture entitled 'Eros And The Eschaton'. More info about the video in the youtube info.