Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Read an Excerpt - Owsley and Me: The Lure of Chemistry

[American Dream]

"Bodhisattve" Garcia became seriously addicted to Persian and speedballs:

Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia... Page 361

[American Dream]

Blow your Nose

[American Dream]

A Counter-History of the California Ideology

April 30, 2013

Psychedelic Militarization/California’s Dreaming

It was in 1943 when Albert Hoffman, a chemist employed by the Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, accidentally absorbed a small amount of a drug he that called LSD, having synthesized it several years earlier. It had a profound effect: laying down, his perception of his everyday reality shifted to an uninterrupted parade of images and colors, swirling about in a kaleidoscope of shapes and designs. Three days later, he tried the drug again at a higher dosage. Feeling the sudden onset of change in his sensory perception, he left the lab on a bicycle for home. Anxiety and panic washed over him – am I going insane? he asked himself. But soon, in the spaces of his house and after a cursory check of his vital signs, he found that he “could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and play of shapes… Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.”



A decade later Sandoz held contracts with the US Food and Drug Administration, providing large shipments of LSD that were in turn given to the CIA.5 The rationale behind this was the new paranoid climate of the Cold War: just as American spies were embedded within the Soviet bureaucratic apparatuses, there was ongoing hunts for communist agents in the US. LSD’s uncanny ability to deconstruct the normal doors of perception could possibly allow, given the right circumstances, the ability not only to gain confessions from those trained extensively not to crack under pressure, but to unmake the human mind and rebuild it from the ground up. Research into these avenues was green-lighted in 1953 under the code-name of “MK-ULTRA,” and money flowed through both secret cut-outs and private foundations for funding. Amongst these organizations was the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, which was by this time being headed up by the former OSS officer Frank Fremont-Smith;6 within several years, the foundation was to set up a series of conferences modeled on the earlier Macy Conferences (and complete with many of the same members) dedicated to the study of LSD.

Gregory Bateson reemerged into the fray of this psychedelic ferment. Psychiatrists had already latched onto other uses for LSD than clandestine shenanigans – the rearranging of the senses could given the otherwise sane individual a glimpse into the mind of the schizophrenic, which meant that the drug had plenty of legitimate clinical applications. Bateson himself was doing his own work on the causes of schizophrenia, arguing that the precipitating factor was the double bind, a confused mental state arising from contradictory messages in the familial environment. Thus, for Bateson, schizophrenia was first and foremost a social phenomena, foreshadowing the arguments made by Deleuze and Guattari in their two Capitalism and Schizophrenia books. Indeed, the layout A Thousand Plateaus is designed with Bateson’s work in mind: just as each chapter in the book is divided into “plateaus” that resonate harmoniously, the anthropologist took cybernetic living systems into a nearly holistic dimension with a model that linked together the mental and the greater ecological world in a series of intense, fluctuating plateaus. Its impossible to tell if LSD had any discernible impact on this turn Bateson’s thinking (though he occasionally hinted that it did), it is known that he did indeed receive LSD from none other than a doctor on the payroll of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program.7

MK-ULTRA, by this point, had turned from vaguely sinister to the horrifying. Naomi Klein recounts much of the grimmer details in The Shock Doctrine, which traces a genealogy between the torture tactics deployed on prisoners during the War on Terror back to the CIA’s research, focusing mainly on the work that Dr. Ewen Cameron was conducting (on frequently non-consensual patients) at the Allen Memorial Institute, part of Montreal’s McGill University. Psychotropic drugs collided with electroshock therapy and sensory deprivation tanks in the psychiatric institute-turned torture changed; with agency funding, Cameron starved patients, bombarded their psyches with LSD and PCP, and with this cocktail, immersed them in the sensory deprivation tanks for upwards of a month. In one disturbing moment, one patient was put in a drug sleep for sixty-five days, only to be awakened from the drug induced comas to eat and use the bathroom.8 But yet the money continued to flow to Cameron, much of it through an agency cut-out called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a rather innocuous-sounding title for the actions conducted under its mantle; one the board of directors set Adolph Berle, a mainstay of the moneyed liberal elite. He too was disturbed by what he saw: in his personal diary he wrote that he “was frightened about this one. If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants.”9

Luckily for us, it didn’t turn out this way. In fact, the blowback of the operation would prove to be quite the opposite. Fast forward in time:

…someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eyelids… I was afraid, because I honestly thought that it was all in my mind, ‘and that I had finally flipped out.

I sought a person I trusted… he held me for a long time, and we grew closer than two people can be… our bones merged, our skin was one skin, there was no place where we could be separated, where he stopped and I began. This closeness was impossible to describe in any but melodramatic term… still, I did feel that we became merged and one in the true sense, that there was nothing that could separate us, and that it had a meaning beyond any that had ever been.

This is the description of a journalist assigned to the first of the electric acid tests; against the backdrop of strobe machines and the bodies twirling and dancing to the Grateful Dead, she had consumed kool-aid that, unbeknownst to her, were spiked with high doses of LSD. These trip festivals, autonomous anarchic zones were psychedelics were consumed and bodily relations were freely traded, were the brainchildren of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a nomadic band of aesthetic revolutionaries who were busy bridging the gap between the Beat Generation and the blossoming hippy counterculture through the dual platforms of individual freedom and the use of hallucinogenics. Kesey’s introduction to the world of LSD had not, however, been in the domain of the counterculture…

Lovell told him [Kesey] about some experiments in the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was running with “psychomimetic” drugs, drugs that brought on temporary states resembling psychoses. They were paying volunteers $75 a day. Kesey volunteered.

Kesey was turned on to LSD by the CIA, Kesey then helped to turn on an entire generation. He wasn’t the only one: Allen Ginsberg took the drug on the advice of Bateson, and Robert Hunter, who was to become the songwriter for the Grateful Dead, ingested LSD and mescaline under the watchful eyes of MK-ULTRA scientists at Stanford University. In the beginning, the CIA’s search for a medical antidote for the Cold War transformed the agency into not only a drug dealer, but one of the most important influences in the rising counterculture that was coalescing into the New Left.




Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters

https://deterritorialinvestigations.wor ... -ideology/

[American Dream]

What's there to live for?

Who needs the peace corps?


Think I'll just DROP OUT

I'll go to Frisco

Buy a wig & sleep

On Owsley's floor...


WHO NEEDS THE PEACE CORPS?

[American Dream]

Madness was made possible by all that milieu that repressed in man of his animal nature...madness then became the other side of progress. By multiplying mediations, civilisation offered men ever increasing means to become insane.

- Michel Foucault. History of Madness Pg. 374

[American Dream]

"Until you heal the wounds of your past, you are going to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex; But eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, Stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories and make peace with them."

--Iyanla Vanzant.

http://caitconqueso.tumblr.com/post/566 ... st-you-are

[American Dream]

Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel

by Todd Brendan Fahey

[American Dream]

http://www2.whidbey.net/zipmont/revamp/cyber.html

The Counterculture and the Advent of Internet Technology



"Flowers produce seeds and there are millions of seeds from the flowers of the 1960s. Every aspect of American society is being run by the seeds of the flowers of the 1960s. We are the establishment and we are doing a good job."

Timothy Leary



In the 1960s, many soon-to-be famous musicians flooded into Laurel Canyon in the foothills above Santa Monica. A vibrant music scene emerged, almost overnight, on the nearby Sunset Strip. As record producer Terry Melcher, recalled, “kids came from everywhere. It just happened. One day you couldn’t drive anymore. It was, like, overnight – you couldn’t drive on the Strip.” Clubs sprung up on the Sunset Strip and major record labels sprang into action. So did the mainstream press. Theories have since emerged about what was happening there and why it began so quickly. Some emphasize the connections between the Laurel Canyon musicians and their numerous relatives in the US military/intelligence apparatus. Others posit that, regardless of any blood relations, powerful interests behind the war in Vietnam could have collaborated to help cultivate a vibrant counterculture, rooted in "muse-ick", psychedelics, and new age consciousness, in order to distract and absorb some of the dissenting pressure coming from the radical left. Where did all the LSD come from? Who paid for it? Did The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the "hippie mafia", who produced and distributed their own brand of LSD called "orange sunshine," really have CIA connections?

There was Timothy Leary's "Harvard Psilocybin Project" in the early 1960s, and Owsley Stanley, the LSD supplier for the Merry Pranksters, Grateful Dead concerts and "acid tests," events like the the human be-in of 1967, the Monterey Pop Festival, and Altamont Free Festival. As popular as LSD was, not to mention illegal (in Ca.) after 1966, it could have fetched a pretty good price on the street. Yet LSD was often passed out, free of charge, as if it grew on trees, begging the question of who was footing the bill. As former Digger Peter Coyote said in the documentary "Hippies" ... “Some on the left even theorized that the hippies were the end result of a plot by the CIA to neutralize the anti-war movement with LSD, turning potential protestors into self-absorbed naval-gazers.” Yippie founder, Abbie Hoffman, said “There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers … all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these ‘flower children’ who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?!”

While it does seem plausible that the mass doping was part of a CIA plot to neutralize dissent, especially after it became known that the CIA was behind the MKULTRA program, in which Ken Kesey himself was involved, there is still another more interesting and culturally relevant component to be considered, and one in which LSD also played an important role. Several hundred miles north of the Laurel Canyon scene, a true revolution was underway, a revolution that would come to fruition in the Silicon Valley just south of San Francisco. Ironically, it was prominent counterculture intellectuals, and their adamantly anti-technocratic core values, who would play a major role in bringing the next state of the art technology, internet technology, to the mainstream. It was they who considered IT to be far more than just a computational tool, but rather a medium, a new consciousness, indeed one modeled after human consciousness. It was the counterculture that looked upon this technology as a way of unleashing social power and their egalitarian worldview. Much of the early early computer research was done at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). During this same period, Stanford was also one of the many universities around the country where the CIA was conducting covert and illegal mind control experiments using psychedelics, including LSD.

The CIA was also conducting these experiments at Harvard, while another, legal program, the Harvard Psilocybin Project, was simultaneously underway. During the fall of 1960, Aldous Huxley, was appointed visiting professor at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, and he became involved with the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which began that same year, along with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), and others. Huxley was one of the "outstanding creative intellectuals" in the project. (1) In 1954, Huxley had theorized in "The Doors of Perception" that there are metaphorical doors in the human brain that may be opened by properly administered psychedelics, greatly facilitating consciousness expansion and self-discovery. Huxley was recognized as a man of remarkable intelligence. Author Jay Stevens described Huxley as "probably the brightest young literary man of his generation in any of the western countries"(2) adding that "The fall of 1960 was an equivocal time for Aldous Huxley. His lectures on visionary experience were jammed. And not just by students. The public ones at night caused traffic problems more appropriate for the Harvard-Yale game." (3) So it's no wonder that Huxley was sought out by Leary to participate in the 1960 Harvard project. And Huxley was also enthusiastic about working with Leary. As Stevens put it, "For Huxley, Tim Leary was like a strong breeze in a sail that had started to sag. His enthusiasm, his theoretical orientation, and most of all his connection with Harvard, made him the perfect man to advance Aldous's psychedelic scenario."

But concerns were raised about the safety and legitimacy of the project, and it was shut down. Leary and Alpert, both rising academic stars, would be released from the university the following year. Down but not out, Leary and Alpert began seeking a better place to pursue their newfound fascination with psychedelics. They would go on to continue their experiments in Millbrook, New York, but after that went their separate ways. Each spent their own time seeking spiritual enlightenment in India. Alpert returned from India with a new name, and would henceforth be known as "Ram Dass". Leary went on to become involved with the Brotherhood Of Eternal Love in Laguna Beach, California, an organization that produced and distributed "orange sunshine", their own brand of LSD. Huxley would become involved with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, a society that "attracts college students from all over America to experience monastic life first-hand, study vedanta, practice meditation, and research the lives of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, through its student program." (4)

Interestingly, Huxley, Leary and Alpert would all go on to become involved with the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Founded in 1962, Esalen was intended to be a center for the study and development of human potential, and is still regarded by many as the geographical center of the human potential movement. Besides Huxley, Leary and Alpert, past teachers include Buckminster Fuller, B.F. Skinner, Deepak Chopra, Albert Hofmann, Stan Grof, Arnold Toynbee, Ken Kesey, Abraham Maslow, Jerry Rubin, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, and many others. LSD was a tool often used at Esalen to promote consciousness expansion. As one participant put it;

Esalen provided the philosophy for the Hippies, but before the Hippie thing could catch on, they needed to find a catalyst and a sacrament. Well, Ken Kesey turned out to be the catalyst and Timothy Leary and Stanley Owsley provided the sacrament, namely the LSD. Our country has never been the same since. It's kind of hard to believe that all of this came out of an obscure little camp out in the woods that only us starving artists and philosophers know about. The Esalen Experience, they call it, experience being the key word, for it's the experience that counts. For example, it's not good enough just to read The Doors of Perception. What you have to do is experience what's behind the doors of perception. In other words, you have to take the acid and have the experience. (5)

A utopian, social vision was emerging in the counterculture which was centered around a strange brew of forces, which in some cases seemed at odds with one another; human potentialism, a sort of back to the earth tribalism, and modern technology, mind expanding psychedelics, especially LSD. Nowhere was this vision better encapsulated than Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, which launched in 1968. Brand credited Buckminster Fuller for the catalog's inspiration. Marshall McLuhan was also a key influence. He and Fuller both helped Brand to "imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics", as author Fred Turner put it. According to Turner, McLuhan had "twin interests in cybernetic approaches to communication media and tribal forms of social organization", and he "linked both the new tribalism and its promise of a return to a prebureaucratic humanism to a more cybernetic rhetoric of human machine entanglement as well." Turner adds, "In McLuhan's view, the individual human body and the species as a whole were linked by a single nervous system, an array of electronic signals fired across neurons in the human body and circulating from television set to television set, radio to radio, computer to computer, across the globe." (6) So it was no surprise that Brand's Whole Earth Catalog also had, in the words of author Theodore Roszac, "the same hybrid taste. Alongside the rustic skills and tools, we discover high industrial techniques and instruments: stereo systems, cameras, cinematography, and, of course, computers. On one page the 'Manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front' (Wendell Berry's plea for family-scaled organic agriculture); on the next, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics." (7) Turner echoes these Sentiments;

In 1968 Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog in order to help those heading back to the land find the tools they would need to build their new communities. These items included the fringed deerskin jackets and geodesic domes favored by the communards, but they also included the cybernetic musings of Norbert Wiener and the latest calculators from Hewlett-Packard. In later editions, alongside discussions of such supplies, Brand published letters from high-technology researchers next to firsthand reports from rural hippies. In the process, he offered commune-based subscribers a chance to see their own ambitions as commensurate with the technological achievements of mainstream America, and he gave technologists the opportunity to imagine their diodes and relays as tools, like those the commune dwellers favored, for the transformation of individual and collective consciousness. Together, the creators and readers of the Whole Earth Catalog helped to synthesize a vision of technology as a countercultural force that would shape public understandings of computing and other machines long after the social movements of the 1960s had faded from view.

In theWhole Earth Catalog era, these networks spanned the worlds of scientific research, hippie homesteading, ecology, and mainstream consumer culture. By the 1990s they would include representatives of the Defense Department, the U.S. Congress, global corporations such as Shell Oil, and makers of all sorts of digital software and equipment. (8)

Brand had other important influences. He first took LSD in December of 1962, and began hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters at Kesey's home near Stanford. He later began collaborating with Kesey and the Pranksters for events like the Trips Festival in 1966, which catapulted Brand to the fore as an entrepreneur. By this time, about 8 years had passed since Kesey had volunteered as a test subject in the CIA's MKULTRA program, presumably unaware that it was a CIA program exploring mind control. Theodore Roszak describes the role of LSD in the counterculture social vision;

The assumption underlying these mass distribution efforts was blunt and simple: dope saves your soul. Like the Catholic sacraments, it takes effect ex opere operato -- by its very ministration. Once this promise crossed wires with the growing interest in oriental mysticism, the psychedelics had been launched as a cultural force. It seemed clear that the research laboratories of the western world -- including those of the giant pharmaceutical corporations -- had presented the world with a substitute for the age-old spiritual disciplines of the East. Instead of a lifetime of structured contemplation, a few drops of home brewed acid on a vitamin pill would do the trick. It was the short cut to satori.

Here, I suspect, is the reason why Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and the other technophiliac utopians struck such a responsive chord among the countercultural young. Acid and rock had prepared an audience for their message, and prepared it in an especially persuasive way that undercut the cerebral levels. ... Combined with the music and the lights in a total assault upon the senses, they can indeed make anything seem possible.

This experience, purchased out of the laboratories of our industrial culture, somehow allies its disciples with the ancient, the primitive, the tribal. Its proper use is among huddled comrades, gathered in a sacramental hush in park or field, on the beach, in the wilderness, or the enfolding darkness of an urban den. Here, then, we find the same striking blend of the sophisticated-scientific and the natural-communal that Buckminster Fuller claimed for the geometry of the geodesic dome, and that the Silicon Valley hackers would eventually claim for the personal computer. "This generation absolutely swallowed computers whole, just like dope," Stewart Brand observed in a February 1985 interview in San Francisco Focus Magazine. (9)

In 2005, in his Stanford University commencement speech, Steve Jobs would compare Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog to the internet search engine Google, echoing Timothy Leary the previous decade and his newly modified, slogan; "turn on, boot up, jack in." "Digital be-ins" would carry the tradition forward into the new century, "with a mission to carry forth the ethos and values expressed at the 1960's Human Be-In, and bring them into the world of multimedia and Internet technology. It served a role through the 1990's as a venue for the San Francisco Bay Area's community of new media pioneers to socialize and exchange ideas. Cyberculture became the focal point of the gatherings. However, producer Michael Gosney also brought in key figures from the Human Be-In such as Allen Cohen, Chet Helms and Timothy Leary to maintain the 60s influence, as well as 60s icons Ken Kesey, Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy. In the early years, it drew major companies as sponsors, such as Apple, Microsoft, Adobe Systems and Kodak, while at the same time staying an underground party." (10)

Computers and internet technology had the distinct pleasure of coming into the mainstream under the cloak of an egalitarian, communitarian social vision. It seems the extent to which new technologies and social movements are planned by elites, as opposed to co-opted later on, while interesting, is not particularly instructive. What seems more meaningful is that, in the end, the results tend to be the same, and decidedly undemocratic. Similarly, whether these results stem from the mainstream values or from counterculture values, once again, is not particularly important. One way or another, power begets power, In this case, a technology thought of as a great equalizer, as the answer to an ailing culture dominated by corporate greed and government corruption, turned out to be a godsend for both Big Brother and big corporate marketing. As Theodore Roszak put it;

Even when the Internet was nothing more than a restricted military messaging system, enthusiasts envisioned a day when politically restive millions would network their aspirations and talents via computer. All they had were funky little CPUs that scrolled sickly green letters and numbers at a snail's pace across a 6-inch screen, but that was enough, they said, to build the New Jerusalem. ... The computer has brought us convenience and amusement, but, like all technology, it's a mixed blessing. Far from smashing Big Brother, computers have given him more control over our lives. ... We have watched high tech become the next wave in big-bucks global industrialism, the property of the crass and the cunning, who are no more interested in empowering the people than General Motors was. (11)

Similarly, it now seems abundantly clear that long before the personal computer has the chance to restore democratic values, the major corporations and the security agencies of the world will have used the technology to usher in a new era of advanced surveillance and control. ... It was an attractive hope that the high technology of our society might be wrested from the grip of benighted forces and used to restore us to an idyllic natural state. (12)

The purpose here is not to deride internet technology or social movements and people with good intentions. IT is a wonderful technology that undeniably has very real benefits for many. The concern is that this technology, like all others, is dominated and controlled by the few. And it is the few who benefit the most from it. There is little that is egalitarian about it. The power and control exhibited by elites before the advent of internet technology was immense. But the power they have after is unimaginable. And there is no doubt that, in the wrong hands, this technology also stands to do significant harm. So while deriding internet technology seems rahter pointless, what isn't pointless is acknowledging the egalitarian billing for the sham that it is. What isn't pointless is asking if there's any sense in our getting so worked up over the red and blue political tilts as we so often still do even after years of crippling, divisive disservice, or if it makes much sense to devote our time and energy to social movements when they have such a strong tendency to be co-opted and the objects of undue influence, their well intentioned participants unaware of the interests they were really in bed with. To put it mildly, there is always a stark contrast between the egalitarian, populist billing and the actual results, between the window dressing and what's inside the building. Our participation stands to waste our time at the very least, if not do us a great social disservice that follows an all too familiar pattern.

And if there are any remaining doubts about those interests social movements might be in bed with, there are plenty of examples that are instructive. One would be the activities of the Stanford Research Institute that are documented in the 2009 BBC film, "The Century of the Self." This is a classic example of the establishment's appropriation of counterculture ethos which, in this case, resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan as the 40th President of the United States in 1980. (13) SRI developed a research methodology called "VALS" ("Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles") which helped both corporate and political marketing campaigns through profiling. The film specifically names countercultural nexus, the Esalen Institute, as well as Maslow's hierarchy, as research topics at SRI. It was the profiling of these "inner directed" individuals of the counterculture that the Reagan campaign would be designed around and would end up making the difference in the election, a bitter irony which surprised even SRI researchers. Given Reagan's track record as Governor of California, this really was an amazing feat. And by the time Reagan was elected, as the film points out, SRI had already begun work for the Department of Defense on a project that would later become "Star Wars" program, proposed by President Reagan on March 23, 1983, taking old sayings, like "the devil fools with the best laid plans," or "the ego loves to come to its own funeral", to new heights.


Next: Greenwashing



Notes:

1 - http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/look1963.htm

2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbI4f1WvN9w

3 - http://www.scribd.com/doc/52911580/15/T ... in-Project

4 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedanta_So ... California

5 - http://wild-bohemian.com/esalen.htm

6 - http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/turner0 ... index.html

7 - http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/primary ... taste.html

8 - http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415.html

9 - http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/primary ... short.html

10 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Be-In

11 - http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/28 ... e-roszak28

12 - http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/primary ... light.html

13 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-xQcuvz ... re=related -

[American Dream]

http://emmyofthemountains.tumblr.com/post/54465524167

[American Dream]

http://www.psychedelic-library.org/unger.htm

Mescaline, LSD, Psilocybin and Personality Change

Sanford M. Unger, Ph.D.*

from: Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes
Vol. 26, No. 2, May, 1963.

Rapid Personality Change

An increasing number of subjects, patients, experimenters, and psychiatrists—spontaneously or with priming—have declared their drug experiences to be transcendental, mystical, cosmic, visionary, revelatory, and the like. There seems to be difficulty in finding the right name for the experience, even among the professional so-called "mystics":

There is no really satisfactory name for this type of experience. To call it mystical is to confuse it with visions of another world, or of god and angels. To call it spiritual or metaphysical is to suggest that it is not also extremely concrete and physical, while the term "cosmic consciousness" itself has the unpoetic flavor of occultist jargon. But from all historical times and cultures we have reports of this same unmistakable sensation emerging, as a rule, quite suddenly and unexpectedly and from no clearly understood cause (67).


Whatever this type of experience is called, however, a growing body of "expert" testimony apparently confirms the possibility of its induction by drugs. Watts, the dean of current Western Zen scholars, has recently described "cosmic consciousness," courtesy of LSD, in exquisite detail (68). Seminary students and professors in the Boston area are said to have definitely concluded that their contact with psilocybin was "mystico-religious" (as to whether or not it was "Christian," however, they are still in doubt) (69). Huxley has been most outspoken about the capacity of the drugs to induce "traditional" mystical-visionary states:

For an aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self-flagellation would be as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb's Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a pig. Knowing as he does (or at least as he can know, if he so desires) what are the chemical conditions of transcendental experience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists.... (70)


Nearly invariably, whenever dramatic personality change has been noted following the use of these drugs, it has been associated with this kind of experience—that is, one called transcendental or visionary—with the particular name the experience is given seemingly most dependent upon whether the investigator focuses on affect or content. These experiments in drug-induced behavior change will shortly be reviewed in detail.

* B.A. Antioch College, '53; M.A., '55; Ph.D., '60 Cornell Univ. U.S. Army (Criminal Investigation Division) '5G'56; Grant Foundation Fellow in Human Development '57-'58; Senior Fellow, Cornell Graduate School '58-'59; Chairrnan, Psychology Curriculum, Shimer College '59-'60; Rsc. Psychologist, Lab. of Psychology, NIMH '60—.

[American Dream]

http://motel11.tumblr.com/post/55856428849

[American Dream]

Tim Boucher with a good riff on Changing Images and Campbell’s involvement:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/index ... =astronomy

Joseph Campbell advanced that understanding tremendously and his abstracted technical essence of myth was used to pattern a powerful new myth that fused science with a sense of transcendent mysticism: Star Wars (where Star Trek, on the other hand was an outgrowth of the more Humanist side of things). As close friends with George Lucas and a stated major influence of his work, Campbell via Lucas helped create an international myth to contain all the societal changes and upheavals that has gone on in the past two decades with the explosion of the consciousness movements and the New Age. It is no wonder than that Joseph Campbell is also listed as an author of a pivotal 1973 document, Changing Images of Man, allegedly funded by the US government, written by the Stanford Research Institute, and credited with inspiring the New Age movement by way of the Marilyn Ferguson book, the Aquarian Conspiracy - which is itself supposed to be a popular re-telling/propaganda version of the SRI report.

Conspiracy theories aside though (although I'm pretty sure all the information above is fairly well-established factually), Campbell also had a decidedly positive view of science and of humanity as a whole. He definitely subscribed to a model in which we could learn from the past and improve ourselves through effort and study (ie, evolution). He was also able to offer a vision of how science could be synthesized naturally with the rich spiritual history of mankind.

Which is not such a crazy idea after all, considering that the natural sciences in no small measure rose out of the occult sciences, such as alchemy and astrology. Campbell was a thinker whose vision was so vast that he could tie those threads back together again, all while glorifying both humanity and the transcendent mysteries of the universe. I don't, however, agree that his work denied The Creator, as the obviously literalist Christian author quoted above believes. If anything, he praised God and disdained the churches men built to contain Him and keep Him at bay - a true compatriot of the true Illuminati principles.

With these eyes, I think it's worthwhile to look at other spiritual thinkers today of similar popularity, if not stature. Ken Wilber, for instance, takes a slightly more technical-seeming, less "Follow Your Bliss" approach to spirituality. He treats spirituality like a science, which can be organized, analyzed and integralized rationally from top to bottom. Small wonder that he's so immensely popular today, or that he was tapped to help author the follow up report to the 1973 SRI document, Changing Images 2000.

What Campbell, and especially Wilber represent is that arm of science which is today trying to correct its willful ignorance and blindness about interior states. Science is trying to go beyond religion, go beyond psychology (ie, Transpersonal psychology) and fully map out our interior worlds. Why else do you find roots linking Timothy Leary's LSD and mushroom research to the CIA, or Terence McKenna to the Rockefellers? Because the scientists and the technocrats don't want to just continue saying that they can’t see inside the human soul. They want to storm the gates of Heaven, map and colonize it. Traditional conspiracy theory would dictate that this is the closing manuever of the Illuminati war against humanity. But if we believe that science came out of the occult (which is a simple fact of history), then it only makes sense that science should want to go back there, now that it believes the culture has been primed and made mature enough to allow it without the interference of theocratic institutions (Islamic fundamentalism, anybody?).

Want more evidence that this is what science is doing? Look all around you: why do you think we’re hearing all this fuss suddenly about Johns Hopkins University publicly "proving" that mushrooms cause mystical experiences? What about that Canadian scientist who has created a helmet that lets you experience God? Why are scientists trying to map the minds of meditating Buddhist monks? What is the emerging field of memetics (along with viral marketing) but the attempt to create a usable model of how ideas themselves operate independent of the individual? And that's without delving into any of the speculative stuff about government experiments in mind control, remote viewing and mounds and mounds of other psychic experimentation both here and abroad.

http://www.brainsturbator.com/forums/vi ... 8/P15/#702



[minimal editing done to attempt to clean up formatting and punctuation issues]

[American Dream]

http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... ghtenment/

Decolonize Enlightenment

August 06, 2013



By Belinda Griswold


But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.

- Dogen

Practicing the Buddhadharma is simple, not easy, as the old saying goes. Part of the “not easy” side of the equation is learning to trust our own understanding of the awakening process, both as individual practitioners and as communities of awakening.

For me, the biggest, bloodiest, gnarliest barrier to self-trust is what’s drily called patriarchy, and its many legacies of abuse, objectification and lack-of-confidence-in-all-things-female, myself included.

In contemporary Buddhist communities, convert and immigrant alike, patriarchy is the rule – with very few exceptions. The teachers are men. The statues are men. The language is male. The learning structures are (generally) heady, focused on “emptiness” and often implicitly anti-embodiment. The sex scandals and abuse (in more and less subtle forms) that go along with these forms are really not surprising, as tragic as they are for all involved. Even those communities that try mightily for egalitarianism end up smelling an awful lot like hierarchy.

All this colonization. All this is not news.

What’s interesting and fresh to me these days, as I emerge from a traditional hierarchical Tibetan Buddhist sangha, is what the decolonization journey can look like. And especially, how do we decolonize enlightenment?

How does our birthright of natural wakefulness, Buddha-nature, embodied wisdom/compassion inseparable come clear to us both within and without the patriarchal structures and human foibles of Buddhist institutions? How do we glean the goodness from our patriarchal traditions, while at the same time nourishing a growing, and powerful, trust in our own journey?

Buddhanature is a given. It is THE given in the genuine Dharma.

But learning to trust ourselves isn’t part of the traditional Buddhist curriculum, and for many women, and maybe men too, we can go on practicing for years, following the forms, never learning to listen to our own wisdom, always wondering why we aren’t “getting it,” always looking for wisdom, or turning away in discouragement.

The power and truth of the Dharma runs through the twin rivers of relative reality/insanity/oppression/confusion, and the pure stream of fresh understanding and connection that can arise at any time. When we sit down on the cushion, breathe deeply when the baby cries, get up early to get to the picket line, lock ourselves down to stop the pipeline bulldozers – when we feel and see into the radiant interdependence of all that is, we are home, if we can trust ourselves.

But here’s the rub: we are (mostly) confused! Those moments are few and far between for most of us. They feel like luck or happy chance. Suffering and discontent bring us to the Dharma. What brought me to the Dharma most deeply was seeing that despite my and others’ deep motivations for deep, nourishing, lasting social change, we kept creating destructive, oppressive structures in most of the good work we do. How painful.

So, we need to work on getting unconfused on a relative level. Most of us are blown mightily about by the winds of our own personal and crazy cultural karma, without even knowing. So, we need the forms, and teachers, to help us see this insane conditioning, and to see what may lie beyond it. That’s the power of the tradition and of lineage.

Thus, we find ourselves as student and teacher: one who asks, learns, receives, and one who gives. There’s a good reason for that. We need our teachers. As someone who has gone through deep disillusionment about the very human foibles of Buddhist institutions and the most beloved of teachers, I still know this.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we know we need help when we come to the path. That’s the essence of interdependence: depending on our teachers to help point us in the right direction, to help us see our own big fat blind spots, our own arrogance, ignorance and self-hatred. Training well and hard is the foundation of engaging this interdependence of learning.

But this interdependence can become a kind of dependence that turns in on itself in terrible ways, and especially for women, as I have learned the very hard way.

So at a certain point, we have to grow up. If we don’t, there’s the grave danger of infantilizing ourselves, deifying our teachers and the forms, and creating/fueling oppressive structures both within ourselves and within our community of practice.

There’s also the larger, social danger – seen everywhere today – that our communities become islands of self-involved peace seekers, never bringing the radical social and political change that is the beautiful, powerful promise of the Dharma.

So decolonizing enlightenment means both full engagement with traditional forms, full processing of our own patterns and craziness, and then what Vajrayana teacher Patrick Sweeney calls “the great switcheroo.” We train hard to tame our minds, and then we realize that all is the great field of Bodhi, and there is nothing we have to strive for or work for or try to become. It’s already here.

That means pulling back the projections from our teachers and the tradition. It means learning to listen, in a very deep way, to our own voices. It means creating new, egalitarian forms that will encourage this very process throughout the sangha and our activist communities. It means bringing this radical wisdom into all that we do to transform late-state-crazy-capitalism.

Is there a way to do this within Buddhist institutions? I don’t know. My own lineage is filled with stories of guys (of course) who had to leave the monasteries to really get it. The confines and rules and forms of the monastery were only helpful to a certain point. Then you have to light out.

But honestly, at this point in history and in the ecological and human crisis that threatens all of life, I don’t think we have time (or the interest) to spend our 20 years training and then head out for the hills for the realization that goes beyond “shoulds.” It’s time to join hands to create these opportunities within our sanghas and activist communities. That is the great challenge of our time. As the incredibly iconoclastic and amazing 17th Karmapa has said, now is the time to manifest all practice on behalf of the Earth.

So, let’s do that together. What could be more worthwhile?


Belinda Griswold is an activist on behalf of Mother Earth, a writer, facilitator of the Work that Reconnects, and practitioner of the Nyingma/Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism. She lives in Boulder with her husband, a martial arts fighter, their wild dakini daughter, two pit bulls and an old cat. You reach her at belindagriswold@gmail.com

[American Dream]

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/cluste ... trol-bombs

Cluster Headaches: Inside the US Army's Would-Be Mind-Control Bombs

By Brian Anderson





It's been the Holy Grail of American defense for generations: War without death. Buying into this oxymoron requires either a stubborn faith in the moral compasses of those in power or an ample dosing of, say, 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, the military incapaciting agent commonly known as BZ. Or both.

But there was nevertheless a time when the US took the idea of deathless war to its then-logical endpoint by actively seeking to not just minimize battlefield casualities but to completely do away with the notion of dying in combat. The dust was settling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the boys were coming home (at least those who made it out alive), and all the carnage and horror of global warring were at long last shrivelling into history's ditches like a slug in salt. Americans were tired of death. Done with it, even.

Of course, conflict is seemingly unavoidable. So if wartime death, and thus lethal weapons, was suddenly passé by 1945, how were weapons researchers and developers with the Department of Defense to go about setting the theatre of war to stun, not death? If all the just wars of the future were to do away with death, what sort of weaponry would provide the luxury of an otherwise non-traumatizing means of quashing enemies without slaughtering them?

Easy: Drugs. Specifically, nasty stuff like sarin, SV, PCP, and incapacititating compounds like BZ. This shift toward mind- and behavioral-control became the preserve of the Army Chemical Warfare Service, whose soldiers by the end of WWII "believed they were proprietors of an awesome weapon with yet unrealized potentials," as Reid Kirby writes in Paradise Lost: The Psycho Agents (.pdf). The trick was figuring out just how to drop all tomorrow's psycho-bombs. How do you covertly dose a mid- to full-sized enemy brigade?

The Army had been tinkering on a few potential vehicles--small-arm grenades, smoke machines, flying spray tanks and ballistic-missile warheads, among others--for administering the goods. But only two--the 175-pound M44 generator cluster and the 750-pound M43 BZ cluster bomb--would reach mass production. Both were designed to be dropped from the air, spraying out bomblets on descent. Both utilized BZ.


It's called Buzz for a reason. BZ is odorless and virtually undetectable. Unless you were standing directly next to the M44 cluster bomb (pictured at right; full schematic here), which could carry 40 gallons of BZ; unless you were in close enough proximity to either the M44's main vessel or one of its 126 bomblets to get a good look at those billowing white plumes of mystery smoke, there's small chance you'd have known you were about to go full-on crazy for a while.

Once it takes hold, the Buzz can be long-lasting and beyond disorienting. For sometimes days on end, subjects dosed with BZ remain locked in a stupor that at turns stokes hallucinations, auto-phantom behaviors (picking, plucking, stripping naked, etc.), anxiety and terror and, perhaps most crucially, a blotting out of certain memories of the trip, which not surprisingly could be marked by a near-total loss of will power.

It is a hell of a drug. Of all the far-flung cocktails and chemicals coloring the US military's sordid history of drugs experimentation and mind-control projects on unwitting and/or exploited research subjects, BZ holds a particularly grim place.


The compound not only fascinated Col. James S. Ketchum, the military doctor who headed up the Army's so-called psychedelic Manhattan Project at Edgewood Arsenal throughout the 50s and 60s. But eventual doses of cluster-bomb BZ, Kirby notes, would have to be ramped up higher than originally anticipated in the brainstorming stages of the M44 and M43 (pictured at left). Turns out your lungs retain only 45 percent of "the inspired agent instead of the 50 percent originally believed." Oops.

Only 1500 M43 and M44 munitions were ever stockpiled. There was more leftover than anyone knew what to do with: Between 1963 and 1964, Millmaster Chemical cooked up 100,000 pounds of BZ for the US Army. (All this was stored in 16-gallon drums and shipped by rail to Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, where it would await being pumped into one of the two cluster-bomb models.) Although only a scant 10 percent of this massive batch of BZ would be used in weapons-dev field trials through the 1960s, the initial 100,000 pounds, according to Kirby, was more than adequate "for a single action of a brigade or town-sized target." That's roughly 15km2.

In the end, the cluster duo would be scrapped. For all its stunning potential for incapacitating adversaries and otherwise ushering in the age of war without death, BZ's operational problems got the best of the Army's would-be mind-control bombs.

There's those white plumes, for one, which blew covers. Makeshift armor as simple as a wadded up shirt over the nose and mouth was enough to have unsuspecting targets gritting their teeth through the fog. BZ's so-called envelope-of-action was also weak: "The rate-of-action was delayed (5 percent within 2 hours, 50 percent within 4.5 hours, and 95 percent within 9.5 hours)," Kirby notes, "and the duration-of-action was variable from 36 to 96 hours." Hardly consistent. The Army labelled BZ obsolete in 1977. All M43 and M44 munitions, together with the remaining 90,000 pounds of BZ, were dearmed by the late 1990s.

Forty years on, the specter of chemical weapons still looms. We may never know the full truth behind allegations that Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Even still, the great irony of the US government warning of military action if the Assad regime crosses the proverbial "red line" by dousing citizens with BZ is that the US pioneered chemical and psychological warfare. Something like the moral high ground long ago got buzzed before going up in smoke and forgetting everything.