Multidimensional interview with Daniel Pinchbeck

Nearthwort Obtain interview with psychedelic author and global consciousness activist, Daniel Pinchbeck.

We discuss his two recent books, Breaking Open the Head and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, as well as an exciting new environmentally-friendly consumer membership programme, EVO.

Some great stuff here from the psychedelic scene’s undoubted dude du moment.

Redemption in Love

This heartfelt poem-prayer was sent to me by Nick, a long time reader of Future Hi. I felt it merited reading and receiving comment.

~~~

You don't want,

You don't need to do this anymore.

You do not need drugs to tell you,

That all you need in life is to love,

and be loved.

I am hereby declaring my intent, my salvation;

to never use any psychedelic drug again.

There is nothing left they can teach me.

There is no 'secret' that I have yet to find.

It was staring me in the face all along.

Love Nick! Just love people!

“Waiting for the moment when the moment has been waiting all the time”

-Yes

Love is all there is to life; and you, I, don't need drugs to learn this.

They were right!

So right!

No more will I take psychedelics.

This is it!

My message to anyone who wants to use entheogens;

Be careful.

It's terrifying.

It's completely, and utterly aweful.

Bewildering.

Incredible.

Beyond belief.

Confusing.

Ecstatic.

But when the sun sets...

You find a dead end.

All you seekers of truth,

Love is this truth.

I have chosen to accept the message,

I have finally found what it is I've been searching for all these years.

Love

“Today is the day I can see what it's all really for”

-Yes

It was staring me in the face.

My family;

The most caring beautiful amazing people.

They loved me, but I couldn't see.

My friends;

The most caring beautiful amazing people.

They loved me, but I couldn't see.

I couldn't see that's all I needed.

I wasn't happy.

I wasn't satisfied.

I wasn't at peace.

I sought.

I journeyed.

Well here it is.

Hear it!

I've finally arrived at my destination.

Unfasten your seat belts because this is what the cosmos is all about.

This is the answer to all the world's problems.

This is the truth I tried so hard to cheat.

Love

You don't need drugs to know that love is all you need; all there is.

You don't need cannabis.

You don't need psilocybin.

You don't need DMT.

Every one of them is going to bring you to the same place.

Drugs could not make me who I wanted to be.

They cannot make you who you want to be.

These organisms can send you to the depths of agony.

They can send you sailing on clouds of ecstatic joy.

But

This is only an image;

A reflection.

I envy the people,

Who didn't need drugs to see that love is the ultimate truth.

I'm casting off this great burden,

This enslavement to altered states.

No more will I be stricken by fear;

By paranoia;

By worry.

This is not a surrender

Oh no,

This is a liberation,

And a victory.

I am taking the next step, the only step;

to live my life fully,

with Love.

Love your friends,

Your family,

Your planet.

Love these things completely and wholly,

With every ounce of your being.

Be with them,

Care for people,

Don't be afraid.

Live.

Laugh.

Breathe.

Touch.
Taste.

Feel.

Be!

Don't believe the lie.

You don't have to ingest chemicals to see, to believe,

what many call 'a fantasy'.

It was a burden to me.

Drugs have been a great burden.

Perhaps the greatest one.

Creating so many uncertainties,

So many fears,

So many wasted moments.

My addiction was not in use but in thought.

My consciousness developed an unsatiable desire to be altered,

Tweaked,

Tuned,

Twisted,

Sapped,

Drained.

No more.

I am casting it off.

It was difficult.

One of the most difficult journeys I have ever taken.

It took a lot of pain.

A lot of fear.

But Love is the most powerful force in the universe.

It broke through my arrogance,

My foolishness,

My ignorance.

“I would show you a man, he would dance for love, I would show you a man, he would love to love... I would show you a child, who has everything, I would show you a child, who has everything”

-Yes

Psychedelics are a great tool,

A great paradox.

My liberation from the trap came from the trap itself.

These chemicals allow expanded perspective,

Colorful visions,

Hyper perception,

Appreciation for Gaia.

But ,

These beings,

These chemicals,

Cannot benefit you,

Unless you stop their use.

They become powerful,

We lose control of our own life.

Like Icarus,

I had to see for myself.

I had to fly to the star.

I wouldn't accept this truth,

Without feeling,

Directly experiencing it.

I got burnt.

The last thing I expected was for these drugs to make me ignorant.

None of the great scientists told me this would happen.

I was convinced I was doing something intelligent.

I was convinced I was being good to myself,

Convinced I was advanced.

But when I looked back I saw,

I had gained nothing.

Training wheels on a bicycle,

Can teach you to handle the bike.

But,

You can't truly benefit from this assistance,

Unless you leave it.

That 'enlightenment' came so easy,

I didn't see what i was missing.

Love

Psychedelics put your mind on fast forward.

You experience a lifetime in a millisecond.

But in this frenzy of information,

Something is lost.

You miss out on joys.

You miss out on life,

On yourself.

We who seek, were in fact blind.

It was in our own selves all along.

These drugs offered us nothing we never had,

Could never have.

But we did not believe something so simple,

Something so utterly cliché could be so redeeming.

Love

Psychedelics have use,

But this spirit is fleeting.

They can be a path,

A step on the journey of life.

But they are not 'the' path,

They are not 'the' answer.

They are only an image of the goal.

The goal is not hallucinating.

The goal is not in sight, in sound, in taste, touch, or smell.

The goal is love.

Love

When you eat the mushroom,

The world is beautiful.
Glowing, ever changing.

A vast, complicated, beautiful network.

But if we cannot recognize the world as such,

Through our own volition;

What have we gained?

If we cannot play beautiful music from within ourselves;

How have we grown?

If we cannot show compassion, concern, and care without these tools;

We have become trapped.

Our expression, our feelings become machine systems,

Fueled by drugs.

The seed of life holds the answer.

It has since the beginning of time.

We grow in Love.

You can choose to believe,

And be complete.

You cannot fully practice and experience love without abandoning these crutches.

Thank them for what they taught you,

But leave them.

Do not return.

Believe in yourself.

Resist the urges.

Acknowledge your empowerment!

I refused to believe that there were people wiser than me,

People who had learned this same truth,

People with more experience than me.

I refused to believe, that perhaps,

The answer was not hidden,

Not taboo,

Not locked away in the vast and wondrous expanse of the psyche.

We don't need conspiracy theories,

We don't need to hypothesize, theorize,

We don't need scientists to tell us.

The breakthrough?

Love completely.

Please.

Please don't think it's necessary,

To take the path I took.

To sacrifice your spirit.

Please don't think its necessary,

To don the wax wings and take flight.

To endure some arduous journey.

It will all come full circle,

And the answer can only be found when you land,

Although flying might have given you a good glimpse of it.

Return to love.

To the people you love.

Some people just have to see, to learn, and experience for themselves.

I hope I can integrate this truth, these truths, I have learned on my journey.

My journey's not over yet though.

Perhaps its only just begun.

Other people told me.

Other people wathced.

I put myself through hell,

Through incredible experience,

To discover the truth.

Love

Each person must make his own journey.

I do not shun these drugs.

I cannot tell you what paths to take.

Only through experience can we be taught.

But I can say this;

If you choose the path of Love,

You will never get lost,

Never make a wrong turn,

Never lose.

"No need to wonder, do you belong. No need to worry, you can be strong. Don't disbelieve it, let your fears go. There must be more to this life than we all know...Then we find the solution, staring us down"

-Yes

I've cleared the cobwebs,

Cleaned away the waste.

I had to see it.

I had to have it stare me down.

I had to have the truth forced into me.

I watched as the lid was blown off reality,

It was exhilarating.

Love

Its all I needed, and all I will ever need.

I'm sitting here,

Chuckling to myself.

Because none of it was necessary.

Drugs are a dead end,

Spiritually,

Intellectually.

Life.

Laughter.

Love.

The important things are all around us everyday,

Love completely.

This is the greatest and most full of all realizations.

Cast off your burdens.

Compassion!

It's all up to you.

You can choose to be brilliant!

You can choose to be a living, breathing, wonderful example to us.

You can be a testament, to the miracle of being alive.

The radiance of existence.

You can choose.

Tell everyone you know!

There is reason for rejoicing!

This is finally it!

Care for people!

Be a beacon of hope!

Do I sound like a maniac?
Like a preacher?

I'm just as fucked up as the rest of us.

Maybe I'm weak?

Thankfully,

There is redemption in Love.

It feels so good,

To finally,

Bloom!

Ayahuasca and Human Destiny

Ayahuasca and Human Destiny
Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D.

My good friend and colleague, Dr. Charles Grob, has extended a kind invitation to submit a contribution to this special edition of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, devoted to the topic of ayahuasca, for which he has been selected as guest editor. I’m pleased to be asked and happy to respond, particularly since I have collaborated for many years with Dr. Grob and other colleagues who are represented here, on various aspects of the scientific study of ayahuasca. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of my life.

In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.

Partly as a result of our collective efforts, over the last few decades ayahuasca has become one of the most thoroughly studied of the traditional shamanic plant hallucinogens. We now have a firm understanding of the plant species that are utilized in its preparation, including the diverse pharmacopoeia of ayahuasca admixture plants, a shamanic technology unto itself that begs additional investigation. We understand the chemistry of the active constituents of its primary botanical components, and have better insight into its remarkable synergistic pharmacology.

We have identified potential therapeutic applications for ayahuasca and the role that it may some day find in healing the physical and spiritual wounds of individuals, if it is ever afforded its rightful place in medical practice. Ethnographically, my colleagues and I have made contributions to an understanding of the central role that ayahuasca already has in the context of Amazonian shamanism and ethnomedicine. We have described, and written about, its status as a window into the sacred cosmology of magic, witchcraft, transcendent experience, and healing that permeates and defines the practices of Mestizo ethnomedicine.

The visionary paintings of Peruvian shaman and artist Pablo Amaringo, brought so beautifully to the attention of the world by Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, has helped to make that tradition accessible to many who would otherwise have seen it (if they were aware of it at all) as alien, exotic, and incomprehensible. To an extent, our work has shed some small light on the more contemporary role of ayahuasca as the sacramental vehicle of syncretic religious movements that originated in Brasil and now are reaching out globally, if incrementally, to embrace a sick and wounded world that desperately yearns for the healing that this mind/body/spirit medicine can offer.

The story of ayahuasca, and our evolving understanding of its place in the world, and of its significance for medicine, pharmacology, ethnobotany, and shamanic studies, is far from over, and in fact, it may have just begun. I would like to believe that is the case. But for the purposes of this contribution, rather than submit yet another dense and lengthy review on the botany, chemistry, pharmacology, &c., of ayahuasca, I have chosen to adopt a broader perspective, and to indulge in some reflections, and speculations on the past and future of ayahuasca of the sort that a scientist, probably mercifully, rarely shares with his colleagues or the larger world.

To those readers who may wish for my more usual nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject, I call attention to my recent review in the journal Pharmacology and Therapeutics (McKenna, 2004). In addition, a complete list of all of “my” publications on ayahuasca is appended to the end of this article; and I use the term “my” advisedly because these publications represent the work and creativity of many people with whom I’ve been privileged to collaborate over the years. They would not exist without them.

On a personal level, ayahuasca has been for me both a scientific and professional continuing carrot, and a plant teacher and guide of incomparable wisdom, compassion, and intelligence. My earliest encounters with ayahuasca were experiential; only later did it become an object of scientific curiosity, sparked in part by a desire to understand the mechanism, the machineries, that might underlie the profound experiences that it elicited.

As a young man just getting started in the field of ethnopharmacology, ayahuasca seemed to me more than worthy of a lifetime of scientific study; and so it has proven to be. Pursuing an understanding of ayahuasca has led to many exotic places that I would never have visited otherwise, from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to the laboratory complexes of the National Institute of Mental Health and Stanford; it has led to the formation of warm friendships and fruitful collaborations with many colleagues who have shared my curiosity about the mysteries of this curious plant complex.

These collaborations, and more importantly, these friendships, continue, as does the quest for understanding. Though there have been detours along the way, always, and inevitably, they have led back to the central quest. Often, after the fact, I have seen how those apparent detours were not so far off the path after all, as they supplied some insight, some skill, or some experience, that in hindsight proved necessary to the furtherance of the quest.

Just as ayahuasca has been for me personally something of a Holy Grail, as it has been for many others, I have the intuition that it may have a similar role with respect to our entire species. Anyone who is personally experienced with ayahuasca is aware that it has much to teach us; there is incredible wisdom and intelligence there. And to my mind, one of the most profound and humbling lessons that ayahuasca teaches – one that we thick-headed humans have the hardest time grasping – is the realization that “you monkeys only think you’re running things.”

Though I state it humorously, here and in other talks and writings, it is nonetheless a profound insight on which may depend the very survival of our species, and our planet. Humans are good at nothing if not hubris, arrogance, and self-delusion. We assume that we dominate nature; that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, nature, even as we set about busily undermining and wrecking the very homeostatic global mechanisms that have kept our earth stable and hospitable to life for the last four and a half billion years. We devastate the rainforests of the world; we are responsible for the greatest loss of habitat and the greatest decimation of species since the asteroid impacts of the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago; we rip the guts out of the earth and burn them, spewing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere; at the same time we slash and burn the woody forests that may be the only hope for sequestration of the carbon dioxide that is rapidly building to dangerous and possibly uncontrollable levels. For the first time in the history of our species, and indeed of our planet, we are forced to confront the possibility that thoughtless and unsustainable human activity may be posing a real threat to our species’ survival, and possibly the survival of all life on the planet.

And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

Our spiritual institutions have devolved into hollow shells, perverted to the agendas of rapacious governments and fanatic fundamentalisms, no longer capable of providing balm to the wounded spirit of our species; and as the world goes up in flames we benumb ourselves with consumerism and mindless entertainment, the decadent distractions of gadgets and gewgaws, the frantic but ultimately meaningless pursuits of a civilization that has lost its compass. And at this cusp in human history, there emerges a gentle emissary, the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not to be the master of nature, but its stewards, Our destiny, if we are to survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.

I find it both ironic, and hopeful, that within the last 150 years, and particularly in the last half of the 20th century, ayahuasca has begun to assert its presence into human awareness on a global scale. For millennia it was known only to indigenous peoples who have long since understood and integrated what it has to teach us. In the 19th century it first came to the attention of a wider world as an object of curiosity in the reports of Richard Spruce and other intrepid explorers of the primordial rainforests of South America; in the mid-20th century Schultes and others continued to explore this discovery and began to focus the lens of science on the specifics of its botany, chemistry, and pharmacology (and, while necessary, this narrow scrutiny perhaps overlooked some of the larger implications of this ancient symbiosis with humanity). At the same time, ayahuasca escaped from its indigenous habitat and made its influence felt among certain non-indigenous people, representatives of “greater” civilization.

To these few men and women, ayahuasca provided revelations, and they in turn responded (in the way that humans so often do when confronted with a profound mystery) by founding religious sects with a messianic mission; in this case, a mission of hope, a message to the rest of the world that despite its simplicity was far ahead of its time: that we must learn to become the stewards of nature, and by fostering, encouraging, and sustaining the fecundity and diversity of nature, by celebrating and honoring our place as biological beings, as part of the web of life, we may learn to become nurturers of each other. A message quite different, and quite anathema, to the anti-biological obsessions of most of the major world “religions” with their preoccupation with death and suffering and their insistence on the suppression of all spontaneity and joy.

Such a message is perceived as a great threat by entrenched religious and political power structures, and indeed, it is. It is a threat to the continued rape of nature and oppression of peoples that is the foundation of their power. Evidence that they understand this threat and take it seriously is reflected by the unstinting and brutal efforts that “civilized” ecclesiastical, judicial, and political authorities have made to prohibit, demonize, and exterminate the shamanic use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants ever since the Inquisition and even earlier.

But the story is not yet over. Within the last 30 years, ayahuasca, clever little plant intelligence that it is, has escaped from its ancestral home in the Amazon and has found haven in other parts of the world. With the assistance of human helpers who heard the message and heeded it, ayahuasca sent its tendrils forth to encircle the world. It has found new homes, and new friends, in nearly every part of the world where temperatures are warm and where the ancient connections to plant-spirit still thrive, from the islands of Hawaii to the rainforests of South Africa, from gardens in Florida to greenhouses in Japan. The forces of death and dominance have been outwitted; it has escaped them, outrun them.

There is now no way that ayahuasca can ever be eliminated from the earth, short of toxifying the entire planet (which, unfortunately, the death culture is working assiduously to accomplish). Even if the Amazon itself is leveled for cattle pasture or burned for charcoal, ayahuasca, at least, will survive, and will continue to engage in its dialog with humanity. And encouragingly, more and more people are listening.

It may be too late. I have no illusions about this. Given that the curtain is now being rung down on the drunken misadventure that we call human history, the death culture will inevitably become even more brutal and insane, flailing ever more violently as it sinks beneath the quick sands of time. Indeed, it is already happening; all you have to do is turn on the nightly news.

Will ayahuasca survive? I have no doubt that ayahuasca will survive on this planet as long as the planet remains able to sustain life. The human time frame is measured in years, sometimes centuries, rarely, in millennia. Mere blinks when measured against the evolutionary time scales of planetary life, the scale on which ayahuasca wields its influence. It will be here long after the governments, religions, and political power structures that seem today so permanent and so menacing have dissolved into dust. It will be here long after our ephemeral species has been reduced to anomalous sediment in the fossil record. The real question is, will we be here long enough to hear its message, to integrate what it is trying to tell us, and to change in response, before it is too late?

Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with humanity. Are we willing to listen? Only time will tell.

+++++++++++++++

McKenna, Dennis J. (2004) Clinical investigations of the therapeutic potential of Ayahuasca: Rationale and regulatory challenges. Pharmacology and Therapeutics. 102:111-129.
Dennis J. McKenna (1999) Ayahuasca: an ethnopharmacologic history. In: R. Metzner, (ed) Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature. Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Callaway, J. C., D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, L. P. Raymon, R.E. Poland, E. N. Andrade, E. O. Andrade, D. C. Mash (1999) Pharmacokinetics of Hoasca alkaloids in Healthy Humans. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 65:243-256.
McKenna, DJ, JC Callaway, CS Grob (1999). The scientific investigation of ayahuasca: A review of past and current research. Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research 1:
Callaway, J. C., L. P. Raymon, W. L. Hearn, D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, D. C. Mash (1996) Quantitation of N,N-dimethyltryptamine and harmala alkaloids in human plasma after oral dosing with Ayahuasca. Journal of Analytical Toxicology 20: 492-497
C. S. Grob, D. J. McKenna, J. C. Callaway, G. S. Brito, E. S. Neves, G. Oberlender, O. L. Saide, E. Labigalini, C. Tacla, C. T. Miranda, R. J. Strassman, K. B. Boone (1996) Human pharmacology of hoasca, a plant hallucinogen used in ritual context in Brasil: Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. 184:86-94. McKenna, DJ (1996)
James C. Callaway, M. M. Airaksinen, Dennis J. McKenna, Glacus S. Brito, & Charles S. Grob (1994) Platelet serotonin uptake sites increased in drinkers of ayahuasca. Psychopharmacology 116: 385-387
Dennis J. McKenna, L. E. Luna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1995) Biodynamic constituents in Ayahuasca admixture plants: an uninvestigated folk pharmacopoeia. In: von Reis, S., and R. E. Schultes (eds). Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. Dioscorides Press, Portland
Dennis J. McKenna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1985) On the comparative ethnopharmacology of the Malpighiaceous and Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 17:35-39.
Dennis J. McKenna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1984), Biochemistry and pharmacology of tryptamine and ß-carboline derivatives: A minireview. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 16:347-358.
Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, & F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants: Tryptamine and ß-carboline constituents of Ayahuasca. J. of Ethnopharmacology 10:195-223.
Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, & F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants Pt. II: Constituents of orally active Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. of Ethnopharmacology 12:179-211.
Dennis J. McKenna & G. H. N. Towers (1981) Ultra-violet mediated cytotoxic activity of ß-carboline alkaloids. Phytochemistry 20:1001-1004

Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom

I've been observing the optimism and "pronoia" espoused by upwinger and Chris in their posts, and the angst espoused by Ralph Metzner in his article, and in their own unique ways, by Paul and eventhorizon. I'd like to offer a perspective on how we can reconcile these divergent perspectives into a single worldview, and how we can "take charge of the situation" and proactively instigate the future of joy, ecstacy, freedom, and abundance that God has prearranged (but not preordained) via universal intelligence. I've been researching a "hyper-holism" that reconciles epistemological and ontological opposites — so that we can: a) see the world's political situation in its true context, and b) effectively reconcile religious and political opposites. What follows is the preface for a large paper/thesis that I am working on. Following the preface is a description of a special twenty-one page .pdf file that I have prepared, and a link to it. It is meant to offer a message of hope that is unbridled, yet grounded in the deepest Truth of our Reality. I can not think of a better forum in which to release this material, and hope you will find it to be both interesting and useful.

------------------------------ Beginning of Preface ------------------------------

Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom

This work is based on ten years of research at the point where science and the world's many religions come together without compromise. This research reveals a symmetry in the structure of human belief, as per the four cardinal paradigms of culture depicted below. As such, this paper draws insight with equal ease from: a) hard rational logic, b) the inspired appreciation of scripture, c) awakened subjectivity, and d) heartfelt ecological sensibility. This research also shows that the goals of collective empowerment and entheogenic freedom are closely related to each other, and to the securing of a unique destiny that is virtually unknown outside "psychedelic futurism." In particular, it shows why these twin goals can not be easily and fruitfully secured unless the quest to do so is made inseparable from a destiny characterized internally by communal, nanotech ecotopia, and externally, by a system of cosmic life that would eventually compare to this earth, in the same way that a towering oak compares to an acorn. It then maps out the way forward in detail.

Religious Monotheism
|
...Mystical Pantheism --------.....-------- Scientific Materialism
|
Paganism/Environmentalism

This paper cuts through mundane superstition to tackle the subject of time-symmetric causation head-on. The belief that cause always precedes effect is the most deeply ingrained superstition of the human race. Many are aware that time as we know it is an illusion. Few however, are aware that behind this illusion is a meta-reality in which objective forward in time processes, and subjective backward in time processes engage a holographic relationship of infinite depth. The paper introduces the nature of this relationship, and describes the primal challenge therein (and backs itself up with an appendix detailing the 12+ logical/philosophical arguments and 40+ pieces of empirical/observational evidence that overwhelmingly confirm the reality of time-symmetric causation). In this regard, it: a) presents the living destiny that has been prearranged, but not preordained, by the gestalt quantum-computational intelligence of Reality, i.e. God, and b) shows how the interaction of the real-numbered physical realm and the complex-numbered imaginal realm is rapidly bringing civilization toward an Eschaton characterized by a stark bifurcation of destiny.

This paper's goal is to give an overview of how we can help guide civilization through the lethal economic crisis that it will face circa 2010-2014 — while at the same time, securing freedom for entheogens in the context of specific group energy rituals. It is meant to offer a solid foundation for the challenge at hand. I hope it will be the starting-point for the wide-ranging discussions that will need to occur in these areas.

-------------------------------- End of Preface --------------------------------

Because this proposal touches on so many different aspects of culture, I have assembled bits and pieces of my work into the special twenty-one page file mentioned above. This file is designed to acquaint "psychedelic futurists" with the scope of my analysis, and the course of action that I am proposing. Because the new hyper-holism is so radical in its breadth, and the journey through and beyond the Eschaton even more radical, I have interspersed various charts with the text, and put everything in the order that I believe will be the easiest to follow. Included are the following:

1. A two-page chunk that contains the above preface and a high-level conceptual overview.
2. A two-page chunk that details the true role of the Divine Feminine vis a vis the Eschaton.
3. Two one-page charts that describe the four-fold symmetry of human culture in detail.
4. A detailed six-page introduction of how we may understand and navigate the Eschaton.
5. A two-page chart that describes "holographic libertarianism," an innovative political idea.
6. The three-page description of what life might be like in the "Millennium" and beyond.
7. A four-page list of experiments that should powerfully confirm time-symmetric causation.

This is obviously a work in progress, and some things may still be a bit rough (especially the list of experiments). Beyond that, the main six-page introduction contains a lot more information than would normally be there (to momentarily compensate for the unfinished paper per se). Please bear with it, for I feel that this research will prove to be accurate, and that the proposals based on it will ultimately be useful.

This file is intended to take people on a visionary journey. I hope Paul and the other people here experience it that way, and by this means, feel the living energy of an entheogenic future that is forever trying to get our attention. My suggestion would be to print out a copy, fasten your seat belt, and happy journeys!

http://home.earthlink.net/~thomaswinans/CollectiveEmpowerment.pdf

If people are interested in hearing more, I'll be happy to discuss the subject matter here, and/or post links to the various sections of the paper as I complete them. Please give me your feedback.

Sincerely,
Reverend Tom

A Bit of Good News

From KRON:

SUPREME COURT The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that a small congregation in New Mexico can use hallucinogenic tea in its religious rituals.

It's the first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts. In the ruling, Roberts wrote that federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the tea.

The tea contains an illegal drug known as D-M-T. But it's considered a sacred part of a four-hour ceremony conducted by the congregation twice a month. Members of the Brazil-based church believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea.

Roberts says the Bush administration failed to demonstrate how it could ban what he termed a "sincere religious practice."

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Moving Beyond Physical Immortality

When I was about 12, I read an astounding article by Robert Anton Wilson's called Next Step: Immortality in Future Magazine. I identified myself as an immortalist from that day on. This same magazine introduced me to all sorts of other new cutting edge ideas. Immortality appealed to me because all the wonders I read in Sci-fi and all the amazing futures I imagined myself living in would now come true, because I would live thousands of years to see them all. I would be alive when we first colonized the solar system. I would be alive when we set out for the stars and colonized other planets. I would be alive to become a space pioneer and experience alien cultures and super advanced extraterrestrial races. All of these visions then and still are much greater and fantastic than anything, save perhaps Star Wars, that I have ever seen depicted on film.

This desire has continued pretty much unchanged all the way through to the present. However, as I have gotten older, experienced more, seen the pressures the world now faces, and more deeply understood the implications of things like nanotechnology, this vision has been shaken. Even a year ago, I don't think I would have said that, but today, the foundations of my quest for immortality have come under greater scrutiny. Is my desire for immortality a genuine spiritual quest or based more around a fear of death? If so, do I really want to live in fear? Living in fear has got to be the worst way to live, since it precisely takes you away from living in your heart, your true center. From what I can see almost all immortalists are such because of their fear of death. They are immortalist more because of their fear of death, rather than their love of life. American culture in particular has a great fear of death, and it is one of the reasons so many American's are bamboozled into mind-numbing reality tunnels - from shop-until-you-drop consumerism to spiritually vacant dead-ends.

Fear can do weird things. I have seen many immortalists trade in many of their principles for the promise of longer life. If faced with their own death, I have seen them embody the worst of culture in a subconscious desire to blend in, not step out of line, or be noticed, especially now in a our climate of squashing dissent. For example, I haven't see any contemporary immortalist taking the moral high ground on any social cause that is sufficiently counter to the status quo, precisely because such an action could jeopardize their immortal quest. After all, look what happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. So the question becomes, at what point, if at all, would an immortalist be willing to die for a just cause over their own quest for physical immortality? Because lets face it, things could bad enough, that such a choice could soon face all of us.

And even putting the morality issue aside, things are changing so fast now, that for me at least; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even identify what the "safest" path to future survival is. Can we say with any certainty what kind of world will be here in 20 years? For me it is almost impossible to imagine. We are at such a critical juncture that the slightest factors are now capable of reaping the most tumultuous change.

The truth that I have been avoiding, but is now staring me in the face, is that my personal ability to survive the next 20 is now almost completely out of my control.

I think the primary reason for this is that as the world has become more populated, explored, controlled and monitored, our ability to act freely within it has become increasingly constrained. For example, I would love to move to New Zealand, and get away from what I see is a rapidly disintegrating free country, and a rise in American despotism and retrograde conservatism. But if you, like me, have contemplated such an escape, it's much more daunting than it first appears, or should be! Unless you are already very wealthy, or happen to have a LOT of experience in one of their in-the-moment much needed skill shortages, your chance of immigrating there are almost zero. Pretty much goes for any other place you care to run to. Lets face it, the world is a lot smaller today, and countries have responded by making it much harder to move there. Frontiers are dead. That only leaves the space frontier.

However, in practical terms we are no closer to space colonization now than we were in the 1970's when Gerald K O'Neill trail blazed a compelling pathway towards its realization.

Nanotechnology for me has always held the key to liberating humanity from slavery. But nanotech is not here, and the mechanisms of elite control have become stronger. Our ability to travel and move freely has become harder, economic conditions more straining, resources more depleted, the environment more destabilized, and political welfare coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile the most powerful technologies are coming under greater control of the military. Sure, decentralized technologies are a powerful liberator, but they are not a sure thing. As powerful as they are, it still leaves those with the most physical power having the most tools of oppression at their disposal to wreck havoc anywhere they see fit. Cyberspace is great, but we still have meat bodies. So those who can control, maim or kill those meat bodies are the ones in charge. Again, it all comes back to our physical bodies, and any fear we have around death. As long as we fear death, those with the power to kill us, control us.

Sure, as they "tighten their grip, more star systems will slip through their fingers", but those "star systems" from what I can see represent a rapidly diminishing portion of the population. There was a time when I thought I could identify what specific characteristics that portion would have, and adapt myself accordingly, but the honest truth is I can't, and I'd be surprised if anyone did. Substantial wealth seems to be a prerequisite, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. Assuming it was and I did have sufficient wealth, what do I do then? Do I move to a small tropical island? What would I do to survive once I'm there? Is this even practical or desirable? Would I have to leave my family? And an even more important question, assuming I could do all these things and it was necessary, would it be worth it to survive in a world that was left? What specifically would that survival entail? What kind of world would life after such global chaos played itself out? Will it be a world I would even want to live in? Is survival in "hell" better than no physical survival at all? Well, if you are like most immortalists, the answer would still be yes, because death is the final oblivion... end of story. For quite a long time, I used to take this as the most logical belief. However, would I want to live within a hellish world that consists of some insane global fascist feudalist empire of insane, craven, infantile warlords, and ex-heads of state with their armies and weapons of death? Or how about a society which consists of a legion of nano-powered weapons of control? A society in which free thought has been eradicated via covert nanobots swimming through my brain and bloodstream? I don't know, imagine your own dystopia.

I know have echoed Bucky Fuller in the past, utopia or oblivion. Although such dystopias are probably self-negating, how do we know clearly when the final choice needs to be made between utopia and oblivion? At some point, quite likely, the only thing that could turn it away from oblivion is enough people at the right time, putting their fear of death aside, and taking a stand against the forces of evil. Is that time right now, next year, or already beyond us? I have no idea, which is why this dilemma is all the more pressing.

Interestingly, quite a few immortalists (ones I met on the Extropian List in the 1990's) having realized these grave possibilities, and fearing their possible extinction have adopted some crazy politics. Rather than side with what is the moral high ground they now position themselves with the side that has the best chance of winning, regardless of what happens to be the morally higher good. From their perspective, the best way to assure survival is make sure they are on the side of the guns, and not on the side having them pointed at you. Sensible enough, right? They have become true survival-of-the-fittest type individuals. Rather than become potential slaves to future feudal lords, they now work hard to make sure they are the feudal lords! When I realized this for the first time way back then, I was seriously depressed and disillusioned. I never gave up my immortal quest, but any illusions I had about immortalists all sharing the same heart-felt quest for a just utopia were shattered that day. Boy was I naive!

Now, lets shift gears.

Lets say, we do make it.. that we do survive the next 20 years as nanotechnology changes everything. Call it the Singularity, or the 2012 Eschaton, it doesn't matter. Well, assuming the Singularity does come and all of us here are alive when it does, what then? This to me is the biggest irony of all. We all might still die. When you think about it, what is the technological singularity anyway? As far as I can tell, and even under the most benign circumstances, it seems to me to portend an utter annihilation of all that we were. Some might say this is a good thing. Well, it would certainly seem to be a good thing in the evolutionary scheme of things. After all, we are talking about the final escape of intelligence past the extinction point out into the infinite cosmos. For life and intelligence, this would be the ultimate liberation - a time for celebration, and an overwhelming feeling of relief at finally having escaped any shackles towards utter freedom, joy, infinite intelligence and wisdom.

So why the irony? The irony, because it’s quite possible, even likely that you and I won't survive such a transition. The very nature of accelerating intelligence would be akin to the ultimate trip, your ego would be obliterated into a billion pieces. Except in this case, as all that was you is subsumed into the SI matrix, there wouldn't be any "you" left, save perhaps the "useful" parts for the SI's purpose. In other words, you die. From the perspective of "you", your dead, same as if you had physically died. So if you permanently die in this way, is this still physical immortality? What difference would there be between this death, and actual physical death? In both cases, "you" are gone. Now, this is where my thinking might be different than other psychonauts. During my NDE, I felt no sense of annihilation. "I" was still there, except this time, there was much, much more than "I". The feeling was I became merged with a much higher and more complete version of my "self". I still had memories of being me in this life, and I still could recall all the details of my life now. I still experienced my ego, but my ego had become totally transparent to this infinite all encompassing love of my more complete higher self. In other words, my ego was now more like my big toe compared to the rest of my more complete body. I can't even begin to tell you how liberating this was. This place that I now found myself was eternal. It was like the ultimate rest stop for the soul. It was a place of total rest, joy and contentment. It was the TOTAL absence of all suffering. And the most amazing part of the experience was that it was totally familiar. There was nothing alien about it all. It was as opposite of otherness as you could have, it was HOME. It was the place I have always known, and always would know. A place that has always existed and always will. It was total confirmation. I rejoiced! It was the most real and true experience I have ever had. To deny, reject, or doubt it would be the ultimate folly. If I were to doubt it, I might as well doubt that I am happy when I am happy. The experience just was. No matter what the ultimate nature of reality is, this experience was the deepest confirmation, the deepest, truest resonance with the very essence of my soul. I lost all fear of death, and it changed my life forever.

These investigations have taken me deeper into exploring techniques for Out of Body Travel, Astral Projection and so on. Based on my own experiences in these areas, as well as reading lots of other peoples, I now believe that there is no death. For many, reincarnation (i.e. rebirth) happens because they are not ready to believe there is something more. According to Robert Monroe, a pioneer in OBE work, people are not able to move beyond rebirth until their belief systems are completely cleared of all limiting beliefs. If we are, as many spiritual and psychonautic pioneers have said, co-creators of Universe, then the ultimate nature of reality is consciousness. Therefore, as conscious co-creators of universe, until we believe in a transcending reality beyond death, it will continue to occur for us in a repeating cycle of death and rebirth until we finally get it. This is exactly what Seth via Jane Roberts was always saying. Consciousness is the name, and infinity is the game. No matter what, we are all heading towards something beyond death, beyond the physical universe, beyond space and time.... not just eternity, but infinity.

So this brings me to my current beliefs. Although physical immortality could be lots of fun under the right circumstances, it is no longer the only game in town. I will continue to pursue my physical immortal quest for as long as I can, for a love of life, not a fear of death. It's win win situation!

No Harm From Peyote

The Guardian reports:

A study of the effects of peyote on American Indians found no evidence that the hallucinogenic cactus caused brain damage or psychological problems among people who used it frequently in religious ceremonies.

In fact, researchers from Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital found that members of the Native American Church performed better on some psychological tests than other Navajos who did not regularly use peyote.

Hopeful

From an excellent New Scientist article:

"Maybe, just maybe, after more than 30 years in the wilderness, this powerful, misunderstood but potentially mind-healing class of drugs is ready to be rehabilitated."

Clifford Pickover: Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves

Clifford Pickover wanted us to know of this new book he's just published. For those who haven't read Cliff's books, you're missing out on a real treat. I look forward to reading it. Here is the link to detailed chapter headings.

You can purchase it here.

Tripping & Pitching

In June of 1970, Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter in a 50,000 seat stadium while high on LSD. This now-legendary event was retold reccently in the Dallas Observer.

What's weird is that sometimes it felt like a balloon. Sometimes it felt like a golf ball. But he could always get it to the plate. Getting it over the plate was another matter entirely. Sometimes he couldn't see the hitter. Sometimes he couldn't see the catcher. But if he could see the hitter, he'd guess where the catcher was. And he had a great catcher back there. Jerry May. You could make mistakes with him, and he would compensate. He'd know if he called for a curveball, he could look at the follow-through of your arm and see if you were gonna hang it. So he'd get ready to slide and block. Also, he had this reflective tape on his fingers that was by far the easiest thing to see.
Ellis had no idea what the score was, and he knew he'd been wild--he ended with eight walks, one hit batsman and the bases loaded at least twice--but here it was, bottom of the seventh, and he was still in the game.

The hardest part was between innings. He was sure his teammates knew something was up. They had all been acting strange since the game began. Solution: Do not look at teammates. Do not look at scoreboard. Must not make eye contact. His spikes--that's what he concentrated on. Pick up tongue depressor, scrape the mud, repeat. Must. Clean. Spikes.

Sometime in the fifth or sixth, he sensed someone next to him. Looking. He turned. It was rookie infielder Dave Cash.

"Dock," Cash said. "You've got a no-hitter going."

Black Pyramids and the Land of Gaia

The horizon shuddered slightly, a shiver in space itself like water rippling across the surface of a painting. There was a sudden stillness unlike anything ever before and not yet since that grabbed at your skin, drawing it in lava-like blobs from muscle and sinew, fascia and bone. It was like falling very slowly into a glowing vat of honey, every moment framed in still life, blurring into one another, soft with bee fur.

And then it was gone.

I can't say the exact year. It was '92 or '93... I can't quite remember that period of my life very well. It was a hazy time. Or, rather, time itself was hazy and seemed often unburdened by the demanding expectations of physics and linearity. There's a loose temporal outline I hold, pieced together from the timelines of college classes, addresses, and major events. Mostly I just remember moments, ideas, happenings, and friends, but they're like pictures hanging on a wall: flat and eternal.

It was that time in one's life - in my life - when everything was being explained in great magickal revelations washing over my world day in and day out, when me and my friends were like magnets for unfathomable circumstances, beacons strobing in hyperspace catching the eye of Time's great architect. Psychedelics and empathogens, esoteric guides and manuals, wild rock and rave communions, bounding through forests and meadows, under full moons dancing on the mercurial tides, all whipped together and pitched on its side. Even people around us, innocents, were getting caught up in the freakish whirlwinds of synchronicity and electricity that seemed to arc off of us.

I believe it was Winter. Cold and wet. A frenzied Friday evening on the verge of rain. We were at a friend's house, the seven of us, in the midst of a party filled with many people none of us knew. We sat at the dining room table, talking, drinking beers, when M pulled out the crinkled plastic baggy we'd been given by some guy from Reed College in Oregon who knew we were involved in the Santa Cruz psychedelic community. He claimed it was ayahuasca, though none of us could rationalize that claim with the actual contents of the baggy: 20 or 30 very small bits of what looked like dried apple lining the bottom. Watching M curiously it took a moment to realize what was going on - a moment too long as he popped a piece in his mouth and chewed. Then another. Then J was chewing and, moments later, we'd all consumed a roughly even portion of the bitter, spicy little bits, not really understanding why, just suddenly caught up in some aetheric swell intent upon carrying us into this experience. It was a possession, sudden and mindless.

Maybe a half hour later we were in a side room smoking a chillum and laughing a little bit more than usual for much less of a reason. Whatever it was we'd eaten was beginning to take hold, creeping up out of our stomachs along our spines, tickling the synaptic webs and retuning the receivers of our brains. We all knew we were heading out fast and needed to take bold action in order to secure our set & setting as soon as possible. No vision questing at the Friday night college party. We arranged for friends to drive us all home immediately.

Stumbling out of the hazy room, giggling and wide-eyed, I remember distinctly the sudden silence of an entire room full of people all staring at us, like we were absolutely completely out of place. You could almost hear the record come scratching to a grinding halt, then the drop of a single pin. We pushed through the door and stumbled out into the electric night laughing hysterically. Poor mortals... They had no idea.

------

There were enormous leaves, bigger than most plants, everywhere, wet and luscious and tumescent, protruding from great vines & liana. A rainbow of greens colored everything I saw from my seat in one of the larger leaves in the jungle. Water cascaded down from the canopy above adding it's gentle cacophony to the symphony of life buzzing all around me. Jerry's guitar seemed just as wet and green echoing through the trees, bouncing off the ethnic percussion bubbling up from unseen drummers no doubt milling about just out of sight within the jungle. The space was solid and consistent and real and it wasn't just me but six other minds sharing it, co-creating it simultaneously all wired together in some telepathic array, feeling and sensing and imagining each leaf and each note as the rainforest concert of our minds grew more and more real until we could only all suddenly laugh together, opening our astonished eyes to peer at one another sitting in a pile on the living room couch before returning back to the collective magick of the jungle.

------

Somehow we made it home. I only recall more laughter and a moment's view of the stormy night outside the car window (which I insisted on rolling down in spite of the cold). Two sober housemates were home and, upon learning of our state, tried to set us up with crayons and pens and paper, but even such a rudimentary feat as drawing proved to require far too much focus for the raging bolts of energy coursing through our bodies. Well-intentioned but clearly defeated, the housemates left us alone and concealed themselves downstairs for the duration. Too much freakiness had been suddenly visited upon the home and they needed to simply hide out and weather the storm.

I keep speaking in terms of we, in part because there were seven of us, but more so because of the great degree of connectivity that was shared between us. Harmala, which is the primary component of ayahuasca brews and contributes the MAOI component, was originally called telepathine when it was isolated after many stories of remote viewing and shared non-verbal communication. One western researcher under it's influence in some South American village suddenly saw his father dying back home in Florida. The next day he learned that, indeed, his father had suffered a major heart attack and passed away at just about the same time as the vision. For me it was like being covered in clear, luminescent psychic goo that stretched between each of us, binding our hearts and souls and minds. It wasn't just my individual experience, though at times it was only my vision that I could apprehend. Ultimately, it was a collective journey shared between us on what seemed to be a cellular level. I still feel bound to those friends, even those who've long since passed out of my life.

We ended up all packed in side-by-side along a great orange couch in the living room listening to "Blues for the Rainforest", a spectacular collaboration between Merle Saunders and Jerry Garcia. All lights were off leaving the living room dancing in the shadows thrown off by a single candle next to the stereo. Those little tiny bits of harmless, desiccated apple were now in complete charge of our little world blasting out into hyperspace and completely rewiring reality as we knew it. This was beyond mushrooms or acid. Way beyond. Superfantastic and hyperreal yet so true and solid, like pulling aside the curtains to reveal The Way Things Really Are. No words passed between us. We were incapable of speaking coherently, though it really seemed unnecessary. Thought and feeling was fluid and unconfined to mere bodies. We were all diving into the aya space led by Jerry and Merle into the great archetypal jungle. The most astonishing aspect of the whole experience was this deep sense of telepathic communion. I can only describe it from my perspective. As I focused on the music with my eyes closed, feeling it swell with my own emotions towards some intangible peak until it grew so amazing and beautiful that I had to burst out laughing, at that exact same moment everyone else on the couch would burst out laughing. This happened again and again and again over the course of the entire album until it was so obvious that we were all existing in the same numinous space, our thoughts and emotions totally shared and flowing through all of us. It wasn't just my attention and emotion tracking the music. It was all of us moving in the same fugue together. Speechless, we could only laugh and stare at one another with amazement at the sheer impossibility of it all.

-----

As I laid face down on the floor, kaleidoscopic visions consuming my inner vision, I pressed my hands down and began to push myself off the rug. In that movement I suddenly became aware that my arms and torso were no longer human but that of a large black panther rising from the jungle. My fur was oily and sleek, bristling slightly with ozone and static. My muscles were thick and powerful wrapping around bone and tendon pulling at the claws protruding from my feet. I felt intensely capable and proud, as if I could easily master anything the jungle could throw at me. I stretched out and arched my back before rising to my feet and stepping out of the panther, back into the living room.

-----

Eventually we left the group huddle of the couch and scattered out through the living room, each off to pursue our own visions now dominating the experience. I recall fending off momentary concerns about having drank a few pints of beer around the time of eating the aya. I couldn't remember if it was any type of alcohol that could inspire a hypertensive crisis when mixed with a MAOI, or if it was just red wine. J was the only one with similar concerns though we didn't vocalize these to the group. Ultimately it was moot. We were here and we'd end up wherever the experience would drop us off. In such deep psychedelic rapture, death can seem like not such a big deal after all.

I walked out onto the balcony under the night sky. The cul de sac was a whirlpool of energy whipping through the tall eucalyptus trees, the large oaks, and assorted other trees and shrubbery. The vast pines rising up behind our house were revealed to be armies of giant insect sentries stacked on top of each other watching over our innocent dimension. Each oak was itself a giant, alive and personal, aware of the life moving so quickly around it against the decades of it's resting. All of the trees exhibited this deep personality and uniqueness. They were each so very present and aware, wise with age and insight, the vastness of their roots clutching at the red earth, tickling each other below. The eucalyptus grove running along the side of the house seemed taller than skyscrapers, rustling and swaying in the wind, bending and flexing with the pulsing energy of the biosphere. Gazing up at them every cell in my body longed to climb up those thin trees, up to the tops then leaping through the rubbery branches beneath the darkened sky and swollen moon. I could feel it so very deep in my bones and knew that, if it weren't for the censor of sensibility clinging to the remnants of my ego, there would be nothing to stop me from pulling myself up into the canopy. I am, after all, an ape, perhaps long from brachiation but fully capable of returning to the trees. And there was a strong, nostalgic part of me that wanted nothing more than to run naked through the forest at night, proud and masterful.

-----

There's a point in any psychedelic experience worth it's salt when you have to just lie down and let the visions roll over you. This was it, the point of concrescence converging with the infinite domain of archetypes where self and other become interpenetrating, undifferentiated. Fractal landscapes pulsed and glowed, ebbing and flowing with my breath and heart beat, luminous and laden with unspeakable meanings, the rich, multimedia glossolalia of hyperspace. Every image is a feeling, a memory, a thought, reflecting back from futures past, somehow codified in these abstract patterns and geometries, deeply verbal yet astonishingly mute. Like passing across the event horizon, my body seemed to dissolve into it's component parts, smaller and smaller, to be re-assimilated into the black hole of consciousness like warm cheese pressed through fine cloth into a vat of black ink. With each exhalation I came to exist less in this space, my body falling away into the darkness lost below the neon signscape rising up all around me, the material world receding like a speck of dust beneath a rocket ship. I was anesthetized and laid to rest, the weight of flesh no longer anchoring my consciousness, no longer tied down but free to walk through the quantum gateways dividing matter from spirit, open and unrestrained inviting gnosis and transformation from whatever timeless angels or kaleidoscopic aliens might be passing by.

Amidst the raging optic storm of rainbow chrysanthemums and multidimensional hieroglyphics, dense and rich with unnamable meaning and depth and impossible volumes of information pouring into my third eye, the tempest came to a sudden stillness, thick and black and silent with the weight of a thousand suns. Chromed slivers of light betrayed the seeming emptiness of this space dancing along the edges of an enormous shape slowly revealing itself. As it rotated into view I beheld a shimmering black pyramid barely visible against the background yet powerfully present and engaging. All sense of scale was lost. It could have been an inch high but it felt to me to be the size of ocean's, continents, entire moons. Entranced I followed it's movement tracing my sight up along the reflective edges towards the apex. In the crown I beheld a great golden eye watching me with unimaginable intent and awareness, holding me in it's unblinking gaze. The eye aligned with my vision, then reflected itself on my forehead caressing the pineal to gently open. My third eye beheld the golden eye of the pyramid beholding me and in that instant seer and seen merged completely and I could see both myself and the pyramid through the same single eye of creation shared by all moments of consciousness, the timeless eternal Now of existence, so fleetingly transient yet always here and never parting. In that moment of perfect union and understanding, so completely beyond normal human awareness, beyond language and logic and thought, like the reflected image of the thing behind the thing we call God, in that moment "I" saw it all for a brief moment, then committed the great mystic mistake and was overwhelmed with astonishment.

The vision passed and I was back in my body lying on the living room floor amidst scattered friends.

-----

As the morning light began to creep around the edges of our world I returned to the balcony and took a seat on the weather-beaten old couch. Closing my eyes I reached out with my senses to the waking morning and was amazed to be living among so many birds. There must have been hundreds and hundreds just within earshot and I could hear each and every one distinctly, like picking a single tenor out of a cathedral chorale. For each bird I tuned into I could "see" them perched on a branch or seated in a nest feeding their young, leaping from tree to tree and soaring over the cul de sac. I could change my focus from the entire chorus to a specific group to one individual. In my mind's eye I was among them all living a bird's life.

A very curious property of ayahuasca mixtures is that they seem to function as a very specific key to a set of archetypal experiences. Unlike LSD or mushrooms, everyone who takes ayahuasca properly will apprehend visions of nature, jungles, large cats and snakes. The aya complex appears to be a very powerful technology that runs like software in the brains of the human species, delivering the divine understanding of Nature, of the Goddess. It is a tool of communion that takes any user and downloads the matrix (mater) of the biosphere into their consciousness, regardless of location, affiliation, race, or religion. Ayahuasca is a powerful ally trying to lead us back down the path to our now-distant aboriginal bond with the womb of our planet, and offers perhaps no less than the salvation of our species so lost in the mechanistic gears of consumption and unrestrained expansion.

Myself, S, and J wanted to be at the beach for sunrise so we layered up against the morning cold and padded out towards the street. We made it only as far as the eucalyptus grove which seemed so inviting and alive. Walking in amongst the trees was a moment of communion, breathing the air and touching the peeling bark and soft trunks underneath. We tore ourselves away and marched through the streets out to the coast feeling a million miles away from the morning commuters buzzing past in their steel horses.

We reached the cliff just in time to watch the sun break over the horizon like a fiery orange blast of pastiche exploding across a hazy blue canvas. Standing on the stone ridge the sea below was a wash of purples breaking on the sandy brown shore. The passing of it's tides had left thin, wavy grooves covering the shore like flames licking off the tips of the sea. The fire in the sky was reflected in the earth, washed and recycled by the water of the sea which, itself, was nourished and continuous with the air above. Standing amidst it all were the three stoned humans giving our share of spirit living on the same four elements coursing through our light bodies. This was the final seal - the pentagram merging with hexagram, microcosm and macrocosm, as above, so below. The night, the journey, the vision... it was all an act of magick and a powerful ritual of planetary shamanism binding us each and all to the breathing holosphere of Gaia, Luna, Sol, and beyond into the infinite blackness of forever.

As the raging star rose up into the sky radiating it's loving warmth down onto our humble planet, each of us glowed with joy at having been allowed into the halls of Eleusis to see past the veils of consensus reality and apprehend the true glory of creation dancing madly all around us every single moment and just a breath away.

Mind States VI

There are only 2 days left (March 1st) to get tickets at the low price of $225. Click here to order. Both LVX, Mark Pesce (who is presenting) and myself (Paul) are all going to be there. For those of you coming, please contact me and we can all arrange to meet. Here are the details:

MIND STATES VI

MAY 27-29, 2005
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
San Francisco, CA

Over 30 speakers presenting on the theme of "technology & transcendence."

Topics include the latest psychedelic research, transcranial magnetic
stimulation, virtual reality, sensory substitution, techno-biological
enhancement, visionary art, electronic trance-dance, video game
environments, Reflections and Inspirations: The 50-Year Anniversary of R. Gordon Wasson's Psilocybe Discovery, skeptical consciousness studies, harm
reduction, plus vendor tables, book signings, and more.

Featuring Presentations From:

Paul Back-Y-Rita, Markus Berger, Piers Bizony, Susa N Blackmore, Vibrata Chromodoris, Mike Crowley, Delvin, Sijay, Naasko, Isis Indriya, Lynzee Dava Lynx, Rick Doblin, Frank Echenhofer, Robert Forman>, Charles S Grob, Charles Hayes, Julie Holland, Clark Heinrich, Sandra Karpetas, Ramez Naam, Mark Pesce, Durk Pearson (tentative), Tom Reidlinger, Katie Salen, Sandy Shaw (tentative), Michael Shermer, Allan Snyder, Paul Stamets, Donna Torres, Sylvia Thyssen, Jim Woodring,
and others TBA

THREE FULL DAYS
Featuring presentations on topics such as:

• visionary art
• brain fingerprinting
• sensory substitution
• electronic trance-dance
• video game environments
• cutting-edge science as art
• current psychedelic research
• techno-biological enhancement
• transcranial magnetic stimulation
• skeptical consciousness studies
• EEG-mapping of altered states
• Reflections and Inspirations
• harm reduction
• virtual reality and more

After Saturdays presentations there will be a late-nite benefit party for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors featuring a presentation by Alex Grey. Dance, music and more.

Click here for details.

Discounted tickets currently available.
Buy now for best price!
Our past two conferences have sold out in advance.

$225 until March 1, 2005
$250 until May 15, 2005
$275 until the event
$300 at door.

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Psychedelic Medicine

New Scientist has a fine article detailing the large amount of state-sponsored research currently looking at entheogenic substances as effective medications for the treatment of alcoholism, drug abuse, post traumatic stress disorder, and other syndromes of modern life. Sadly, many of the researchers blame Dr. Timothy Leary for putting the nail in the coffin of drug research. But I'd argue that Leary's evangelism of LSD was absolutely necessary to the development of western culture under the shadow of atomic war. People like to imagine that the civil rights movement and the protests against the vietnam war were separate from the acid scene. They weren't. Not to mention the impact of the psychedelic experience on music, movies, and cinematography...

Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs are planned or under way at numerous centres around the world for conditions ranging from anxiety to alcoholism. It may not be long before doctors are legally prescribing hallucinogens for the first time in decades. "There are medicines here that have been overlooked, that are fundamentally valuable," says Halpern.

...But to some brave souls, psychedelic medicine never lost its allure. One of them is Rick Doblin, who in 1986 founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in Sarasota, Florida, and who earned a doctorate from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government after writing a dissertation on the federal regulation of psychedelics. For nearly 20 years MAPS has lobbied the FDA and other government agencies to allow research on psychedelics to resume. It has also persuaded scientists to pursue the work and raised funds to support them. A similar body, the Heffter Research Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was founded in 1993 by scientists with an interest in hallucinogens.

In the past couple of years their efforts have begun to pay off. Doblin is optimistic that psychedelic research is back for good, and this time it will do things right.

The Reality of the Psyche

Future Hi pal Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the seminal book Breaking Open the Head asked me to share this with you. This article appears in the latest issue of Arthur Magazine.
__

A few months ago, I attended the Burning Man festival, in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, for the fifth time in a row. Burning Man has been called the world’s biggest party, but I don’t even know if I have "fun" at Burning Man in any ordinary sense – being there is incredibly intense, a kind of psychophysical endurance test. Despite the difficulties, I will continue to return as long as it is possible to do so. The gathering acts as an enormous shamanic transformer, constellating new insights and clearing away old junk.

I chose to go to Burning Man instead of staying in New York for the protests surrounding the Republican Convention. My increasing suspicion is that traditional forms of protest, at this point, are only playing into the hands of the security apparatus. The police and military get the opportunity to test out their latest tactics and shiniest gadgets, while the corporate media finds the most incendiary images to broadcast across the US, amping up the anxiety. The catharsis that protestors get from yelling slogans across barbed wire barriers and out of "free speech pens" might be energy that could be more creatively invested in other ways.

As the corporate and governmental superstructure continue a lockstep march towards their own self-destruction, their attempts to pulverize the collective psyche into submission becomes more transparent and overt. Electrical currents of spite and anxiety ripple across our public discourse and private lives. The individual’s refusal to fall into these traps or accept this negative conditioning can be a great liberation. At Burning Man, I kept thinking that the most meaningful political act, right now, is to continue cultivating fearlessness in pursuit of joy. To be fearless, calm, and joyful is to jam a wrench into the "Brave New 1984" technodystopic machinery that is seeking to impose itself on our world.

I consider the current sociopolitical abyss to be a kind of evolutionary tool. The control apparatus of modern society may be functioning as a training ground for a new level of consciousness. Many different thinkers of the Twentieth Century, as well as the prophecies of archaic and indigenous spiritual traditions, have proposed that a major change in human consciousness is imminent. This has been articulated in various ways. Before his death in 1961, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw that the "reality of the psyche," repressed by the modern mentality, would soon become unavoidable. Mankind was being forced to climb "to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness," to handle "the superhuman powers which the fallen angels" had dropped into our hands.

The Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner (founder of Anthroposophy and Waldorf education) claimed that the mission of his life on Earth was to return the knowledge of reincarnation to the West. According to Steiner, individual human beings reincarnate again and again, and the Earth itself passes through successive incarnations. He considered this phase to be the fourth incarnation of the Earth. Steiner thought we are approaching a fifth incarnation, the "Jupiter state," where humanity would evolve new capacities and reach a new level of wisdom – actually, not just humans. According to Steiner, the plant and mineral kingdom would reach a higher level of consciousness during this next incarnation, while humanity would split into several different "human kingdoms," undergoing different forms of evolution.

The Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo also felt that we were moving towards a new level or intensity of consciousness. In one of his last essays, The Mind of Light, he defined this as the "supramental" state. Just as life had self-organized out of matter, and mind had self-organized out of life, consciousness would evolve beyond the obscurations and ignorance of our current condition – to attain a level of truth-consciousness, and spiritual awareness, that could not be manipulated or fooled. Aurobindo speculated that our evolution would accelerate exponentially from that point. Once we had reached this supramental state, this truth-consciousness, we would be able to transform our physical reality and our bodies. "Man," Aurobindo wrote, "is a transitional being." The powers unleashed by technology might be reintegrated into the psyche, at a higher level of development.

As counterintuitive as it may seem at first, I propose that our current environment, saturated with noise and chaos and fear-mongering, is the necessary background for attaining this supramental condition, for accepting and mastering the reality of the psyche. The new mindset stems from a fearless curiosity and hunger for truth, and a rejection of the cynicism and negative programming foisted upon it by the corporate-controlled media and current power structure. The new intensity of consciousness accepts the reality of psychic and occult levels of reality, denied by modern materialism, but integrates this understanding with a scientific, pragmatic, and empirical approach to existence. As a speaker at Burning Man pointed out, it is not "New Age," but "New Edge."

My hypothesis is that at least a portion of humanity attains this level of "supramental" consciousness – including, as Aurobindo proposes, an accelerated evolution – as we approach the year 2012, prophesied by the Mayans as the end of the 5,125-year "Great Cycle" of human history. Despite current appearances, we are on the verge of a transition into a new intensity of human consciousness that will institute an harmonic and utopian situation on the Earth. This thesis is not mine alone – it is carefully elaborated by Carl Johann Calleman, among others, in his new book, The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness (Bear & Co.). This book supports the basic ideas of the writers Jose Arguelles and John Major Jenkins – a new outsider paradigm is crystallizing.

Calleman, a biologist who has worked with the World Health Organization, considers the development of human consciousness to be an organic process akin to fetal development. Chemical signals are transmitted to the fetus in an incredibly complex and perfectly orchestrated sequence. The proposal made by Arguelles, Calleman, and others, is that the evolution of human consciousness on Earth follows a similar process on a planetary scale, and we are currently approaching the birth of the higher mind, or noosphere, of the Earth. After many years of research, Calleman as well as Arguelles understand the Mayan Calendar to be a synchronically-attuned device that indicates the year-by-year changes, in this final period, leading to the inevitable phase-transition of human consciousness.

The run-up to the 2012 transition appears, necessarily, as universal capitulation and collapse – just as birth is a messy process that would appear horrific to the uninformed observer. According to Calleman’s study of the Mayan Calendar, the global economy – and with it, the materialist paradigm currently holding the collective psyche at a certain level of development – will collapse around 2007 - 2008. Right now, we are being forced to witness the shadow of the psyche projected into material form through systemic misuse of technology, biospheric destruction, as well as our current political farce. During the transition, things seem to be getting simultaneously – paradoxically – much better and much worse. Time itself seems to be changing form, accelerating, as events follow each other at breakneck pace.

Obviously, it is a difficult leap for most people to accept the possibility that the Maya had a deeper understanding of time – as a synchronic order, rather than a simple linear extension – than we currently possess. However, it seems to me that any impartial study of the current world situation makes it obvious that the current social and political paradigm is unsustainable, even in the short term. We are depleting and burning out our global resources at an ever-accelerating rate. A cynical or nihilistic perspective on the imminent fate of our species is, of course, plausible, but unproductive. An alternate perspective sees the destruction of the biosphere – and the development of technology – as byproducts of the psychospiritual evolution of humanity, bringing us to a new form or phase-state of consciousness.

One of the most beautiful aspects of Burning Man is the wide-open expanse of the desert itself, which seems to represent the infinite potential available to the liberated human imagination. While I was bicycling across the playa one night, enjoying the laser lights and carnival displays of the festival from a distance, I thought that the shift to a new planetary culture, and a new form of nonhierarchical social organization matching our new level of mind, does not have to be a cataclysmic or destructive one. The transition could occur in a manner similar to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire – a sudden piffle, and a shocking surrender. However, for this to happen, the new paradigm must already be in place, at least as an undercurrent. Lacking a model or an imprint, the collapse of the current system will result in a world resembling that of the Road Warrior films, without the occasional flickers of irony.

If we can make the transition to a truly rational planetary culture based on compassion, generosity, and dharmic principles, this will inspire a change in our basic conception of science. Rather than seeking to resolve dualisms and institute some final "Theory of Everything," the science of post-history will embrace and explore paradox, going deeper into conundrums, relinquishing delusory attempts to achieve closure. Superstring physics describes a universe of nine, ten, or eleven dimensions. If reality is, as Buddhism proposes, actually maya, a projection of subtler levels of the psyche, then we may come to accept that the extradimensional object or hypercube described by physics is the psyche itself, in its full multidimensions.

I suggest that the planes or surfaces of this object can be incorporated into awareness as the various vectors or intervals or vibrational field-effects experienced in non-ordinary states – induced by psychoactive substances, meditations, dreams, shamanic trances, and so on. Different psychedelics open "lines of flight" or ingressions across the extra-dimensional object that is the psyche itself. When we have matured to the point that we can accept the "reality of the psyche," investigating these areas will be recognized as natural and even essential to expanding the parameters of human understanding. The science and art of post-history will be dedicated to exploring the numinous paradoxes of psychic reality. Instead of seeking closure, we will open new possibilities and explore infinite new realms.

Cybernetics & Entheogenics: From Cyberspace to Neurospace

Lecture by Peter Lamborn Wilson held during the "Next Five Minutes" Conference on Tactical Media Amsterdam, January 19, 1996

The term "Neurospace" I learned from the Kiev artist Vladimir Muzehesky, through Geert Lovink. What I immediately thought he meant by it was a comparison of that space which is posited as belonging to the computer with the neural space or the inner-body experience, that comes, for most of us, largely through psychedelic drugs—neurospace as the space of hallucinations, for example. I would like to compare and contrast, as they used to say in school, cyberspace and neurospace. There are similarities and differences.

I remember some years ago, when virtual reality suddenly appeared with a big whizbang on the scene, going to a conference in New York where Timothy Leary, God bless him, appeared with Jaron Lanier and couple of other cybernauts. Tim was wearing the goggles, he was on stage and he said, "Oooh, I have been here before." So right from the start there was this connection set up between virtual reality and the LSD experience—or as some us prefer to call it "the entheogenic experience," which is just a fancy way of not using the word psychedelic because it alerts the police. Actually, " entheogenic" means the birth of the "Divine Within. "I am able to use this term that is meaningful for me even though I am not a theist in the strict sense of the word. I don't think you have to believe in God to understand that there can be an experience of the Divine Becoming Within.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

Daniel Pinchbeck talks to The Daily Grail

There's a great interview with author and psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck, over at The Daily Grail. Here's an excerpt:

One reason that the 60s' mass shamanic journey failed is because people lacked guides or cognitive maps available to interpret and integrate the realms into which they were suddenly catapulted. To make things worse, because our society is so consumer-oriented, people would overdo their intake of psychedelics until they had a regressive or nihilistic effect. John Lennon, for example, said that he tripped over a thousand times on LSD until he destroyed himself. Done in the wrong way, without knowledge or attention to context, psychedelic substances can induce what the Mazatec Indians call "mind shadows," amplifying destructive and negative aspects of the psyche.

When psychedelics became politicized and demonized, that also influenced the kinds of experiences people would have when they took them. If you go back to the early 1960s, LSD was considered an "astonishingly safe" drug - even a wonder drug - by psychiatrists. The propaganda against it exponentially amplified the dangers associated with it. The psychedelic experience is personal and delicate and it relies on "set and setting" and cultural context. A lot of other social and gender issues were being worked out during the 1960s, and this added to the general confusion. Those voices that shouted loudest in the 1960s, like Timothy Leary's, tended to be very egoistic and self-aggrandizing. However, even Leary, at first, was trying to find a way to integrate psychedelic use into modern society - he wanted to create a new profession of shaman/psychologist/guide to administer these substances.

As for the "modern neo-shaman," I think they are at a distinct advantage. There is much better information available, and many more guides around who have been through their own initiations. The people who will benefit most will be those who put time and thought and some research into what they are doing. While the professional class that Leary hoped to create does not exist officially, there are people who have stepped into that role.

Burning Man 2004: Moving Past the Singularity

I just arrived back from Burning Man fully transformed. I suspect it will take me several months to fully digest this most awesome experience... maybe just in time for next year. It was wonderful to finally give warm embraces to people I've known only online.

As the Official Burning Man Website says, this event is notoriously indescribable. When I was there it becomes quickly obvious that no amount of eloquent speech or series of pictures could ever do it justice. Quite simply, Burning Man has to be experienced. It is Utopia. One of the things that struck me about every 30 minutes or so as I wandered the playa is, "I can't believe this exists, it is beyond description". I would look out to the horizon in nearly every direction to find this immense amount of novelty. During the day, art installations of various kinds were scattered about - some within a few hundred yards, others some one or two miles away, as if a mirage. Certain structures like the Temple were over 100 feet tall and were noticeable from almost any distance. Nighttime was equally amazing, when many more art pieces come alive to join the spectacle. Nearly everywhere I went, looking in front of me and in every direction, there was some kind of dynamic activity. It's not the dense activity of an urban city with its rules and boundaries, but a vast unbounded playa stretching for miles in every direction, filled with light, fire plumes, neon floating caravans with distant yet pleasant volumes of lounge-techno music, and thousands of glow sticks representing and protecting people as they walked and rode their bikes across the playa. So imagine seeing thousands of these various colors randomly crisscrossing the desert, stretching for several square miles in every direction. The sense of freedom, joy, excitement and possibility filled my every cell. I danced and moved and rode my bike hither and thither for hours on end, stopping at different installations, spending time in distant planetarium, and then traveling further out into the playa, which this year represented the heavens. As I traveled further from the Esplanade (the main arced avenue), the further out into "outerspace" I was going. At about a mile and half beyond the Esplanade, I encountered an illuminated and pulsating star with alien creature blowing in the night winds. I took several photos of it, but my camera is very old and doesn't work well at night, so here is a day shot.

On a typical day I would spend some 14-15 hours wandering the interacting with the art and enjoying immensely the company of fellow burners, hanging out at center camp for some hot chai, dance for awhile at Solarhenge, and back to camp to hang out with friends at Prometheatrics. I was introduced to this wonderful bunch through Mark Pesce, who unfortunately was unable to attend this year.

I spent a couple of lazy afternoons hanging out at The Brane, home of the 2nd Annual Palenque Norte lectures. When I first came into the tent I met Carey Thompson whose Galactivation Art is so beautiful. About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction. Perhaps it was my own state of mind at the time (he he), but his words struck a deep chord, ringing true like few things do for me these days. His message was hopeful, positive and inspiring. LVX23's words ring true too when he says that out on the playa we are expanding the mythos or morphogenetic field of modern humanity. Burning Man is pioneering the cutting edge of possibility - not a counter to culture, but front-runners scouting out the frontier of what is possible. This might sound overly grandiose, but the feeling on the playa of genuine fast-forward evolution is palpable.

I feel like I could write a book on my experiences, like it's been every other year I've been. Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all. I missed the last few years, and feel very sad now that the event has come to an end. I'm so looking forward to next year, and I'm just bursting at the seams with new creative ideas to make happen for next year’s event. With all the walking and riding bikes I did this year, and coming across so many wandering, tired people, we are planning on creating a playa taxi service for next year, which we're thinking of calling Trip N' Taxi. Great way to meet new people, and a lot easier to get around. It’s merely a single idea of many. Several members of Prometheatrics and I schemed a few more ideas, which will have to remain hush-hush for now. If you're interested in creating and collaborating on some art installation for next year, please get in touch with me at psiphius at yahoo.com

One last thing, LVX23 mentioned this year there was not enough deeply sublime art as last year. I found out today that a lot of regular artists skipped this year’s event because they're too involved politically with the coming election. From what I've heard the numbers are large enough that an impact on the playa art would be felt, and so it was. Having missed the last three years I didn't notice it and was instead just so grateful to be here again, and in turn was even more enthusiastically participatory and social this year, and even more inspired to make more art for next year.

Hope to see more of ya on the playa next year!

Stay tuned for more pics - I'm working on an entire section of photos.

This guy was towering over me and must have been 6'6.

New MAPS bulletin online

Via Bruce Eisner, "The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies or MAPS for those who wish to avoid tounge twisters has the Summer Issue of their interesting MAPS Bullitin online".

Neuropharmacology of the Mystical State

From the original article, via bird-on-the-moon.

There exists an abundance of evidence to indicate that mind-changing drugs have been used since remotest antiquity by many of the peoples of the earth, and have importantly affected the course of human history. The plant sources of these drugs - the visionary vegetables - have been worshiped as gods in many times and places, and the persons employing the drugs as a means of acquiring 'supernatural powers' have been the priests, prophets, visionaries, and other leaders of their respected societies. East and West, civilized and primitive, religious thought and all that flows from it almost certainly has been importantly influenced by the psychedelic drugs…

Read the rest of this article

DMT, Moses, & the Quest for Transcendence 

Author and infonaut Clifford Pickover presents an analyisis of the DMT experience as more than hallucination, but as a valid dimension of Reality. Central to this are the perceived "alien" or Other presences encountered in the DMT experience.

"The molecule DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. The transition from our world to theirs occurs with no cessation of consciousness or quality of awareness. In this environment, beings often appear who interact with the person who is using DMT. The beings appear to inhabit this parallel realm. The DMT experience has the feel of reality in terms of detail and potential for exploration. The creatures encountered are often identified as being alienlike or elflike. Some of the creatures appear to be three-dimensional. Others appear to lack depth...Maybe this is why the ancients seemed so in touch with God and with miracles and visions. Maybe Moses and Jesus had a greater rate of pineal DMT production than most."

These theoretical ponderings are followed by a whole bunch of fascinating responses contributed by his readers, reflecting the diversity of interest and speculation about this captivating chemical. N-N-Dimethyltryptamine exists naturally within the nervous system of most higher mammals. It bears a strong structural identity to serotonin and melatonin, both of which are vital to perception, cognition, sleep, and dreaming. Little is known about it's biological function and it remains uncertain why such a profoundly mind-altering psychedelic is manufactured by the nervous system. As a pineal modifer it could be affecting what Descarte's referred to as the "reducing valve of the Soul", tearing away the biosurvival filters to allow the kaleidoscopic spectrum of the Absolute to enter into conscious apprehension. As Pickover suggests it seems very possible that many mystical visions depicting angelic visitations bearing earth-shaking proclamations could have been driven by the endogenous production of psychoactive indoles.

Of course Pickover wields McKenna and Rick Strassman as his allies, but it's refreshing to see him cite rogue neuroscientist Julian Jaynes whose intriguing work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind suggests that concsiousness too evolved and that the emerging mind of early humans was a very different perceptual apparatus than it is now. The self-reference provided by the ego, the gallery of emotions and complexes, and the creative leaps of the enlarged cortex, might have intitially manifested as god-like whisperings or sudden possessions, hence the preponderance of mythologies populated by anthropomorphic dieties. DMT, or as Mckenna argues, it's cousin psilocybin, may have been the early catalyst to the emergence of the Self and the cataloging of our world by language leading to our technological evolution as tool makers and numerical wizards.

Paradoxically, it seems also to be the trail of bread crumbs back to the pre-linguistic interconnected web of nature within which humans were once intimately embedded; when the distinction between I and Thou was barely a murmur in the primal buzz of instinct and reaction. Did Homo sapiens long ago answer a distant call from hyperspace while perhaps scrubbing about the Savanah plain? But then just who are these entities, these "self-transforming machine elves"? Where do they come from, and what is their message? Telepathic Zeta Reticulans who monitor us through brain frequencies induced by tryptamine spin resonance? Our future selves popping in from the 5th dimension to harasas us for not yet figuring It out? Or more holy whisperings and angelic visitations manufactured by an over-excited pineal gland bent on religious fervor?

Whatever the source the visions always seem to deliver a profoundly real sense of contact with something very far away yet right next to us all of the time, seeming to say, "Look... we are all beings of light suspended in eternity dreaming this beautiful creation."

Ibogaine: Trip of a Lifetime

From original story:

He's tried clinics and therapy, Narcotics Anonymous and rehab. He's taken up exercise and gone through reduction cures. He's even given up on giving up. Now, though, Sebastian Horsley thinks he may have found the answer to his lifelong craving for heroin. Only problem is, it's another dangerous drug...

This is another story among hundreds of people who have cured lifelong addictions and disorders after just one Ibogaine trip. This is probably why this drug is not on the street - it would put all the dealers out of business.

Hopefully organizations like MAPS can be successful in getting this off of Schedule 1 and into clinical trials.

Trippiest Trip Report

Below is one of the most descriptive, far out and cosmic trip reports I've ever read. Originial report on Erowid.

DOSE : 50mg synthetic DMT in a glass pipe on a small bed of dill, three large, hot, plasticy tokes:

Upon inhalation, the trembling darkness before me crystallized instantly into a shimmering vortex of lime-colored tessera and began a meticulous implosion in upon itself. Pulses of sinuous electric energy shot along it from behind me and I could see them disappear down its infinite corridor. Each one came faster and faster and faster until this typhoon like tunnel was throbbing with supple, supernova pulsations. It was then that I began to accelerate, an auditory drone that seemed to flange at the edges of my being propelling me along. I couldn't believe the breakneck speed with which I was beginning to move, like a proton in a hyperspatial supercollider. The breathtakingly ecstatic sensation of being literally shot out of the confines of my corporeal body was overwhelming, and already my mind was grasping wildly about for some semblance of familiarity. No previous DMT journey had ever moved this fast. The vortex started coiling then, curling and cycling into its cylindrical self, and I became aware that it was but one strand in a warping and wefting dimension which was now materializing and taking on a thousand outlandish forms all around me. Ahead was an entirely ludicrous, tensile, concentric, mandala-like disco-medusa that wore about it a technicolor dreamcoat of fibrillating antennae, surrounded by an ultraviolet aura. Instantly I could tell it was alive: some sort of a sentinel. Then seemingly out of nowhere and from every direction at once came these freakish tentacles of liquid lapis lazuli. They began moving together with an almost orchestral hyperprecision, and I was completely mesmerized - it was like nothing I had ever seen. I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at - there must literally have been thousands of them - I was utterly flabbergasted. I knew I must find a way past this creature though, as extraordinary as she was. We were still cruising along at the speed of light, now descending backwards together through an amoeboid, octahedral gallery of iridescent vaults. It was at this moment that I became suddenly aware we were not alone. The vaults seemed to zoom explosively outward then and the gallery expanded ad infinitum into a gargantuan, labrynthine, almost interstellar space, and through every vault poured the miraculous and zany imps who make the tryptamine hyperdimension their home. The tentacles of lapis lazuli gathered these capricious, multi-colored enigmas in towards the center, and became the architectonic scaffolding of their new multi-dimensional reality, a world which I found myself dab smack in the middle of. It was like a liquid mind ecology of staggering and alien complexity, the mind as it crosses over into quantum warpdrive and migrates ever further out into the oceanic beyond. At this point the glorious geometries transcended what is even vaguely feasible in this three dimensional mundane, constantly concrescing into new and varigated permutations, exfoliating out of themselves what might be called hyperspherologies of the divine, and to look anywhere was to be shot clean through with scintillating amazement. Crowding and cramming themselves into my field of vision were thousands upon thousands of beings of every imaginable sort and many that were completely unimaginable. They were everywhere jabbering in indecipherable tongues, juggling incandescent neon microworlds of dancing beings, and morphing with a zen-like, diaphanous fluidity that remains a primal miracle no matter how often you lay your all too human eyes on it. The primordial intelligence being manifest before me was palpable, undeniable, transcendently amazing - it shook me to my core in a more-than-real gleeful profundity. All I could do was sit there in divine liquid awe, my soul gaping wide open, and stare at the incalculable proportions of bizarreness and the down right weird that lay before me. It was like being entertained by the 76,000 piece orchestra of an alien civilization in whose classical music each note is not merely a musical tone, but an entire world, each just as intricate and nuancical as our own. You have a sense of being swarmed by the whimsical mastermind artforms of an extremely eccentric Boolean contortionist, a diabolical merry go round of linguistic Rubix cubes, 13th dimensional millipedes saying themselves to themselves as they make love, and impossible Gordian knots dancing the jitterbug at a lyrical lightspeed: a gelatinous ballet of endlessly self-juxtaposing pirouettes. You realize all at once you have arrived and are now having darshan with this gigantically insectoid, otherworldly Oz.

They came at me again and again, a more than possible tsunami of opalescent combobulations, like rivers of music and miracles and clowns, the flood gates of my soul thrown wider than wide with the sheer magnitude of this dazzling, world-devouring spectacle. It was the primal, otherworldly bewilderness of the Andalusian gardens that grow in the antipodes of the mind, the crystalline vegetal perplexity of its delectable ecologies spilling and dripping and pouring like liquid diamonds from my eyes. The presence of what is awesome, what is wildly and passionately and numinously alive, filled every meridian in the vast continent of my expanded being, an intensity of joy and love and life coursing like heavenly ambrosia through my electrified veins. It was as though I myself was god, moving through liquid ecologies of god, the self-crystallizing emerald labyrinths of the tryptamine dreamtime, a marvelous infundibulum of plasmoidal calisthenics. What occurred was a total meltdown of everything I know and hold dear, utter surrender into the honeycomb lovewomb of the universe reborn, born anew in a thousand unendingly magnificent eyes, and Maya and Lila handheld spinning in sundream dandelions, my five senses spinning like a zillion gyroscopes round the centripetal amethyst of this all and everything.

I was there, and then I was back - zap like before - I was back before I even knew I was back, the dimensions subsiding very quickly within me as the last few molecules of DMT were cracked wide open and gone. The room before me buzzed and shimmered like the most unlikely dream. The world? Oh yes - I remember - I like it there. Hello people. You look so normal and good. But wait, something just happened. What was that thing? Oh YES, OH MY LORD YES.....everything was still a shimmering mindmirage or bliss and joy and awe. WOW...... I think I said that: WOW......

To think that we all spend hours there every night, after *we* have been metabolized away that is, and that every day the collectivity of human consciousness looks upon that miracle for over 50 billion hours, is more than any of us can even begin to begin to understand. Seven minutes spent in that dimension, the primal furnace of our being, is enough for most people to think about for the rest of their lives. How miraculously absurd and awe-inspiring is our situation as humans then, that we are somehow built around this certain little molecule, only four atoms away from serotonin, the neurotransmitter which mediates and colors every aspect of our waking lives. It is like the human body is a door, a portal, and DMT is the key that opens our experience to the all-possible, the everything dimension, which surrounds us on all sides though we see it not. That the simple quantum difference of four atoms can open this for anyone to see is, and will remain, the greatest, most mysterious enigma in this life. The day we unlock its secrets we will for the first time awaken from the dream.

** A reader pointed out to me that DMT, a substance found in the Amazon may have an anolog from a substance call phalaris in North America. You can read more about it here.

Psychotherapy and Shamanism

From an article by psychedelic pioneer and shamanic anthropologist, Ralph Metzner, titled Hallucinogenic Drugs and Plants in Psychotherapy and Shamanism:

Certain common elements can be found in the anthropological literature on the experiences with hallucinogenic plants in shamanistic indigenous societies. These features are also found in accounts of shamanic journey experiences with other modalities, such as drumming, vision questing, or conscious dreaming. It is clear that these experiential features imply the existence of a radically different worldview (than the Western) in entheogenic shamanic practicioners. I will simply list these features, since there is not the space here to document them extensively.

(1) The role of the guide, curandera or healer is always described as central and essential. This must be a person with extensive personal experience in the use of these medicines, who agrees to provide an initiatory experience to a seeker or training to an apprentice. In virtually all entheogenic rituals, the guide or shaman does much or all of the singing, and this singing profoundly shapes the quality and content of the experience.

(2) The experience can be healing, on physical, psychic and spiritual levels (although traditional shamanic healers do not make such analytic distinctions). Shamanic healing experiences, with entheogens or other means, have three main variations: one is the extraction of a toxin, that may have been implanted by means of sorcery; the second is the retrieval of a split-off psychic fragment or "soul"; and the third is the experience of being dismembered or destroyed, and then reconstituted with a healthier, stronger "body."

(3) The experience can provide access to hidden knowledge, -- this is the aspect of divination, "seeing", prophecy, intuition or visioning. If the intention or context is healing, then the divination would be equivalent what Western medicine calls diagnosis -- e.g. from where and from whom did the particular toxic implant come, where has the soul-fragment been "lost", what particular herbs should be used for the person's illness, etc. It is said that there is an intelligence associated with the plant medicine, an intelligence that communicates in an interior way to the person who ingests the medicine. Indigenous healers refer to the entheogenic plants as "plant teachers".

(4) There is a feeling and perception of access to meta-physical realms or worlds. Such realms have, in shamanic, esoteric or magical traditions, been referred to variously as "inner world", "spirit world", "upper or lower world", "faerie world", "dreamtime" or "otherworld". Some anthropologists, including Michael Harner, refer to them as "non-ordinary reality." The access to these other-worlds may come through a kind of journey to that world; perhaps on the back of an animal or carried by a large bird. Alternatively, one may feel that one can see into the spirit world without moving, while still aware of the ordinary present world of time-space as well. Scenery and beings of the other world may appear in our world. In any event, the usual boundaries between the worlds seem to become more permeable, during such experiences.

(5) The experience may involve the perception of non-material, normally invisible, spirit beings or entities. Such spirits are recognized as being associated with particular animals (e.g. serpent, jaguar), certain plants, trees or fungi, certain places (e.g. river, rainforest), deceased ancestors, and other non-ordinary entities (e.g. extra-terrestrials, elves). It can include the experiences of actually becoming or identifying with that spirit (e.g. the experience of becoming a jaguar or a serpent). The healing and divination is experienced as being done by or with the assistance of such spirits, also referred to as "allies", "power animals", "guardians" or "helpers". In some healing rituals, there may also be contact with bad or malevolent spirits, that need to be exorcized or neutralized in some way.

Psychedelic Science Theater

Via Bruce Eisner,

Wandering the web via Google, I came upon Psychedelic Science Theater with a lot of fun games that really work. Turns out, the theater is part of a larger spunky young Brit site called SeethruZine. The site calls itself Your Internet Filter and Webzine. It has a good music section and do not miss the Good Drugs Guide.

The Dreaming Universe

I've been reading Daniel Pinchbeck's excellent psychedelic travelogue Breaking Open The Head and one of the most profound realizations of his experiences is the depth and reality of the spirit world and the beings which live in the interstices between mundane life and the subtle dimensions of dream and vision. From the machine elves of DMT to the "heavenly ones" of ayahuasca, the ancestors of eboga and the mushroom people of amanita, the plant psychedelics seem to show the vast terrestrial and extra-terrestrial intelligences present throughout nature, like a waking dreamworld shut off by the human species' deadly insistence upon scientific rationality and numeric evidence. This dreamworld seems to be a very real place, and its star-lit landscapes home to many forces.

This morning my sleep found me in contact with some such force or spirit. The realms of dreams and the psychedelic experience are kindred and tap into the same continuous landscape of spirit and imagination. Within this place arise archetypes and patterns, as well as apparently sentient entities common to many visionary experiences and often bound in some familiar way to the agent of invocation. Elvish or alien beings, for instance, are a common experience of those who blast into the DMT space, lending a consistency and presence to their fundamental existence beyond mere hallucination. Similarly, in tracking my dreams I've realized an interior map of places I commonly visit. A rocky coastline, a large grocery store, an apartment complex - these among others recur in my dreams, uniquely altered in each, but consistent as ideals. I've been mapping this internal geography, and in perceiving this fundamental pattern my dreamscape seems to exist regardless of whether or not I'm dreaming.

This morning I met a man of sickly ochre pallor, skin like wet plastic, aged and sharpened yellow teeth. His black eyes captured my gaze as I stared, both mesmerized and appalled by his visage. I couldn't help but marvel at how unusual and menacing he looked. He was trying to convince me of something and it made me uncomfortable. I left only to be pursued by a black-hooded figure in tattered rags, faceless and riding a bicycle. As it neared me I could feel a tangible presence drawing close to my flesh. I tried to maneuver away but my movements became sluggish and labored as the entity circled around to confront me. Shaking and afraid I jacked out and awoke.

The most striking aspect of this dream to me is its uniqueness. I rarely have dreams where I become scared. Usually my dreams are light adventures where I float through them feeling strong and in control. Furthermore I rarely ever meet such dark and menacing characters. The tangibility of fear was the element which lent the most realism to the experience and made me consider its depth. If I adopt Pinchbeck's realization - which I am inclined to do as it resonates much with my own experiences - then I met a malevolent entity of some power intruding on my dream, manifest as the ochre man then as the black-hooded bicyclist. Perhaps I met a demon, or a dark archetype (they are the same, after all) feeding off of my fear. An Archon.

Questions of course arise, least of which would probably concern the reality of this dream and the sanity of the dreamer. What did this entity want? What was the source of my fear? More importantly, what does the vision mean to me? And this is the central crux of the issue and the fundamental element which separates the mystical path from that of rationalism: Meaning. Science and rationalism have stripped meaning from life in favor of material evidence. Mysticism seeks to balance the world of materialism with the world of imagination. Or, more correctly, mysticism seeks to bring spirit into matter to awaken the dreaming universe to its own lucid glory. The kingdom of heaven is on earth. Creation is the dream of god and we are all sleepers.

Shaffer Psychedelic Library

The Drug War Chronicle hosts a good selection of full psychedelic texts in html. Selections include such classics as Huxley's Doors of Perception, The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts, Hoffman's LSD, My Problem Child, and Maslow's Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, to name a few. The home page for the Shaffer Drug Library offers many other selections as well.

Ecstasy Rising

I just finished watching Peter Jenning's ABC special, Ecstasy Rising, a one hour special that had the sanest and most balanced coverage I've seen on the topic by the mainstream. Highly recommended.

Play Real Audio.

Here's the MAPS story on the special.

Thanks Bruce.