Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Also, I think the James Kent chapter I cited deserves inclusion here, so here goes:


http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?smlid=486

Messianic Ideation & Delusions of Grandeur

James Kent

Chapter 20: Psychedelic Information Theory

One of the major negative side effect of psychedelic experimentation is delusional ideation, and one of the most common pathologies associated with frequent high-dose psychedelic experimentation is persistent recurring delusions of grandeur. Delusional ideation within the psychedelic state is to be expected; but when delusional ideations cross the boundary from dream-state into waking state, this is where the trouble begins. For instance, in the prologue to this text (Late Night Notes from the Alien Hybrid Messiah) I caught myself in the midst of a messianic delusion, a delusion so absurd in its complexity and thin in pretext that — upon sober reflection a short time later — was somewhat embarrassing and laughable. Of course, while having the delusion I was in a borderline conscious state, eyes closed in a darkened room, simply riffing off noise sparking through my own brain. Yet somehow, with no external input to speak of, I managed to convince myself that I was at the center of a massive cosmic conspiracy involving Christ, aliens, the secret government, etc. I can use this delusion to dredge facets of my own identity and perhaps learn a little about my own subconscious fears and desires, but the main point is that I quickly realized that it was all a passing delusion. When the drugs wore off the delusion did not persist. It did not stick. But the question remains: Instead of coming down, what if I had chosen to do more drugs? What if I actually convinced myself I was the messiah, and couldn't talk myself out of it even while I was sober? Where would I be now?

Well, for starters I would have persistent recurring delusions of grandeur, a messiah complex, and would need a steady supply of drugs to keep me in that delusional snap for as long as it took to deliver my prophecy and convince everyone else I was right. This is the trap many psychedelic explorers fall into: They convince themselves they are at the center of a grand cosmic conspiracy, and that the only way to resolve the crisis is to do more drugs, and to get other people to do more drugs to see how right they are. This was the logic that trapped Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Terence McKenna, and many other latter-day prophets like Zoe-7. Each one of these prophets of the psychedelic movement believed at one time or another that they were, in-fact, messiahs, but I say their messages (respectively) hold no water. Leary claimed that LSD would liberate minds and create a free society, and also believed he was a secret agent in a cosmic conspiracy of oppression and freedom. Although he had the secret order of chaos on his side, his visions ran into many real-world road-blocks and reality checks. John Lilly claimed high dose Ketamine trips in an isolation tank (or anywhere, all the time) would allow contact with ECCO, the disincarnate cosmic intelligence that communicates through synchronistic action. Lilly claims he was seeking answers and deeper truths, I claim all he came up with was gibberish and endless hours in the K-hole. Terence McKenna claimed high-dose mushroom and/or DMT trips would allow contact with aliens and discarnate entities that hold secrets about the nature of language and the universe, and could provide artifacts for mapping the end of the time in 2012 from ordered patterns in the i-ching. We are all waiting to see how 2012 comes and goes, but let's just say I'm not holding my breath here. Each one of these men carried their own messianic complexes, but beyond each of these persistent delusions was the intense need to proselytize and to tell the world about what they had discovered (drugs), and then styled themselves as pop gurus, latter-day messiahs, enlightened masters of chaos, and twentieth-century alchemical magi. Doesn't this sound just like the people with temporal lobe epilepsy who begin to hear voices and believe they are messiahs?

So how did this happen? How did the delusional trap suck them in?

The first thing to keep in mind is that persistent recurring delusions of grandeur (PRDoG) don't typically take hold after a single isolated psychedelic voyage. Though one might run up against some savory delusional, messianic, or paranoid ideation in a single trip, the content derived from a single psychedelic session is often easily forgotten, dismissed, or toyed with for a while before it simply fades away. The key patterns we are looking for when approaching persistent delusions of grandeur are 1) high dose ranges, 2) high frequency of use, 3) ingestion contexts which isolate the user from external stimulus, and 4) ingestion contexts that revolve around repetitive rituals, themes, or patterns. In the cases of Leary, Lilly, and McKenna, each seemed to follow the other's opinion that high-dose experimentation in complete sensory isolation was the way to go, all (or most) of the time, sometimes for extended periods of time, often the longer the better. Each one of these explorers claimed that they were receiving Gnostic telemetry from the psychic logos of the conscious universe (or something like that), just as prophets have mystical visions and receive supernatural wisdom from their Gods. Each of these men claimed to be rigorous thinkers, yet none of them ever stopped to consider (publicly at least) that they just might be swimming in their own BS. Each one of these psychedelic pioneers bought their own fabrications so completely — hook line and sinker — they were unable to step back and see reality in any other way. Is this because they were crazy? Did they drink too much of their own Kool-Aide? I would say the answer is yes, and that each of these men trapped themselves so thoroughly into their own delusions that there was no escaping once they were in. And the public rewarded and supported these delusions with book sales, speaking gigs, and the promise of exciting "consciousness-expanding" social movements based on their expert guidebooks and lots of high-dose psychedelic experimentation. Sounds like a win-win situation, yes? No? Maybe not?

Obviously Leary was never able to deliver on his promise of an evolved and liberated society based on the free use of LSD; Lilly was never able to discern anything from ECCO other than he needed to be doing more Ketamine in order to receive the next important transmission; and McKenna's archaic revival was hipster trend masquerading as a social movement, as devoid of meaning as the rave culture which embraced it, the DMT elves that populated their visions, and the literal nothing "Timewave Zero" that they swallowed as prophecy. I'm sorry to lay it all out like this, but like most other spiritual or political dogma, the psychedelic fairy tales offered up by these great men — upon closer inspection — bear little or no resemblance to the actual world we live in. I do not say this to "dis" them, I think they were very brave to attempt what they did: Leary being the radical, Lilly being the research wonk, McKenna being the throwback anthropologist and explorer of the arcane. Each one of these men was stepping into dangerous territory, unraveled in the entire history of the modern West. Each of these men was passionate about testing the limits of the human brain and grasping at the nature of God, the universe, and everything. I understand this. I grok this. But somewhere along each of their journeys the dogma got sticky, cast in stone, and they found themselves trapped in the very ideologies they were selling. They got pulled under, they bit off more than they could chew, they were surfing on the edge of something big, but that had no real answers, no exit strategy, no where to go. So what happened to them? They wiped out.

I think what everyone would like to know — what's missing here — is some kind of mechanistic explanation, or an analysis of the "trigger" which could turn your normal, recreational psychedelic experimentation into a trap as insidiously recursive and self-referential as persistently recurring messianic delusions of grandeur. And the culprit is, I assert to you, good old neural plasticity and brainwashing. According to the primary tenet of Hebbian neural plasticity, "Neurons that fire together wire together," which means that neurons which spend a lot of time processing the same information or remembering a lot of the same concepts at the same time, invariable begin to form hard-wired connections between themselves to solidify concepts and make "thinking" a more energy efficient task. Thus, delusions formed in a single psychedelic session are not necessarily hard-wired, and can fade in mere hours. But delusions which are solidified in successive, ritually-programmed trips can easily form lasting, hard-wired connections in long-term-memory. Couple neural plasticity with sensory isolation and the obsessive nature of psychedelic feedback in the excited cortex, and you have a model for a turbo-charged re-wiring of neural connectivity through extended psychedelic programming — otherwise known as brainwashing. Yes, brainwashing.

If you are following my discussion here, you will now realize what I am asserting is that Leary, Lilly, and McKenna all actually brainwashed (yes, brainwashed) themselves into believing their own flimsy delusions, thus convincing themselves they were onto something larger than rationality would normally allow. And not only did they spread their brain-eating delusions to the masses through the Eucharist of high-dose psychedelic drug experimentation, they sold the primary auto-brainwashing technique to the masses as well: sensory isolation.

Some might call auto-brainwashing "metaprogramming," and this is fine, but if you are metaprogramming yourself to believe a flimsy and preposterous fairy-tale without any hard evidence (other than your own drug-fueled visions) to back you up, this sounds a lot like brainwashing to me. Metaprogramming is a legitimate term for any hands-on rewiring of the neural structure, and auto-brainwashing is a good example of the "bad" or "reckless" kind of metaprogramming. In truth, psychedelics are perfect for all kinds of brainwashing, but particularly useful in the kind of brainwashing used in religion, which is generally based on the divine teachings of a single individual (or dogma) and the notion of "faith" (or the willingness to believe) that this dogma is the true word of God as passed through the prophet. Leary believed his message in a Darwinian behaviorist model: LSD + human nervous system = Enlightened Being, there was no room for error in his formula (unfortunately). Lilly cast his prophecy in the divine interpretation of random chaos, but his temple is full of relativist noise, no questions or answers there, just more babble retrieved from time spent (wasted) in the hole. And McKenna was a legitimate genius who became too enamored with his own imagination; a scholar genuinely steeped in lore, but stumped by his own inventiveness. McKenna was also unable to drop his madcap stage persona long enough to step back and admit he just might be spinning an elaborately detailed fantasy, the very same way Leary had done with LSD and Lilly with Ketamine. Weren't these people watching and listening to each other? Couldn't they see it coming for themselves?

I'm not saying that Timothy Leary was the first case of messianic psychedelic auto-brainwashing in history of mankind — their were no doubt others in our glorious entheogenic past — but he was definitely the first in Western culture to hit the media so hard with his prophetic (yet problematic) message. Leary was huge, and influenced ageneration (or two, or three) of psychedelic explorers in his wake. Leary's auto-brainwashing techniques were picked up by many, the MKULTRA crew and Charles Manson just to name a few, and were echoed for years by Terence McKenna in his own way. But the problem of auto-brainwashing is real, even if you are not intending to go that way (even more so, perhaps). I will mention that in addition to the neural plasticity aspect of psychedelic auto-brainwashing, I would not be surprised if repeated high-dose experimentation with psychedelics could lead to the kind of petit-mal seizures seen in temporal lobe epileptics, which means there might be a very real chance of brain damage in the temporal lobe that could lead to increased erratic functioning and messianic ideation over time. Again, I am talking about repeated, high dose experimentation over a period of days-to-weeks, not the casual trip here and there. And for those of you who would like to precisely pinpoint where this damage or temporal re-wiring might be the most extreme, I would say the first place to look would be in the entorhinal cortex, in the medial temporal lobe. From a 1999 doctoral dissertation on the area:

The human entorhinal cortex is located in the ventromedial portion of the temporal lobe and consists of eight subfields. It has reciprocal connections with the hippocampus and various other cortical and subcortical structures, and thus forms an integral component of the medial temporal lobe memory system.

The number of neurons of the entorhinal cortex is diminished in temporal lobe epilepsy (Du et al. 1993) and in Alzheimer's disease (Gomez Isla et al. 1996).

Epileptic seizures... of the temporal lobe, [produce] psychosensory events including taste, smell, fear, sexual pleasure sensations, and memory disturbances (Engel 1996).

In addition to the hippocampus proper, other medial temporal lobe structures are involved in TLE, such as the amygdala (Kälviäinen et al. 1997, Pitkänen et al. 1998) and the entorhinal cortex (Du et al. 1993). Cell loss is the most profound in layer III of the rostral entorhinal cortex (Du et al. 1993). In experimental studies of status epilepticus of rats, layer III of the medial portion of the entorhinal cortex is suggested to be the most vulnerable (Du et al. 1995a). Evidence is also beginning to point to the entorhinal cortex as one of the primary sites in which temporal lobe seizures propagate and reverberate (Spencer and Spencer 1994). Furthermore, the structural changes in the entorhinal cortex might propagate changes in the hippocampus.

Mikkonen, Mia. the human entorhinal cortex: Anatomic organization and its alteration in Alzheimer's disease and temporal lobe epilepsy. Series of Reports, No 50, Department of Neurology, University of Kuopio. 1999. 91 p. http://www.uku.fi/neuro/50the.htm

So, if we are to fully make the connection between psychedelics, brainwashing, delusions of grandeur, and temporal lobe epilepsy, the first place we would look is the entorhinal cortex and its close interconnectivity with the hippocampus and memory processing. The proper functioning of the entorhinal cortex is essential to accurate memory storage and recall, and damage to this area can lead to the formation of persistent delusions as well as the loss of accurate memory recall. Since the entorhinal cortex is so important in the task of parsing multi-modal sensory data into accurate memory storage, this would be the first place to ply the tenets of neural plasticity when trying to get someone (including yourself) to equate specific ideas or memories with pleasure or pain (as in behavioral hypnosis); alter internalized concepts of self in relation to others (as in psychotherapy, neurolinguistic programming, or metaprogramming); or to get them to believe things that are not true, or to create false ideas of themselves or reality based on false memories (as in brainwashing). What we are talking about here is a selective rewiring or deliberate destruction of areas of your memory cortex in the pursuit of a higher truth about the self. This is very bad territory to be walking into. The farther you go into the brainwashing process, the more you begin to believe your own delusions (formative delusions). The more impressed the delusions become in your memory, the longer they persist (explicit delusions). The longer they persist, the more you begin to filter everything else about reality around those delusions (integral delusions). Finally, the delusions become so intricate and complex that they color the context of everything you see or hear or remember about anything. Delusional intensity has now reached the immersive level. Brainwash complete. The delusions can take any form: the free market; Jesus; Allah, aliens; ECCO; the apocalypse; conspiracies; hate-filled ideologies; free-love ideologies; etc., but the basic brainwashing system is the same for all of them. Isolate them, hit the entorhinal cortex, hit it hard. Make them believe.

The pattern of high-dose/high-frequency use of any psychedelic or dissociative (with or without ritual dogma) is typically not good for the psyche and usually leads to a direct withdrawal from society and some hard falls into delusional territory. I speak both as one who has felt the lure of succumbing to the delusional trap, and as one who has met many who have fallen into same said trap themselves. And I can say with some confidence that stopping the drug use early-on in the process of an auto-brainwashing slide clearly allows messianic delusions to fade over time; but persistent use clearly causes the delusions to become more complex, intertwined, and solidified over time. Unfortunately I cannot tell you exactly where the "point of no return" mark is in repeated high-dose psychedelic experimentation. If I had sailed off that edge of the map this would be a totally different text altogether. But what I can tell you is this: tread very carefully when walking into alluring psychedelic waters, and always reality-check yourself on the comedown to make sure you haven't permanently dropped your rationality and stepped right over into the deep end. Because once you pass the point of no return, you are in it, full time, and are basically on your own. And from what I gather from the signposts: here there be monsters.

[liminalOyster]

Rhythm of breathing affects memory and fear
December 07, 2016 | By Marla Paul

CHICAGO — Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered for the first time that the rhythm of breathing creates electrical activity in the human brain that enhances emotional judgments and memory recall.

These effects on behavior depend critically on whether you inhale or exhale and whether you breathe through the nose or mouth.

In the study, individuals were able to identify a fearful face more quickly if they encountered the face when breathing in compared to breathing out. Individuals also were more likely to remember an object if they encountered it on the inhaled breath than the exhaled one. The effect disappeared if breathing was through the mouth.

“One of the major findings in this study is that there is a dramatic difference in brain activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during inhalation compared with exhalation,” said lead author Christina Zelano, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “When you breathe in, we discovered you are stimulating neurons in the olfactory cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, all across the limbic system.”

Northwestern scientists first discovered these differences in brain activity while studying seven patients with epilepsy who were scheduled for brain surgery. A week prior to surgery, a surgeon implanted electrodes into the patients’ brains in order to identify the origin of their seizures. This allowed scientists to acquire electro-physiological data directly from their brains. The recorded electrical signals showed brain activity fluctuated with breathing. The activity occurs in brain areas where emotions, memory and smells are processed.

Nose Mouth Time

This discovery led scientists to ask whether cognitive functions typically associated with these brain areas — in particular fear processing and memory — could also be affected by breathing.

The amygdala is strongly linked to emotional processing, in particular fear-related emotions. So scientists asked about 60 subjects to make rapid decisions on emotional expressions in the lab environment while recording their breathing. Presented with pictures of faces showing expressions of either fear or surprise, the subjects had to indicate, as quickly as they could, which emotion each face was expressing.

When faces were encountered during inhalation, subjects recognized them as fearful more quickly than when faces were encountered during exhalation. This was not true for faces expressing surprise. These effects diminished when subjects performed the same task while breathing through their mouths. Thus the effect was specific to fearful stimuli during nasal breathing only.

In an experiment aimed at assessing memory function — tied to the hippocampus — the same subjects were shown pictures of objects on a computer screen and told to remember them. Later, they were asked to recall those objects. Researchers found that recall was better if the images were encountered during inhalation.

The findings imply that rapid breathing may confer an advantage when someone is in a dangerous situation, Zelano said.

“If you are in a panic state, your breathing rhythm becomes faster,” Zelano said. “As a result you’ll spend proportionally more time inhaling than when in a calm state. Thus, our body’s innate response to fear with faster breathing could have a positive impact on brain function and result in faster response times to dangerous stimuli in the environment.”

Another potential insight of the research is on the basic mechanisms of meditation or focused breathing. “When you inhale, you are in a sense synchronizing brain oscillations across the limbic network,” Zelano noted.

Other Northwestern authors include Heidi Jiang, Guangyu Zhou, Nikita Arora, Dr. Stephan Schuele and Dr. Joshua Rosenow.

The study was supported by grants R00DC012803, R21DC012014 and R01DC013243 from the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health.

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2 ... -and-fear/

Entering A Psychedelic State — Without Psychedelics: Inside Holotropic Breathwork

“Now start to increase the speed of your breath. Breathing faster and deeper each time.” Dr. Stanislav Grof is instructing a room full of attendees who are about to embark on a three-hour journey using a powerful technique called holotropic breathwork. With his very calm and deliberate manner of speaking, Dr. Grof leads a brief relaxation exercise before signaling the onset of catalytic music that aids the immersive experience. The music starts playing over a powerful sound system — a loud and fast rhythm centered on drums and pulsing beats. For the next three hours, the ‘breathers’ will be utilizing the power of this technique in the hopes of reaching a profound and non-ordinary state of consciousness.

Holotropic breathwork saw its genesis in the mid-1970s. Grof developed the technique in collaboration with his now-late wife Christina, though his previous work with LSD provided a vital context for framing the technique in a therapeutic context. Part of this context included the name itself. Its roots are derived from the Greek words holos, meaning ‘whole’ or ‘wholeness,’ and trepein, meaning ‘to turn towards,’ thus holotropic, or ‘moving towards wholeness.’ At 83-years old, Grof continues to facilitate a handful of holotropic breathwork retreats and training programs every year around the world.

Grof defines the holotropic states as those that are beyond normal waking consciousness, having a mystical quality to them that can sometimes be reached through meditation and use of psychedelic drugs, and in some cases through spontaneous emergence. Grof argues that these states have inherent healing mechanisms, similar to a body’s immunological or histological response to physical distress. Setting an intention for healing and psychospiritual growth when accessing the holotropic states initiates a process of self-repair of the psyche, he explains.

In 1971, as psychedelic drugs became increasingly popular in the recreational sphere, the federal government began to crack down. This put a halt to research Grof was leading on psychedelics for the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. (He began volunteering for the first LSD experiments shortly after Albert Hofmann’s discovery of the compound.) However, he had learned enough about the relationship between the psyche and the healing power of non-ordinary states of consciousness that he was able to develop a non-drug technique to reach those states. The theory of consciousness he developed became a crucial addition to the field of Transpersonal Psychology, and by the late ’70s the early stages of what would later become a full-blown certification in “Grof Transpersonal Training” began with small structured holotropic breathing sessions, primarily among therapists.

“Holotropic breathwork is a simple, elegant technique that made it even clearer that the healing is within,” wrote Rick Doblin, executive director of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), in an email to Reset.

Doblin was one of the first graduates of the formal certification program, and even helped organize a training retreat for a group of international therapists in Austria. Doblin credits Grof with sustaining the foundation of the practice of psychospiritual growth and healing through non-ordinary states following the termination of clinical psychedelic psychotherapy programs.

“Holotropic breathwork was the connecting thread between prohibition and the psychedelic research renaissance,” Doblin said. “Stan and Christina’s work has been fundamental to training many of the current researchers investigating psychedelic psychotherapy, including the Principle Investigators of our [MAPS] South Carolina and Canadian MDMA-PTSD studies.”

Going Holotropic With Stan Grof

As the music starts, I wonder if this is really going to do anything. How can deep breathing cause a powerful LSD-like experience? I’m at a holotropic breathwork program called “The Journey of Self-Discovery: A Holotropic Breathwork Experience” at a yoga retreat center nestled in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. After reading about seemingly miraculous healing brought on by LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions in Grof’s book, LSD Psychotherapy, I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to attend. After Grof’s remarkably engaging introductory lecture followed by Q&As, 60-something attendees have split off into groups led by Grof-certified facilitators. Despite my skepticism, the music envelopes me almost instantly.

Grof’s guided relaxation, though brief, is enough to shift my focus inward and I rely on the breath as a vehicle. My personal meditation practice has taught me to remain aware of the breath for centering and becoming mindful of the present moment, but this is different. For one it’s much faster. I’m not used to breathing like this and after a couple of minutes I feel my body start to tingle. I keep breathing. Soon my whole body feels like it’s buzzing, a pleasant vibration that begins to distract me. The euphoria tempts me to take it further, but I slow my breathing, content with this physical sensation. The feeling begins to fade and I ask my guide to help me to my feet so I can use the restroom. My conscious state certainly feels non-ordinary; my gait is unsteady and though my vision seems fairly unaffected, my surroundings appear as if I have just woken up from a dream.

I return to the room and lie back down, immediately re-engaging with the music and immersing my body in deep, rhythmic breathing. As the tingling returns, I continue to breathe deeper and faster, and the feeling intensifies. I recall that the guides recommended I ‘listen’ to my body and that there may be times where I desire physical pressure. My body is buzzing more intensely than before and I feel my forearms begin to curl from hyperventilation. My breathing slows due to this distraction, but after a few moments when the buzzing calms and my forearms relax, I again intensify my breathing. I call for support from my guide and ask for pressure, but I seem to have hit a psychosomatic block that I am unable to break through.

My breathwork session may not be as overwhelmingly powerful and transformative as some of my peers; I observe them at times so immersed in their experiences that their bodies shake uncontrollably and they roll around on the ground, screaming violently and signaling for physical interventions from the guides and facilitators.
I choose not to force the breathing anymore and instead lie still, contented with relaxed breathing until I feel tired. I turn to my side and fall asleep. When I awake, the music has become more melodic and calm. I turn to my guide and exclaim, “I think I’m done.”

The holotropic breathwork experience is intuitive, like having a one-on-one conversation with the mind and body simultaneously. While a drug-induced experience or a spontaneous emergence of a non-ordinary state of consciousness can sometimes forcefully collide with unpleasant psychological content, using the breath as a vehicle of engaging these states offers a uniquely adjustable experience. As Doblin explained in his email, “Holotropic breathwork is a more controllable process, since you’re starting and stopping on your own.”

Any exploration into seldom-exposed aspects of the psyche can be challenging, even without chemically-aided catalysts.
Dublin continued, “The voluntary nature of it is courageous in ways different from taking a psychedelic drug since it requires more of a letting go than being overwhelmed. However, the same voluntary nature means that it’s sometimes difficult to overcome your own defenses and delusions.”
For people undergoing psychological crises or those seeking sustained growth and healing of deep unresolved issues, the adventure of self-discovery that comes with non-ordinary states of consciousness can be profoundly influential in shaping personal lives. Many integrate lessons learned in their inner-healing breathwork sessions to their professional roles.

“Breathwork has added a major dimension to my work as I go deeper in the psycho-spiritual realm,” writes a psychiatric nurse and Grof-certified holotropic breathwork facilitator who led one of the small groups during the weekend program I attended. “Breathwork goes beyond the process of complete letting go and giving up the feeling that I am in charge. It has taken me to an awareness of a greater consciousness that has changed my life, both personally and professionally. There is a deeper freedom that lets the spirit work beyond my usual comfort zone.”

http://reset.me/story/entering-psychede ... reathwork/

[American Dream]

I have no personal experience with the Holotropic Breathwork, though the above does make me think a lot of Prana Yoga, as a more modulated version of the same sort of thing. For whatever it is worth, one person I know became very negative about a therapy cult that used Grofian breath work and then ultimately exploited its members for all they were worth. There was something about a psychiatric hospitalization in there, and a group lawsuit. By the same token though, it seems as though a drug or other techniques of consciousness alteration could have served the same role for this cultish group. Another person I know was initially positive towards Holotropic Breath Work but is now fairly negative. In both cases there may be concerns that these techniques intensify pre-existing mental conditions, to push someone over the edge.

This kind of thing can happen for sure and is dangerous in a variety of ways, as for example someone I knew who was returning from some group ceremonies in the woods and dashed out of the van when it came to a stop sign in a small rural town. They ran into a church service in session and ran around the congregation screaming, "I'm a witch! I'm a witch!".

Anyway, here is something that explains a bit more about James Kent:

An Interview with James Kent

Jeremy Totes

The publisher of Trip Magazine talks candidly about psychedelics and life in the 'zine business.


So before we talk about the shutting down Trip, tell me how you got started publishing psychedelic magazines.

Wow, let's see. It was back in, must have been around 1993. It was a couple years after I had graduated with a degree in writing and had been working for a small travel magazine, flying around Asia, taking pictures and doing travel coverage, doing some editing and layout...

Sounds like a great job.

It was a blast. It would have been better if it actually paid the rent, but at least I got to travel and learn a little about the magazine business.

So how did that translate into psychedelic publishing?

I had discovered LSD and mushrooms in college and had done a fair bit of amateur exploration, but I was still completely mystified by what was going on and wanted to learn more. I was contacting a lot of people in the scene back then trying to figure out what kind of research was going on, and I ran into Ron Piper, the publisher of Psychedelic Illuminations, at a Seeds of Change conference in San Francisco where Terence was speaking. This was just days after I had first met Terence McKenna and conducted a four-hour interview with him. Terence was the first person in the scene I actually sought out to interview. Anyway, when I saw that Ron had put together a magazine I figured that if I offered my assistance I could get more access to those kinds of people, the people I was looking for. And since Ron needed the help I wound up producing the next four issues of PI and meeting a lot of people. The only problem was that the more I looked around for someone who could give me the answers I wanted, the more I realized that very few people knew what the hell they were talking about! (Laughs)

Really? Like who?

Oh you know, all the big names; Terence, Tim Leary, John Lilly, and just about everybody else I could think of to contact. I wanted to find someone who could just lay it out for me and say, "Okay, well here's what's going on in your brain when you're tripping. This is how it all works and this is why you see what you see." Everyone had a theory, but I wanted it spelled out in way that made sense to me and didn't go totally off into airy-fairy land. And no one could do it. Most people I talked to were admittedly groping around in the dark like everyone else, and the people who thought they knew what they were talking about had really just developed occult systems which kind of mapped out the territory, but didn't explain anything. And then there were the freaks, and I mean my God there were a lot of them. Weird shaman-wanna-be types and wide-eyed self-styled gurus enamored with their own mystical bullshit. And the mumbling burn-outs... It totally threw me. I was expecting to find a community of witty genius Huxley types out there. I thought, "My god? Is everyone in this scene totally clueless? Has no one figured this out yet?" (Laughs)

It couldn't have been that bad.

Maybe I jest a little, but to be fair this was ten, fifteen years ago. We were still coming out of the dark ages. Receptor affinities hadn't been mapped yet, brain science in general was just getting up to speed. Since that time I have met a lot of younger people who are actually doing the hard research in graduate school and getting the knowledge together. I mean, the best model I could find back then was the one proposed by Terence and Dennis McKenna in The Invisible Landscape, which kind of left me with more questions than it answered. It was something about the torsion from intercolated psychedelic molecules in the rungs of RNA creating a superconducting field that produced holographic emissions of genetic memory onto the pineal gland... something like that. Anyway it sounded far out, but it kind of had the ring of truth to it and I thought "Hey, these guys are onto something." In retrospect all of that seems a little far fetched, but that was back in the '70s and the brain in general was still kind of a mystery. And of course Dennis went on to co-found the Heffter Foundation and is still on the ball trying to sort out the wet stuff. Looking back it seems odd that Terence got all the attention with DMT elves and the Timewave and whatnot while Dennis has been quietly working away getting the actual research done. I mean, he's done more for the field in terms of figuring out how these things work than maybe anyone else I can think of. He and Dave Nichols are basically setting the tempo on scientific discovery and kicking it down for rest of us. It's astounding.

And of course there's Shulgin...

Oh no, don't get me wrong. There are many legitimate experts out there. Shulgin, Ott, all the guys who do the field and lab work to isolate and catalog the various plants and compounds...

Is there anyone else in the field you think is getting it right?

There are a lot of people in the scene who have done tremendous work. I mean, in terms of just defining what psychedelics are and how they fit into modern culture, Terence certainly contributed an enormous amount of analysis on this. I think Alex Grey has nailed the visual expression of what I consider to be the most profound aspects of the psychedelic experience. I mean, how much better can it get than that? One Grey painting is worth all the books I've ever read when trying to explain to non-users what the whole point of the experience is. And then there are people like Stan Grof and Charlie Grob who are totally trailblazing the models for therapy and clinical use in a modern society, and that task is... totally insane. I mean the balls on these guys; talk about walking on eggshells. Karl Jansen and Rick Strassman have done some good work sorting out Ketamine and DMT respectively, and of course people like Rick Doblin who organize and create the context for legitimate research in delicate times. It's a lot of people getting at it from all angles, getting into all the details. But I wanted the big picture, right, I wanted to know it all, so I basically had to weed through all the stuff these people were spitting out, get myself up to speed on psychopharmacology and other bits of neuroscience with my own research. That, and, you know, dropping, snorting and smoking whatever I could get my hands on. (laughs)

An essential part of any psychedelic research!

Absolutely! I mean, you have to understand the effects first-hand. I admit to using psychedelics recreationally because they're fun as hell, but my experimentation was always done with a very removed third-person analysis of what was going on in my head. I very rarely lost that meta-analytical part me, even in the most hardcore psychedelic trips. I mean, all kinds of crazy shit could be going on -- portals to other dimensions opening up, reflective ooze bubbling up from the floor, whatever -- and no matter how panicked or overwhelmed I would get there was always this calm, logical place in the back of my mind, a very dry and cynical part of me that would be like, "Oh, now I'm being eaten alive by plasma wasps. How odd. That was unexpected..."

Plasma wasps?

Yeah, you know, or whatever. Being taken by the alien mothership, turning into a pool of liquid and seeping through the cracks in the floor, phasing out of reality and winding up in a frog's body. Stuff like that. I mean it's all very heady and riveting stuff when you're right in it, and yet a part of me would always hold back from embracing it all, would always be saying, "Now what's really going on here? How am I seeing and feeling all of this?" Though I do have to admit to losing myself a couple times, not being able to remember who I was or what I was doing or what anything was, just kind of being scattered to the wind with no concept of anything but vast timelessness. In those situations even the cynical part of me is gone, language is gone. The universe is just churning and exploding in all directions and there's no words for any of it. The magnitude of the moment overwhelms everything else. When it gets like that there's really nothing to do but hunker down and wait it out. I always knew I would come back eventually, a part of me could still say, "Just keep breathing, heart keep beating, the linear progression of time and space will resume momentarily..." (Laughs) But I never had one of those "Oh God, I'm going to be like this forever!" moments, though I've been with people who have.

http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=jk

[dada]

I've noticed that through developing my concentration, attention, and awareness, "ordinary consciousness" has many of the qualities of the "non-ordinary" states, with the added benefit of clear-minded control, and solid grounding in the everyday world. There's no need to separate the rational and irrational, or to switch between the states, they can both function at the highest levels simultaneously.

Maybe it's just me. But I've been to many mind-spaces, and none of them can hold a candle to my ordinary state of conscious perception. Insights, inner travel, weirdness, is all there. Creativity is better. Any "altered state" would be a step down from where I am currently.

Concentration, attention, awareness. It depends what you're looking for, I guess. If you want a special place with melting color patterns, this wouldn't be it. I think that's what a lot of people are looking for. To watch a cool movie.

Others are looking for healing and integration, I get it. Physician, heal thyself. I don't know what else to tell you. Everyone will find it in their own way. If you really want to be integrated, you will. For me it was thinking and writing. I thought my way out to healing and integration. No fancy systems or techniques required.

The vision quest has such a romantic aura to it. Take a drug, or do the hyperventilation thing. So what. Why is it so strange to think that the same states can be reached by breathing normally and paying close attention to what's going on inside and out?

It reminds me of a friend of mine, a hardcore TM meditation guy. He sits in zazen for hours a day, been doing it for years. I prefer to move while meditating. But I can sit still with him, it's fun. He can't do it my way, though.

I liked Dr. Grof's writing, though. The idea of constellations of experience, or condensed experiential systems or whatever it is, was useful for me. I've gotten something useful from all those guys, except McKenna. Not familiar with his stuff, never bothered. Dr. Lilly has some good books, and Tim has some fun writing. But why elevate them to 'pantheon of psychedelic guru-gods' status. They're just people. I think the mystification is stupid, to put it simply.

It's like Ram Das. It isn't fashionable to call him Ram Das anymore, is it? Anyway, it's like Ram Das. At the end, he'd give talks, people would come to listen because he's a psychedelic rock star. He'd talk slowly about death, and helping sick and old people. Didn't have much to say. I'm sure it was disappointing for many. You say, "hey, I'm going to see Ram Das give a talk," sounds pretty exciting. The reality is reality. Sitting on folding chairs in a roomful of broken, alone and uncomfortable strangers just like you, listening to a guy mumble about sickness, death and being kind. (I liked Ram Das)

Or how about, "hey, I'm going to St. John Divine Church to listen to Ralph Metzner give a talk!" Sounds sweet. He plays a hurdy-gurdy, talks about Fenrir wolf and the Norse apocalypse. Even that sounds sweet. The reality is, sitting in a roomful of broken, alone and uncomfortable strangers just like you, listening to Ralph mumble over a drone. At least the church is a nice setting. (I like Ralph, too.)

Anyway, concentration, attention, awareness. And demystify, demystify, demystify.

[Perelandra]

Thank you very much, liminalO and dada.

[American Dream]

What's good for the goose is good for the fairies, elves and aliens too:

Moving Beyond God

by James Kent

Special Excerpt: Psychedelic Information Theory

When discussing entheogens and the role of psychedelics in religion, it is often said that the highest or most desirable aspect of the entheogenic voyage is becoming one with God. This union may be literal or it may be figurative; it may happen via channeling the voice of God; by awakening the presence of god within; via merging into the one-light of the universal mind; or sometimes you actually get to have an audience with the almighty himself, a good old-fashioned face to face chat.

Some people experience God on every single psychedelic trip, some people never have this experience. Some people experience God once and then are never able to repeat the experience no matter what variety of drug combinations and doses they try. Some people try many trips and get nothing, but then one day when they least expect it they finally tap into the Godhead and "get it". For people who use the term "entheogen" as opposed to "psychedelic", the concept of "awakening the godliness within" is placed as primary over all other aspects of psychedelic use.

The exact nature of the Godhead state has been debated for at least a couple thousand years now, but to me it seems to be a highly active, highly focused, highly attentive state with resonant EEG coherence spikes in the high beta and gamma ranges. As opposed to the transient high-speed "pulse" and "attention" consciousness that we typically experience via our multi-threaded parallel neural sense-processing network (brain), the high synaptic activity and rate of recurrent feedback stimuli facilitated by psychedelic excitation creates something more like the idealized solid-state "field consciousness" we would expect to see when talking about spiritual awakening, expanded consciousness, enlightenment, Godhead, and the like. But that is just my opinion.

To be clear, this Godhead state is very different from Zen states of deep meditation or the highly-tuned physical "flow" states where mind and body become one. While Zen and flow states are clearly representative of classic mystical experiences, my own personal description of the Godhead state is synthesized from years of experimentation and research with psychedelic drugs and mystical technique, but I consider this description to be fairly accurate and extremely reproducible under everyday circumstances, so I'm sure forward-looking research will bear me out or correct me on this description in short order. But whatever the most accurate description of the Godhead state might be, it is still one of the most fascinating mysteries of the mind, and arguably one of the most important influences on Human culture to this day. And to be clear here, everyone in some way or another desperately wants to "get it", even though they might not really understand what "it" is.

Over the course of my psychedelic experimentation I have been lucky enough to "get it" more than a few times, and each time I "got it" it left me wanting more. You see, the funny thing about becoming one with the mind of God is that it is really awesome, so awesome you want to do it again and again and again. And since I had armed myself with a head full of knowledge and a handful of powders, pills, plants, and potions, when I came knocking on heaven's door God was always home, and we would chat. Oh how we would chat.

Although I didn't get to visit very often I really enjoyed the time I spent with God. God would show me secrets about the universe; let me see how the little things worked; he'd tell me things about myself I didn't know; scold me for being selfish; praise me for being kind and noble. God would also relentlessly hit on me, often taking the form of nubile young females and other objects of desire just to get some traction off my action. Looking back over the history books I have discovered that this is actually one of God's favorite tricks, though you don't hear about it much anymore.

Yes, those were good times, very good times, but one day something interesting happened. I was having my usual visit with God -- sitting on his throne, basking in his infinite wisdom, running my fingers through the sands of time -- when I suddenly wondered what there was beyond God. The thought had seriously never occurred to me, even though I had studied philosophy and ontology and epistemology and metaphysics and all the other schools of thought that proclaim there is always another beyond beyond beyond.

So I got up off God's throne and walked beyond, beyond God, beyond the tower of infinite wisdom, beyond the gates of omniscience, and out into what lie beyond. And as I passed through the boundaries of God's kingdom I turned back to see something odd. When viewed from a distance of beyond I could see that God's eternal palace was nothing more than a two-dimensional set fabricated of plywood and chicken wire; and God himself nothing more than a mute statue upon a rickety throne. God, heaven, the eternal kingdom... the whole thing was obviously a set-up, a sham perpetrated by someone obviously far more powerful and imaginative than God. But who could that be?

I walked away from the holy ghost out into the darkness, wondering what could possibly be out there beyond God. If God was just a creation, then who had created God? And as I asked myself this question I came upon a window hanging in space; but it was not a window, it was a mirror. And as I looked into the mirror and pondered the notion of who could possibly be more powerful than God, I found myself staring back at myself, ad infinitum.

And then I woke up.

After all God had taught me, after all he had given me, he decided to teach me one more lesson. He taught me that he was only an illusion, fabricated by me for myself. He was an amalgam of everything I had ever been taught about God, but tailored just to my liking. He always had me all figured out and always had just the information I needed. He was the idealized version of me; the elder me; the me who was wise and had all the answers; the me who felt no physical or temporal limitations holding me back. He was the essential me, the eternal me.

And so that's how I discovered that I am God, just as you are God, just as we all create our own personal God in our own image. And many of us simply take for granted that God is a higher power, yet the whole time the trick has been on us. We are the higher power, and when we are praying to God we are really praying to ourselves, praying to the God within. For as a wise person once said, that is where all true change comes from.

http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=978

[American Dream]

TIDS is not confined to a drug based problematic but, that said, I really am liking the way James Kent breaks down the complexities of the entheogenic experience:

While anxiety produced by psychedelics may sometimes be in response to legitimate threats, more often than not tripping people become anxious and paranoid over things that are relatively minor if not completely fabricated. For example, I once went hiking while on a mild dose of LSD, and along the way somewhere I got a splinter in my palm. It was not a big splinter, but it was long and in under the skin in the middle of my palm. It hurt, and I could not get it out without tweezers or a small knife, neither of which I had. Although I could rationally tell myself that a small splinter would not kill me, and that I would be fine for half a day with a splinter in my palm, I could not help worrying about my hand all day long. I obsessively checked and re-checked the amount of redness and swelling around the splinter to see if it was getting infected. It also looked like it was right next to a large blood vessel under my skin, and I kept thinking that I needed to rush home to pull it out before bacteria got into my bloodstream, because if bacteria got into my bloodstream it could get into my heart, and if my heart got infected with bacteria I’d be dead. This was my reasoning. In reality the splinter was a minor nuisance, and normally I would have dismissed it, but in this instance it bothered me all day simply because it was a small nagging problem that could not be immediately resolved. Thus, the anxiety would not leave me alone.

As I hiked and tried to enjoy the day, I would find myself getting very worried and again obsessing over how to get that splinter out, and then I would finally convince myself that it was no big deal, and that I could safely leave it alone until I made it back home at the end of the day. But even though I could rationally convince myself that I was safe, the obsessive anxiety would recur every few minutes, and I would have to go back through the exact same mental rationalization over and over to keep my looming anxiety from spiraling out of control. I was literally stuck in a loop that started in pain and anxiety and exited into a maze of logical rationalizations, including the exact location of my tweezers in a drawer back home, so that I might bound into the house when I finally got home and instantly pluck the splinter from my reddening palm without a moment’s hesitation. This entire scenario repeated and fed back on itself in entirety (from pain in my hand to me visualizing myself bounding through the door of my house to grab the tweezers) every few minutes, over and over again, most of the day. There was the short-term pain biofeedback driving the anxiety spiral, but there was also long-term potentiation, repetition, and recursion of the same exact emotional and rational reactions echoing and growing stronger throughout the day.

The problem was that I simply could not forget the splinter. My excited amygdala continued to perceive this tiny laceration as a dire threat, even though I had rationally convinced myself otherwise. And the momentary paradox between feeling legitimate panic while simultaneously thinking that I might be overreacting is a very confusing place to be, especially when my cortex was chemically altered and having trouble staying focused on what was real and what was imaginary. This is almost the very definition of insanity itself, because it felt like at any moment the panic would take over and I would have to rush back to the car and drive home high on LSD just to remove a splinter from my hand. Although the problem was small, the enormity of how to deal with it almost overwhelmed me. Even though I was able to enjoy the rest of the day, drive home that evening, and finally pluck the bothersome splinter from my hand with little thought or consequence, it took a great deal of effort for me to keep that anxiety at bay for an entire day, particularly during the onset and early peak of the trip when everything seems heightened and strange to begin with.

The funny thing about the example with the splinter is that I have been in actual life-threatening situations under the influence of psychedelics, and the panic I felt was nowhere near as great as the panic I have felt on the few paranoid “freak outs” that I’ve experienced. Oddly, it seems that the more abstract, invisible, or unverifiable the perceived threat is, the more prone one is to slip into an anxiety spiral. For instance; in the case of my splinter I was more concerned about bacteria and infection than I was about the pain. I couldn’t see the bacteria, but I knew they were there and would infect my hand if I didn’t get the splinter out. In contrast, I once cut my shin open very badly while rock climbing on a mild dose of mushrooms, and even though the laceration was very long and I could actually see the bone through the thin layer of skin, I did not panic. I was not seriously bleeding and I knew the wound could be easily sewn up at a hospital, and that all I had to do was stop the bleeding and wait a few hours until I could find someplace to get it stitched up. The graveness of my injury immediately grounded me in the reality of my situation, and brought me instantly back to sobriety, or near sobriety. Also, I had antibacterial ointment with me in the car that day, and was able to clean and treat the wound before bandaging it with a ripped t-shirt. Since I could control the bleeding and infection, I could relax and wait until the group I was with was sober enough to drive back to town and find an emergency room. In this situation, I was prepared enough to actively deal with the threat, making it easier to keep myself calm. Also, I knew that if I freaked out, the people I was with would start freaking out, and that would get us nowhere good. Because the situation was so real, panic was simply not an option.

In contrast to both of these situations, I once had a significant paranoid freak-out on LSD when I literally thought that the rock music coming from my stereo was laced with subliminal suicide messages. Now I know full well that hearing “masked messages” in otherwise innocuous media was a classic symptom of delusional psychosis, but I was sure I was hearing something real going on. The closer I listened to the music, the less literal and more subliminal it became, until all I could hear were disjointed and re-arranged snippets of music parsed back together with a totally distorted meaning, one that actively promoted nihilism and teen suicide. In retrospect I see how crazy it sounds, but I was picking up on the generic nihilistic rock-n-roll vibe and conflating it with the ‘70s rumors of Led Zeppelin using backwards-masking to place satanic messages in “Stairway to Heaven” and other hits. A whole paranoid scenario erupted in my brain: Record executives were making deals with Satan for fame and fortune in exchange for the souls of the innocent teens who buy the message. The details of this dastardly plot were just unfolding in my brain as I happened to look out the window and see a paramedic van circling the block, slowly. Why? Were they after me already? The paramedic van came around the block a second time, and I began to feel real panic. Because I had uncovered their plot they were somehow after me now, and were going to whisk me away to the loony-bin before I could tell anyone what I had discovered. Even speaking the details of such a crazy plot was an insidious trap guaranteed to get me sent to the nut-house. They had thought of everything, even how to deal with people who might expose them! What to do now?

Of course, the devious “They” of my paranoid fantasies were an invisible threat, they existed more in the machinations of my own mind then as an actual group of human beings in the real world. It is true that the music industry profits from selling nihilistic messages to the youth of America, and that some bands mask satanic messages in their music as a gimmick, but those two facts alone are not evidence of an industry-wide teen-suicide pact with Satan. However, the moment I began hearing “something strange” in the music under the influence of LSD, I connected all of these conspiratorial notions in my head and began to hear the satanic messages in the music for myself, and could see all the satanic, nihilistic, destructive, and suicidal imagery promoted alongside the music. I saw the rock music trend not as an artistic commentary on culture, but as a very real conspiracy to fuel Satan’s army of subservient souls with a very crafty marketing campaign. I thought I had blown the lid on something big, and by listening to the CD and parsing out the satanic messages I also had the proof. But when that paramedic van cruised down my street, the fear I felt was real. The scary end-result of every paranoid fantasy suddenly hit home. What if I was right? Who would believe me? Would they try to whack me? Who could I even tell without sounding completely nuts? The media was probably in on it. I was alone in my discovery, and the fact that I could not trust vocalizing my paranoid feelings — especially over the phone (they might be listening) — without seeming absolutely crazy was a trap itself. It locked me in the fear with no escape…

Best to get in bed and hide under the covers until it all goes away.

I got out of this particular paranoid trip like most people tripping people do: I was talked down by my very patient girlfriend who had rushed home from work because I sounded “freaked out” when I called her and told her I had something very important to tell her in person, and I couldn’t tell her over the phone, and that it couldn’t wait because it was very dangerous and people might be listening in on me already (Does that sound freaked out to you?). I bring this up because it is the classic paranoid delusion come to life. I constructed a grandiose scenario in my head based on real-world events but with no real evidence to back up the imaginary conjecture, other than hallucinatory ones. Even though I knew I was tripping and that I was probably making it all up, the nihilistic feeling coming through the music and the “masked” suicidal lyrics I was hearing made me doubt my own rationale, and the paranoid conspiracy became real to me at that moment because it felt real. I felt real fear.

On this particular trip I made the mistake of being alone and on too high a dose, so when I flipped I really flipped, and I had no ground to come back to. I panicked over a fabrication of my mind, because the fabrication could not be rationally dealt with; the depth of the conspiracy could be endless as long as it remained an invisible “Them” that I could not confront. Compared to the real-life danger of a 4-inch bone-deep laceration in my shin, the vaguely defined “Them” of the paranoid fantasy is much harder to cope with because “They” are invisible and out of your control, like the bacteria I feared under the splinter in my palm while hiking through the woods.

In the above examples the source of the anxiety is clear -- a splinter in the palm, or some menacing sounding rock music -- but anything can set off a psychedelic anxiety spiral. In group psychedelic trips anxiety is often generated by friction or communication errors between members. A common symptom of paranoia is to feel like everyone is watching you, scrutinizing you, judging you, or laughing at you behind your back. In a psychedelically charged social situation, any stray laugh, awkward glance, gesture, or innocent comment can be totally misinterpreted, misconstrued, and blown way out of proportion, and these social frictions typically get worse the longer they go unspoken. Letting the anxiety and paranoia fester under the surface is usually what causes communication errors to get distorted into full-blown freak-outs, and under the influence of psychedelics the mind can concoct the most elaborate paranoid conspiracy theories in a matter of seconds. Being able to get a rational grip on your emotions and then express them in words can become equally frustrating, thus communication “misfires” and unspoken feelings are a very real problem in group psychedelic sessions.

Traditionally, it would be the shaman’s job to recognize such group tensions and attempt to dissolve the friction or anxiety by getting everyone on the same wavelength, but for modern amateurs a great deal of angst-filled interpersonal freak-outs and psycho-trauma must be dealt with on the fly. This is precisely why groups that trip together often must quickly drop conventional social insecurities and build more secure bonds of trust and acceptance, often conceived of in the tribal or family paradigm. But beyond having a safe group environment in which to experiment, the key to dealing with the paranoia spiral is to first realize that this specific trap exists, and then devise a method or methods – in advance – to snap yourself out of it.

In an earlier section on “The Psychedelic Rules,” I talked a little bit about having a “grounding object” that you can return to when the psychedelic trip becomes too intense or begins to spiral out of control. Not all grounding strategies work: A friend once told me he made a recording of himself trying to talk himself down from a bad trip, but once he started tripping hard and needed the tape, he found it be full of useless garbage made by some idiot who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I have found from experience that the simpler the grounding object the better, something like a pleasant landscape photo, a rock, a bird’s feather, a sea shell, etc. Keep it mundane, natural objects are always good, and be sure not to choose anything with overtly occult or mythic symbols as those can often have the opposite of a grounding effect.

On the day of my hike in the woods, my grounding object was my wristwatch, and I knew exactly where the hands would be when I would be sober again, able to safely drive home and remove the deadly splinter from my palm. Being able to remember that the trip was temporary and that I had a timeline laid out in advance kept me from slipping into panic during my hike. Even in the peak of the trip, when I was out in the wilderness with nothing to keep me tethered to civilization or reality, I could always look at my watch and remember that there was a structured universe somewhere that I would return to, probably in time for dinner. Even if I couldn’t tell what time it was, I understood that everything would be back to normal later, and that I should just try to relax and enjoy myself while the universe unraveled into tiny singing trails of colored light. The watch forced me to be patient and keep myself occupied for the rest of the day, and when the trip was winding down the hands on my clock were exactly where they were supposed to be, and that made me feel much better about the whole splinter situation.

One final note about anxiety and paranoia spirals is that they are often dose dependent, and the higher the dose the more likely one is to feel dysphoria, anxiety, paranoia, etc. (Hobson). This does not mean that low doses are immune from such traps, just that it is much easier to snap out of them at lower doses. When “the fear” grasps onto you in higher dose sessions, the only thing to do is ride it out calmly in a safe place. Sit still, don’t talk or think, just breathe. The longer you sit still with nothing bad happening to you, the more you will realize that you are not in any immediate danger. There is a school of psychedelic thought that believes that sitting completely motionless and bringing the body to complete stillness is the way to get the best aspects of the psychedelic experience; the sensations of opening to the visionary self, raising consciousness, nurturing mindfulness, etc. There is a lot of truth to this, and it is very hard to feel anxiety while you are sitting quietly and meditating, even on psychedelics. Of course, quieting the body will almost always make the psychedelic trip itself stronger, and if your source of anxiety is that you want the trip to end (which is a common source of anxiety for newcomers), submitting entirely is not always the best solution. As always, people unfamiliar with the experience should have a sober sitter the first time they try a significant dose, or at least a close friend on speed-dial who they can count on to talk them down when things get hairy. This advice can hopefully prevent a lot of unnecessary freak-outs and unfortunate calls to 911.

http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=pit24

[liminalOyster]

I need to read more of Kent, I now realize. But he is a bit too committed to solipsism for me, not entirely unlike a psychedelic Hofdstater.

I tend to think of psychedelic experience as native to the domain of energy anatomy/psychology and his ideas, on being translated into more interpersonal forms of paranoia, anxiety and mutant perception, start to seem kind of unidirectional. How would he account for projective identification in which the perceiver is being shaped or influenced by external forces or agents? Maybe not a great example but my point is that Kent seems like part of the current of psychological/psychoanalytic thought that diverges from Janet and Jung et al, de-emphasizing the socius and the mimetic basis of experience and far too credulous about the fundamental existence of a bounded self.

BTW, personally, when I have experienced the godhead, I've often been left utterly shell-shocked, a bit pious, and most definitely not wanting more anytime soon.

[American Dream]

I never paid that much attention to James Kent till very recently- reading his older writings told me much more about his background and experience than I had known, which was enlightening in it's own way. A lot of it boils down to how we deal with psychic experience that seems over the top in one way or another. Kent tried to fuse his psychedelic experience with neuroscience and other objectivist elements not because he was incapable of ego melting/far out experience but rather because he had taken such experiences to a very disorienting, frightening, destabilizing level.

I know that one response is to say that he should have embraced the "madness" and taken it further but I will assume that he had very good reasons for taking another tack, that there really were problems. This I think gets at a key TIDS problem: when one has taken it to the limit of what is bearable- and suffered the consequences- what then? Retreat into normalcy? Find a safer means of getting further along? Redefine the game? Leap into the Abyss no matter what the consequences?

I feel personally that psychedelic substances and cultish guru type groups have shown their strengths but also their limitations. Further clues may be found in pop culture but here are no easy answers.

[liminalOyster]

I'm very interested in the plant/human interaction involved with Iboga, Psilocybin, Ergot and Ayahuasca. Kent's emphasis on the bounds of psychic/psychological experience at least hints at treating plants (and plant spirits) as dead matter, more or less. Clearly there is a wicked projective exuberance about the psychedelic renaissance, and his cautionary admonitions are useful. But I think there may be other paths too.

I liked your comment the other day about the maybe-wisdom in seeking a local plastic shaman. But, OTOH, I would begin to frame the more familiar plastic shaman as the prime mover in a *new* shamanism native to the Euro/West. Can we for instance, imagine/create/develop a shamanism or sorcery to contended with consumer animism and late Capitalism commodity fetishism?

It strikes me that the same sort of cognitive dissonance that so much of RI has always dealt with might be dealt with shamanically - as a traversal between different kinds of knowing and their correlate realities. As politics and its correlate psychodrama plays such a central role in our time/space, this shamanism must necessarily be political, I suspect. Hence my wariness about how Kent seems to reify "society."

So, in a historical sense, I am all for Kent and others' cautions but I think I ally them more with, for instance, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Which is a book all about how Ego uses "spiritual" progress paradoxically, to further strengthen itself. This message was a paradigm changer during the overly credulous 60s/70s but I'm not sure it's the same message we need today.

[American Dream]

I'm familiar with Cutting through Spiritual Materialism- which remains relevant to this day- and I do think you can make a strong case that these substances ended up supporting egoic agenda for Kent (as many of us). From what I understand of his milieu, he was right in the middle of Shulgin's extended family and so likely had access to all the novel compounds as well as botanicals, hybrids, and whatever else. Where in that does plant spirit medicine begin and end?

I think also Kent's experiences generally raise questions of anti-Psychiatry vs. Therapy and Recovery cultures, which is a complicated area. I know folks who had peripheral contact with the fusion area that is "Psychedelic Therapy" and not only do they personally not want to go there, due to pre-existing mental vulnerabilities, they also report some abuses of the process.

[liminalOyster]

I'm familiar with Cutting through Spiritual Materialism- which remains relevant to this day-

That's one of the wisest and most responsive-to-the-needs-of-its-time books I have ever read. Yet I wonder if its as relevant to the full spectrum dominance of "mindfulness" we are now experiencing in which some sort of very rudimentary attention to time, breath, etc. is being promoted mostly as a functional corrective to the epidemic of dangerously elevated stress levels characteristic of our time/space. Meditation now seems to show up more as a tool than anything else and in this new culture of mindfulness, enlightenment-seeking seems to be only at the far fringes. If anything, most mainstream secular presentations of mindfulness comfort new adherents/practitioners that meditation isn't at all "far out." This makes me question the basic hypothesis of TIDS - aren't we seeing the advent of something more banal and even more insidious? The use of meditation/mindfulness/(probably psychedelics too) to create a better-adapted late Capitalist subject who not only "returns" to society but loves that society as well?

Zizek's take on Buddhism is embarassingly ignorant in its misunderstanding of dharma itself, but I am beginning to think he may be hinting at a diagnosis of secular-mindfulness-induced-cognitive-dissonance syndrome. (SMICD)

[American Dream]

I agree with you about the critique of institutional "Mindfulness" but how to reconcile that with say the radical praxis of Dzogchen meditation? There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground. Also, if and when Mindfulness may help people limit harmful behaviors, combat anxiety and depression etc., I'm (cautiously) supportive.

One of the more problematic features of westernized pop cultures is the "Enlightenment Now" thread. In some places and times only certain people became committed monks or shamans. Their neighbors may have snorted some yopo, meditated daily, or whatever else but it was not on them to break through the veil so fiercely, totally and immediately. Others may have saved such tasks for later in life, which has its own logic and wisdom.

So, if our contemporary enlightenment practices grew in the shadow of Colonialism and Imperialism- even from CIA renegades and like- and all within a rubric of Capitalism/Power which inexorably shapes all it touches, it's hard to find a solid path, I think. Still, I've got to keep trying, just stepping very carefully..

I'm familiar with Cutting through Spiritual Materialism- which remains relevant to this day-

That's one of the wisest and most responsive-to-the-needs-of-its-time books I have ever read. Yet I wonder if its as relevant to the full spectrum dominance of "mindfulness" we are now experiencing in which some sort of very rudimentary attention to time, breath, etc. is being promoted mostly as a functional corrective to the epidemic of dangerously elevated stress levels characteristic of our time/space. Meditation now seems to show up more as a tool than anything else and in this new culture of mindfulness, enlightenment-seeking seems to be only at the far fringes. If anything, most mainstream secular presentations of mindfulness comfort new adherents/practitioners that meditation isn't at all "far out." This makes me question the basic hypothesis of TIDS - aren't we seeing the advent of something more banal and even more insidious? The use of meditation/mindfulness/(probably psychedelics too) to create a better-adapted late Capitalist subject who not only "returns" to society but loves that society as well?

Zizek's take on Buddhism is embarassingly ignorant in its misunderstanding of dharma itself, but I am beginning to think he may be hinting at a diagnosis of secular-mindfulness-induced-cognitive-dissonance syndrome. (SMICD)

[liminalOyster]

I agree with you about the critique of institutional "Mindfulness" but how to reconcile that with say the radical praxis of Dzogchen meditation? There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground. Also, if and when Mindfulness may help people limit harmful behaviors, combat anxiety and depression etc., I'm (cautiously) supportive.

I'm admittedly almost fully supportive of mindfulness practices - they stand to help suffering people too much to pass much judgment on. But I'm quite wary of their secularization wherein I think a lot of trouble can arise and wherein they seem to grow rather mutated from historical roots and various built-in cultural protections. Reminds me also of someone like Malidoma Some's take on mental illness in non-shamanic cultures.

One of the more problematic features of westernized pop cultures is the "Enlightenment Now" thread. In some places and times only certain people became committed monks or shamans. Their neighbors may have snorted some yopo, meditated daily, or whatever else but it was not on them to break through the veil so fiercely, totally and immediately. Others may have saved such tasks for later in life, which has its own logic and wisdom.

Agreed. I remember a piece - would have to search to post here - from Dharma Geeks a few years ago in which the author strongly cautioned against the dangers of secular meditation wherein people approached it for stress relief but ended up with full on Kundalini rising crises that affected them for months.

So, if our contemporary enlightenment practices grew in the shadow of Colonialism and Imperialism- even from CIA renegades and like- and all within a rubric of Capitalism/Power which inexorably shapes all it touches, it's hard to find a solid path, I think. Still, I've got to keep trying, just stepping very carefully.

I sort of agree but OTOH, I'm not sure if my critical interest in those histories has necessarily impacted my own path or practices (admittedly currently inactive.) It's a good question .

[American Dream]

I'm not sure exactly what to do with it, but if emerging spiritual practices have been shaped by cultism, profiteering, and/or institutional power, it serves to know this, to me. That way, I can step more carefully.