Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 19, 2013 2:17 am

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 19, 2013 3:33 pm

http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10 ... -1986.html

Corporate America, Mind Control and New Age Cult Groups
(NY Times 1986)


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Jack Rafferty (L) and Werner Erhart (aka "Jack" Rosenberg) - Erhart Seminars Training (est)

Representatives of some of the nation's largest corporations, including I.B.M., A.T.&T., and General Motors, met in New Mexico in July to discuss how meta-physics, the occult, and Hindu mysticism might help executives compete in the world marketplace.

Here in San Francisco, a politically conservative research center foresees an eventual alliance of conservatives, leftists of the 1960's, and Americans with interests ranging from eastern mysticism and the occult to holistic medicine.

And this November, ABC-TV plans a five-hour miniseries, based on an auto-biography by the actress Shirley McLaine that delves deeply and seriously into reincarnation and the supernatural. These are strands in a thread of alternative thought that scholars say is working its way increasingly into the nation's cultural, religious, social, economic, and political life.

On one level, they say, it is evidenced by a surge in interest in new meta- physical religions, mediums, the occult, reincarnation, psychic healing, satanism, "spirit guides," and other aspects of supernatural belief.

At another level, the scholars site the spreading influence of psychological self-help and "human potential groups" that operate under names such as The Forum, Insight, Actualizations, Silva Mind Control, and Lifespring. These groups' programs for corporate employees attract millions of dollars a year.

Borrowing some spiritual concepts from asian religions, the programs try to transform clients' thought processes and make them better, more creative people.

On both levels, leaders contend they are ushering in what they call a New Age of understanding and intellectual ferment, as significant as the Renaissance. But critics of these groups that many are nothing more than cults, and that others subject unwitting participants to mind control.

Professor Rashky, a critic of the trend, describes it as a "most powerful social force in the country today. I think its as much a political movement as a religious movement," he says, "and its spreading into Business Management Theory and alot of other areas. If you look at it carefully you see it represents a complete rejection of judeo-christian and bedrock American values."

Some who have evaluated the trend attribute it partly to a loss of confidence in traditional western ideas and conventional ways of doing things, and to a willingness to try out anything new in search of a replacement.

"Why is business rushing in to look at everything from EST to firewalking?" asks Robert S. Callodson, a business consultant who is a retired Vice President of the Champion International Corporation. "The old ways of doing business aren't working anymore, and even the most intelligent of people feel that something's broke."

Although precepts vary from group to group, many argue that western man, partly because of scientific discoveries of recent centuries, has become disillusioned with the spiritual concepts he inherited. Many groups are also critical of the world's current economic and social systems, saying they have ravaged the planet.

Most argue that mankind is at the threshold of "a great evolutionary leap of consciousness to new beliefs about many things" and that there is an energy or force in the universe that will lead to a happy, peaceful, perhaps united, new world (the sort of "force" at work in George Lucas' Star Wars films.)

The purpose of many of the groups is to transform the society to prepare for this "New Age." To get there, it is argued, men and women must first alter conventional ways of thinking and begin using areas of their minds they do not normally use. They must enter "an altered state of consciousness" through the use of such types of psychological techniques as meditation, hypnosis, chanting, biofeedback, prolonged isolation, and the intervention of "spirit guides," or ghosts.

Psychologists who have studied the process say that while participants are in this "altered state," leaders of the groups are able to implant new ideas and alter their thinking processes.

Participants in various new age groups say they often experience euphoria in the altered states and cited this as one reason for their popularity. "The drug of the 60's was LSD and marijuana," said Carrie Klinger, a 29-year old resident of Washington State, who belonged to several New Age groups before becoming disillusioned. "I think the drug of the 80's is cosmic consciousness."

Reginald Alev, Executive Director of the Cult Awareness Network, a Chicago- based clearinghouse of information about cults, said "it's very sad what's going on. Most of the people who get involved in these New Age groups which are growing all over the place are intelligent, altruistic, idealistic. They want to know the meaning of life, and someone comes along and tells them they have the answer. Then they're told they are the master of their own destiny, sort of an eastern version of Norman Vincent Peale, but they don't know they are being subjected to mind control."

Richard Wattring, Personnel Director of the Budget Rent-A-Car Corporation in Chicago, is seeking to arouse concern among his peers over how quickly Corporate America is embracing "pseudo-therapy programs." "I really think you're going down the wrong path in business when you deal with a person's spiritual being and attempt to manipulate his mind," he said.

Graduates of such programs and former cult members are often psychically scarred says Dr. Edwin Morse, a former member of the University of Wisconson's psychology faculty who now counsels such people in Madison. "These groups are using hypnotic procedures and people are not being told about it." Not only do leaders of some groups convince clients that they should sign up for expensive new seminars or workshops, it is asserted, many also use the hypnotic state to plant beliefs in their mind they are unaware of.

One concept commonly transmitted in these sessions by "human potential groups" is that because man is a deity equal to God he can do wrong, thus there is no sin, no reason for guilt in life.

The Ford Motor Company, Westinghouse, and the Calvin Klein Fashion House are among scores of major companies that have sent employees for training, according to "human potential organizations" such as Transformation Technologies, Lifespring, and Actualizations, all of which include techniques modelled to a greater or lesser extent after the techniques started by Werner Erhart, the founder of EST. "We teach new patterns of thinking," said Stuart Emory, chairman of Actualizations.

Kevin Garby, an author and researcher on New Age topics in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, cites an army recruiting slogan "Be All That You Can Be" as evidence of what he contends has been the significant influence of EST, Lifespring, and other New Age programs in certain quarters of the military. In the early 1980's, he said, officers at the Army War College in Carlyle, some of whom were graduates of EST, and were former members of The Radical Students For A Democratic Society, conducted a study aimed at creating a "New Age Army." The slogan, a derivative of the "You Create Your Own Reality" orthodoxy of New Age groups, grew out of this work.

The study, according to participants, also envisaged training soldiers in meditation, developing skills in extrasensory perception, magic, and in "neurolinguistic training," a hypnosis technique. Army officials say the program has been cancelled and its principle leaders have left the army. Mr. Garvy, however, contends that EST and Lifespring graduates continue to have influence in the army and other government agencies.

Politically, many in the New Age movement have said they tend to gravitate toward democrats like Edmund G. Brown, Jr., the former governer of California, and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, but A. Lawrence Chickering, editorial director of the Institute For Contemporary Studies here, a conservative research organization, whose alumni include Attorney General Edwin Meese, and Defense Secretary Casper W. Weinberger, forsees the evolution of a New Age Right.

Mr. Chickering attributes the "rediscovery of conservatism" during the 1970's in part to the Esalen Institute, "because what they are trying to do is rediscover principles of order within a context of freedom." In time, he said, he expected the New Age Right to form an alliance with "some of the components of the New Left of the 1960's and others in the New Age movement."
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 19, 2013 4:20 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:39 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 20, 2013 12:46 am

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 20, 2013 1:06 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 20, 2013 7:26 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 20, 2013 10:05 pm

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 20, 2013 10:19 pm

http://www.american-buddha.com/aciddreams.7summer.htm


ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND

The Great Summer Dropout

Nineteen sixty-seven was a year of stark contrasts. America's war against the Vietnamese had swollen into a disaster, provoking disgust and condemnation throughout the world. The black ghettos of Detroit and Newark exploded in the summer heat while Aretha Franklin belted out her anthem for women and oppressed minorities: "All I want is a little respect ..." Yet it was also a moment of high-flying and heretofore unimagined optimism as the youth movement reached a dazzling apogee. (Time magazine gave its Man of the Year award in 1967 to "anyone under twenty-five.") Nowhere was the upbeat sentiment of these turbulent times better expressed than by the Beatles, who embodied in their music and personalities the very principle of change itself.

The Beatles were the foremost lyric spokesmen for an entire generation; millions worshiped their verse as holy writ. Their songs were synchronous with the emotional excitement surrounding Haight-Ashbury. The Beatles were a symbol of the communal group that could accomplish anything, and their unprecedented success fueled the optimism of the times in countless ways. Just before the Great Summer Dropout, the Beatles gave the blossoming psychedelic subculture a stunning musical benediction with their release, in June 1967, of the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Later that month they supplied an anthem for the advocates of flower power, "All You Need Is Love," in the first live international satellite broadcast, to an estimated audience of seven hundred million people. "I declare," stated Timothy Leary, "that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God with a mysterious power to create a new species -- a young race of laughing free men.... They are the wisest, holiest, most effective avatars the human race has ever produced."

In their early days the Beatles had popped uppers and downers to keep pace with the rigors of the late-night performing circuit in the bars of Hamburg, Germany. They took whatever was around -- French blues, purple hearts, and the "yellow submarines" immortalized in their "children's song" of the same name. It wasn't until 1964, after they broke through to rock stardom, that they tried marijuana. The Fab Four got their first whiff of the wacky weed when John Lennon smoked a joint with Bob Dylan at London's Heathrow Airport. It was a happy high, and from then on the Beatles spent much of their time together stoned.

In early 1965 Lennon and his wife, Cynthia, went to dinner with George Harrison at a friend's. The host slipped a couple of sugar cubes of LSD into their after-dinner coffee, and things got a little barmy when they left. Cynthia remembered it as an ordeal. "John was crying and banging his head against the wall. I tried to make myself sick, and couldn't. I tried to go to sleep, and couldn't. It was like a nightmare that wouldn't stop, whatever you did. None of us got over it for about three days." For John the experience was equally terrifying. "We didn't know what was going on," he recalled. "We were just insane. We were out of our heads."

Despite his jarring initiation into psychedelia, within a year John Lennon would be dropping acid as casually as he had once smoked a cigarette. But Lennon was hardly in the vanguard of psychedelic use, which had gained a certain currency among British rock bands in the mid-1960s. A number of pop stars, including Donovan Leitch, Keith Richards, and the Yardbirds, had been introduced to LSD via Michael Hollingshead and his short-lived World Psychedelic Center in London. Soon the turned-on message was being broadcast throughout the English-speaking world, and acid became an international phenomenon. The Rolling Stones announced that "Some-thing Happened to Me Yesterday." Eric Burdon and the Animals crooned a love song to "A Girl Named Sandoz." Across the ocean in America the Count Five were having a "Psychotic Reaction," the Electric Prunes had "Too Much to Dream Last Night," the Amboy Dukes took a "Journey to the Center of My Mind," and the Byrds flew "Eight Miles High." [1]

LSD influenced much of mid-1960s rock, but it was the Beatles who most lavishly and accurately captured the psychic landscape of the altered state. Their first acid-tinged songs appeared on Revolver (1966). "She Said She Said" was inspired by a conversation in California with Peter Fonda during Lennon's second LSD trip. Fonda talked about taking acid and experiencing "what it's like to be dead." The album also featured Lennon's "Dr. Robert," a song about a New York physician who dispensed "vitamin shots" to the rich and famous. On the final track, "Tomorrow Never Knows," Lennon exhorted his listeners to turn off their minds, relax, and float downstream. Originally titled "The Void," this song was inspired by Leary's Tibetan Book of the Dead manual which Lennon was then reading while high on acid. On it he used the first of many "backward" tapes while tripping in his studio late one night. He even considered having a thousand monks chant in the background. Although this proved unrealistic, it pointed up Lennon's growing obsession with musical special effects, which would reach an apotheosis on Sgt. Pepper.

By the time Sgt. Pepper was recorded, all of the Beatles were getting high on acid. Paul McCartney, the last Beatle to take LSD, made candid admissions to the press about his use of psychedelics, causing an uproar. "It opened my eyes," he told Life magazine. "It made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society." If the leaders of the world's nations were to take LSD even once, McCartney insisted, they would be ready to "banish war, poverty and famine."

Teen America got its first look at the psychedelicized Beatles on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, in a film clip accompanying the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever." Their hair was longer, they had grown moustaches, and they were dressed in scruffy, slightly outlandish clothes. Lennon especially looked like a different person, with his wire-frame glasses, Fu Manchu, and distant gaze. That was how he appeared on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, where on close inspection, according to Lennon, "you can see that two of us are flying, and two aren't." John and George had taken LSD for the photo session.

Sgt. Pepper is a concept album structured as a musical "trip." The Beatles play the part of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an old-time musical group, that takes its listeners on a sentimental journey through the history of music from ballads and folksongs to dancehall tunes, circus music, and rock and roll. The album includes at least four cuts with overt drug references, and the entire LP utilizes sound effects in novel ways to evoke unique mental images and create an overall psychedelic aesthetic.

It is difficult to overstate this record's importance in galvanizing the acid subculture. For the love generation, Sgt. Pepper was nothing less than a revelation, a message from on high. Thousands of people can still recall exactly where and when they first heard the magical chords of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" wafting in the summer breeze. This was the cut on which Lennon celebrated the synesthetic peak of an acid trip. The hallucinatory visions of "tangerine trees," "marmalade skies," "newspaper taxis," and "looking glass ties" mesmerized the multitudes of Beatle fans who listened to Sgt. Pepper on pot and acid until the grooves were worn out. Lennon said that the title of the song, rather than standing for LSD, was inspired by his son's drawings, but his disclaimer had little effect on the general interpretation of the lyrics.

The Blue Meanies immediately denounced the album. The ultra-right-wing John Birch Society charged that Sgt. Pepper exhibited "an understanding of the principles of brainwashing" and suggested that the Beatles were part of an "international communist conspiracy." Spiro Agnew, then governor of Maryland, led a crusade to ban "With a Little Help from My Friends" because it mentioned getting high. And the BBC actually did ban "A Day in the Life," with Lennon singing "I'd love to turn you on."

In September 1967 the Beatles went on an adventurous trip modeled after the Merry Pranksters' odyssey. Loading a large school bus with freaks and friends, they headed for the British countryside. Like the Pranksters, they also made a movie -- an ad-lib, spontaneous dream film entitled Magical Mystery Tour (with an album of the same name). During this period there was an abundance of LSD in the Beatles family thanks to Owsley, who supplied several pint-sized vials of electric liquid along with a cache of little pink pills. Lennon was at the height of his acid phase. He used to "trip all the time," as he put it, while living in a country mansion stocked with an extravagant array of tape recorders, video equipment, musical instruments, and whatnot. Since money was no object, he was able to fulfill any LSD-inspired whim at any time of day or night.

By his own estimate Lennon took over one thousand acid trips. His protracted self-investigation with LSD only exacerbated his personal difficulties, as he wrestled with Beatledom and his mounting differences with Paul over the direction the group should take, or even if they should continue as a group. Unbeknownst to millions of their fans, the Beatles, even at the height of their popularity, were well along the winding road to breakup. That acid was becoming problematic for Lennon was evident on some of his psychedelic songs, such as "I Am the Walrus," with its repeated, blankly sung admission "I'm crying."

Eventually the mind-boggled Beatle couldn't stand it anymore. He got so freaked out that he had to stop using the drug, and it took him a while to get his feet back on the ground. "I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego," he later explained, "and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary's [the psychedelic manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead] and all that shit. We were going through a whole game that everyone went through, and I destroyed myself.... I destroyed my ego and I didn't believe I could do anything."

Lennon's obsession with losing his ego typified a certain segment of the acid subculture in the mid and late 1960s. Those who got heavily into tripping often subscribed to a mythology of ego death that Leary was fond of preaching. The LSD doctor spoke of a chemical doorway through which one could leave the "fake prop-television-set America" and enter the equivalent of the Garden of Eden, a realm of unprogrammed beginnings where there was no distinction between matter and spirit, no individual personality to bear the brunt of life's flickering sadness. To be gratefully dead, from the standpoint of acid folklore, was not merely a symbolic proposition; the zap of superconsciousness that hit whenever a tab of LSD kicked the slats out of the ego might in certain instances be felt as an actual death and rebirth of the body (as the psychiatric studies of Dr. Stanislav Grof seemed to indicate). Acid could send people spinning on a 360-degree tour through their own senses and rekindle childhood's lost "tense of presence," as a Digger broadside stated.

But this experience was fraught with pitfalls, among them a tendency to become attached to the pristine vision, to want to hang on to it for as long as possible. Such an urge presumably could only be satisfied by taking the "utopiate" again and again. But after countless trips and sideshows of the mind one arrived at an impasse: "All right, my mind's been blown.... What's next?" Little could be gained from prolonged use of the drug, except perhaps the realization that it was necessary to "graduate acid," as Ken Kesey said. Oftentimes this meant adopting new methods to approximate or recreate the psychedelic experience without a chemical catalyst -- via yoga, meditation, organic foods, martial arts, or any of the so-called natural highs. That was what the Beatles concluded when they jumped off the Magical Mystery Tour for a fling with the Maharishi and Transcendental Meditation. "Acid is not the answer," said George Harrison. "It's enabled people to see a bit more, but when you really get hip, you don't need it." Ditto for McCartney: "It was an experience we went through ... We're finding new ways of getting there."

For many who turned on during the 1960s there was a sense that LSD had changed all the rules, that the scales had been lifted from their eyes and they'd never be the same. The drug was thought to provide a shortcut to a higher reality, a special way of knowing. But an acid trip's "eight-hour dose of wild surmise," as Charles Perry put it, can have unexpected consequences. People may find themselves straddling the margins of human awareness where all semblance of epistemological decorum vanishes and form and emptiness play tricks on each other. Things are no longer anchored in simple location but rather vibrate in a womb of poetic correspondences. From this vantage point it is tempting to conclude that all worlds are imaginary constructions and that behind the apparent multiplicity of discernible objects there exists a single infinite reality which is consciousness itself. Thus interpreted, consciousness becomes a means mistaken for an end -- and without an end or focus it becomes an inversion, giving rise to a specious sort of logic. If the "real war" is strictly an internal affair and each person is responsible for creating the conditions of his own suffering by projecting his skewed egotistical version of reality onto the material plane, does it not follow that the desire to redress social ills is yet another delusion? In this "ultimate" scheme of things all sense of moral obligation and political commitment is rendered absurd by definition.

Herein lay another pitfall of the tripping experience. Even after they stopped taking LSD, many people could still hear the siren song, a vague and muffled invitation to a "higher" calling. Those who responded to that etheric melody were plunged willy-nilly into an abstract vortex of soul-searching, escaping, and "discovering thyself." Some were intensely sincere, and their quest very often was lonely and confusing. The difficulties they faced stemmed in part from the fact that advanced industrial society does not recognize ego loss or peak experience as a particularly worthy objective. Thus it is not surprising that large numbers of turned-on youth looked to non-Occidental traditions -- Oriental mysticism, European magic and occultism, and primitive shamanism (especially American Indian lore) -- in an attempt to conjure up a coherent framework for understanding their private visions.

Quite a few acidheads and acid graduates subscribed to the Eastern belief that reality is an illusion. They were quick to mouth the phrases of enlightenment -- karma, maya, nirvana -- but in their adaptation these concepts were coarsened and sentimentalized. The hunger for regenerative spirituality was often deflected into a pseudo-Oriental fatalism: "Why fret over the plight of the world when it's all part of the Divine Dance?" This slipshod philosophy was partially due to the effects of heavy acid tripping -- "the haze that blurs the corner of the inner screen," as David Mairowitz said, "a magic that insinuates itself 'cosmically,' establishing spectrum upon confusing spectrum in the broadening of personal horizons. It could cloud up your telescope on the known world and bring on a delirium of vague 'universal' thinking." Or it might just reinforce what poet John Ashbery described as "the pious attitudes of those spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing."

The laissez-faire intellectualism that flourished in the acid subculture was particularly evident in the San Francisco Oracle, which by now boasted a nationwide circulation of a hundred thousand. The lingo of pop mysticism was sprinkled throughout the pages of the psychedelic tabloid. Sandwiched between various tidbits on ESP, tarot, witchcraft, numerology and the latest drug gossip were announcements of impending UFO landings. Yet in a sense the Oracle was merely echoing a trend that had begun to assert itself in American society as a whole. The appetite for spiritual transcendence, the desire to go beyond "the sweating self," in Huxley's words, is an indefatigable urge that assumes many guises -- offbeat religious sects, parapsychology, the occult, and so forth. While such phenomena are not necessarily futile diversions, there is an inherent danger in "wanting the ultimate in one leap," as Nietzsche put it, whether by pill or perfect spiritual master. This desperate yearning makes individuals highly vulnerable to manipulation by totalitarian personalities. It was, after all Charles Manson who wrote a song called "The Ego Is a Too Much Thing."

Manson, an ex-convict and would-be rock musician, had his own scene going in the Haight during the Summer of Love, before he and his family of acid eaters moved to southern California and made headlines as a grisly murder cult in 1969. Claiming to have experienced the crucifixion of Christ during an acid trip, he declared himself the almighty God of Fuck. Then he fed the drug to his harem of females as part of their daily regimen, had intercourse with them while they were high, and cast a corrupting spell over them. To demonstrate their faith they carried out his bloodthirsty schemes.

Manson was only one among numerous mind vamps, power trippers, hustlers, and rip off artists who hovered over what Mairowitz described as "the ego-death of easy-prey LSD takers" in the Haight. There was a certain type of character who got off on attacking people while they were high and trespassing on their brains. "The whole catalogue of craziness ... was exposed by acid," commented Stephen Gaskin. There were LSD freaks "who were into ego dominance.... That was their hobby and that was what they worked toward." Call it acid fascism or plain old psychological warfare, the hippie community had degenerated to the point where it merely offered a different setting for the same destructive drives omnipresent in straight society. "Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street," a Communications Company leaflet declared. "Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3000 mikes [twelve times the normal dose] & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last."

Violent crime increased dramatically as the acid ghetto became a repository for hoods, bikers, derelicts, conmen, burnouts, and walking crazies. The shift in sensibility was reflected in the kinds of drugs that were prevalent on the street. First there was a mysterious grass shortage, and then an amphetamine epidemic swept through the Haight. By midsummer 1967 speed rivaled pot and acid as the most widely used substance in the area. The speed syndrome ravaged people mentally and physically. Widespread malnutrition resulted from appetite suppression, and infectious diseases like hepatitis and VD (from unsterilized needles and "free love") were rampant. The Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic was established in response to the mounting health crisis. Among its other functions the clinic offered a special "trip room" where people could ease off the bummers and freakouts that were becoming ever more commonplace in the Haight. The increase in bad trips was largely due to the fact that inexperienced youngsters were taking psychedelics in a hostile and congested environment. To make matters worse, a number of new mind-twisting chemicals suddenly appeared on the street, including a superpotent hallucinogen known as STP, which could launch an intense three-day trip. "Acid is like being let out of a cage," one user said. "STP is like being shot out of a gun."

STP (2,5 dimethox-4-methylphene-thylamine -- the initials stood for "Serenity, Tranquility, Peace") was developed in 1964 by an experimental chemist working for the Dow Chemical Company, which provided samples of the drug to Edgewood Arsenal headquarters of the US Army Chemical Corps. Scientists at Edgewood tested STP (which was similar in effect to BZ, to see if it could be used as an incapacitating agent, while the CIA utilized the drug in its behavior modification studies. In early 1967, for some inexplicable reason, the formula for STP was released to the scientific community at large. By this time ergotamine tartrate, an essential raw ingredient of LSD, was in short supply, so Owsley, the premier acid chemist, decided to try his hand at STP. Shortly thereafter the drug was circulating in the hippie districts of San Francisco and New York.

STP made its debut in the Haight when five thousand tabs were given away during a solstice celebration marking the onset of the Summer of Love. Few had heard of the drug, but that didn't matter to the crowd of eager pill poppers. They gobbled the gift as if it were an after-dinner mint, and a lot of people were still tripping three days later. The emergency wards at various San Francisco hospitals were filled with freaked-out hippies who feared they'd never come down. The straight doctors assumed they were zonked on LSD and administered Thorazine -- the usual treatment -- to cool them out. But Thorazine potentiates or increases the effect of STP. It was bummersville in the Haight until people figured out what was going on and word went out to think twice before ingesting the superhallucinogen.

STP was just one of the bizarre drugs that were pumped into the willing arteries of the acid ghetto. According to doctors who worked at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there was a rash of adverse reactions when a compound purporting to be THC (a synthetic version of marijuana) inundated the Haight. The drug was actually phencyclidine, or PCP -- otherwise known as "angel dust" -- which had originally been marketed as an animal tranquilizer by Parke-Davis. But the army had other ideas when it tested PCP on American GIs at Edgewood Arsenal in the late 1950s. At the same time the CIA employed Dr. Ewen Cameron to administer PCP to psychiatric patients at the Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal -- under the rubric of Operation MK-ULTRA. The Agency later stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal incapacitant," although high dosages, according to the CIA's own reports, could "lead to convulsions and death."

Yes, a lot of weird drugs were floating around Haight-Ashbury. The neighborhood was clotted with youngsters whose minds had been jerked around ruthlessly by chemicals touted for their euphoric properties. Much of the LSD turning up on the street was fortified with some sort of additive, usually speed or strychnine, [2] or in some cases insecticide. But where did this contaminated acid come from? Originally the main source of LSD in the Haight was Owsley, but the scene got totally out of hand with all the media fanfare after the be-in, and renegade chemists started moving in on the drug trade. The Mafia exploited the situation by setting up its own production and distribution networks. In June 1967 James Finlator, chief of the FDA's Bureau of Drug Abuse and Control announced that "hard core Cosa Nostra-type criminal figures" were behind "an extremely well-organized traffic in hallucinogenic drugs." Consequently the quality of black market LSD began to deteriorate. Signs posted in the Haight expressed the consensus among hippies: "Syndicate acid stinks."

And what was the CIA up to while its perennial partner of convenience, organized crime, was dumping bad acid on the black market? According to a former CIA contract employee, Agency personnel helped underground chemists set up LSD laboratories in the Bay Area during the Summer of Love to "monitor" events in the acid ghetto. But why, if this assertion is true, would the CIA be interested in keeping tabs on the hippie population? Law enforcement is not a plausible explanation, for there were already enough narcs operating in the Haight. Then what was the motive? A CIA agent who claims to have infiltrated the covert LSD network provided a clue when he referred to Haight-Ashbury as a "human guinea pig farm."

And what better place to establish a surveillance operation than the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco? A dozen years earlier in the same city, George Hunter White and his CIA colleagues had set up a safehouse and begun testing hallucinogenic drugs on unwitting citizens. White's activities were phased out in the mid-1960s, just when the grassroots acid scene exploded in the Bay Area. Suddenly there was a neighborhood packed full of young people who were ready and willing to gobble experimental chemicals -- chemicals that had already been tested in the lab but seldom under actual field conditions.

In addition to the spooks who inserted themselves among the drug dealers, there were scientists with CIA backgrounds who stationed themselves in the acid ghetto for "monitoring" purposes. Dr. Louis Joylon ("Jolly") West, [3] an old-time LSD investigator for the Agency, rented a pad in the heart of Haight-Ashbury with the intention of studying the hippies in their native habitat. The hippie trip must have held a strange fascination for Jolly West and other CIA scientists who had devoted their talents to exploring the covert potential of mind-altering chemicals during the Cold War. Numerous spies had tried LSD long before flower power became the vogue. They had administered the drug to test subjects and watched unperturbed as the toughest of specimens were reduced to quivering jelly, their confidence and poise demolished under the impact of the hallucinogen. No doubt about it -- LSD was a devastating weapon. Richard Helms, CIA director during the late 1960s and early 1970s, had once described the drug as "dynamite" -- a word often used by hippie connoisseurs when praising a high-quality psychedelic.

_______________

Notes:

1. LSD-25 made its debut in the pop world on the flip side of a 1962, single by the Gamblers.

2. Strychnine, a poison that is lethal in sufficient quantities, was listed in an inventory of biochemical agents stockpiled by the CIA. Other drugs in the CIA's medicine chest included tachrin (a vomit-inducing agent), 2,4 pyrolo ("causes temporary amnesia"), M-246 ("produces paralysis"), neurokinin ("produces severe pain"), digitoxin (for inducing a heart attack), and seven BZ homologues.

3. West was head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma during the 1950s and early 1960\s, when he conducted research into LSD, hypnosis and "the psychobiology of dissociated states" for the CIA. (It was West who administered a massive dose of LSD to an elephant as part of an ill-fated drug experiment.) In 1964 he was called upon to examine Jack Ruby, who had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. After visiting Ruby in his jail cell, West concluded that he had sunk into a "paranoid state manifested by delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations and suicidal impulses." Ruby was not faking these symptoms, West asserted, since he had vigorously rejected the doctor's repeated suggestions that he was mentally ill. "The true malingerer usually grasps eagerly at such an explanation," said West. Since Ruby would not admit he was crazy, West concluded he was nuts. Catch-22.

Ruby's "delusions" included the belief that an ultra-right-wing conspiracy was behind the death of the president. On the basis of Dr. West's diagnosis, Ruby became a candidate for treatment of mental disorders. Another doctor soon put him on "happy pills," although these drugs did not seem to cheer Ruby up. Two years later he died of cancer while still in prison.

West, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles, where he served as director of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, a position he still holds. In the early 1970s he became embroiled in a heated controversy over plans for a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. Originally proposed by Governor Ronald Reagan, the violence center would have exceeded even Jack Ruby's worst paranoid nightmares had it not been scuttled by the California State legislature after information about it was leaked to the press.

West, who helped formulate plans for the center, described the program as an attempt "to predict the probability of occurrences" of violent behavior among specific population groups. "The major known correlates of violence," according to West, "are sex (male), age (youthful), ethnicity (black), and urbanicity."

The violence center was to have been housed in a former military base located in a remote area of California. The medical facility at Vacaville prison, the site of a major CIA drug testing program during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was listed among the facilities that would have been used to develop treatment models and implement pilot and demonstration programs for the violence center.

Treatments discussed by West included chemical castration, psychosurgery, and the testing of experimental drugs on involuntarily incarcerated individuals. Furthermore, the activities of the Center were to have been coordinated with a California law enforcement program that maintained computer files on "pre-delinquent" children so that they could be treated before they made a negative mark on society.



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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 21, 2013 10:24 am

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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 24, 2013 12:59 am

Alan Moore - Author, Comic Book writer & Magician:

'At the age of 17 I became one of the world's most inept LSD dealers. The problem with being an LSD dealer, if you're sampling your own product, is your view of reality will probably become horribly distorted. And you may believe you have supernatural powers and you are completely immune to any form of retaliation and prosecution, which is not the case.'


www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7307303.stm
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:58 pm

Mike Oldfield - multi instrumentalist:

1970
'One evening, I was to have the last LSD trip in my life. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I do remember walking down Vauxhall Bridge Road, where we were tripping. All of a sudden, something simply switched in my body, almost like switching on a huge electric current. It felt like I was being electrocuted.

'The effect on me was immediate. I felt a veil was lifted off, from where I was and what I was, and from what everybody was. The people around me, they weren't people any more, everybody was stripped of anything I had ever learned about them. They looked to me to be just like biological machines, almost like robots, but made of flesh and blood. I saw into their bloodstreams and down to the molecular level; I could see that all their movements were dictated by electrical impulses and chemical reactions. They were inhaling this gas which we call air into their lungs, they were somehow processing it into energy so they could move around. Even their mouths, the way they spoke -- they were making these weird, strange sounds we call language. It wasn't that I had a hallucination, that I imagined that humans were machines, but I knew it, I saw it, and indeed I can still see it. We are machines. If you see that in its harsh reality, it's horrifying.

'Then my consciousness expanded even further. It became a hopelessly lost, weird thing, floating in the middle of an eternal void. It was like, quite suddenly, somebody had told me the secret they had been trying to cover up for my whole childhood. I faced the harsh reality of looking at our existence in its purest, most physical level, without the foggiest idea how we got there, or how we came to be conscious, or why, for what purpose. I felt I had unlocked some terrible Pandora's box, that somebody had told me life was not really how I imagined it, that I was lost in a completely bio-electromechanical world without a clue as to how I had got there or why I was there; what was more, I was going to disappear from it by dying, without finding a single explanation for anything. At that time it just seemed such a terrible truth. I felt I was the only person who knew it. I wanted to go up to everybody and say, 'Don't you know, don't you know, this is real, this is how it really is!''


http://www.lsdbritain.com/page29.htm
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 24, 2013 10:13 pm

“Science and anti-science have collided throughout the history of the magic mushroom. Just as the ricochets and trajectories of sub-atomic particles reveal something of how the physical universe is constructed, so, I think, do the reverberations caused by the magic mushroom expose something fundamental about our cultural universe, about the attitudes and sensibilities that shape our time. That we in the West, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have found the mushroom’s litany of peculiar effects desirable is, I would suggest, symptomatic of a broader underlying craving for meaning – more specifically, for enchantment – that sits somewhat awkwardly within our supposedly rationalist, scientific and technological culture.”

--“Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom,” by Andy Lechter
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 26, 2013 8:32 pm

The LSD Chronicles: George Hunter White Part III

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As far as MK-Ultra is concerned, White is most well known for a series of safehouses that he established first in New York City and later San Francisco. At these safehouses White conducted experiments with a whole host of drugs given to him by the CIA, most notably LSD. White also apparently conducted various sexual experiments (that also involved drugs in many cases) with the aid of local prostitutes that lured johns back to the San Francisco safehouses from time to time. White did not restrict his experiments to the safehouses, however. White also took a sick pleasure in dosing friends and associates with LSD in his private life. These incidents were apparently outside of his work on MK-Ultra (officially) and frequently disastrous.

"White's 1953 and 1954 date book entries reveal that he drugged at least seven unwitting people for no apparent reason other than to see the effects of LSD on unsuspecting people. One woman drugged by White during a dinner party at his home had required brief hospitalization. Another woman, a friend of his wife, suffered long-term effects from the drug and subsequently required psychiatric treatment for over thirty-five years. A young aspiring actress who lived in the same apartment building as the Whites was drugged in 1954 and hours later had found herself on the roof of the building, contemplating jumping to escape the monsters trying to drive her mad."
(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli Jr., pg. 279)

White seems to have had a perverse fascination with dosing people unwittingly with LSD. Liz Evans, a former aspiring actress and sometime prostitute who worked for White during his time in San Francisco, recounted this peculiar fetish.

"Evans remembers that White 'three or four times at his house' dosed people with LSD 'just for fun.' She recalls, 'He gave it to me once and I hated every minute of it. I told him if he ever did it again that would be the last time he did it to anyone.'

"Evans also recalls that White, or 'someone who worked with him... sometime around 1959 or 1960,' dosed 'a really pretty, blond-haired waitress at [San Francisco's] Black Sheep bar.' Says Evans, 'her name was Ruth [Kelly] and George wanted her to take part in things, but she had no interest, so he, or someone he told to, dosed her with LSD.' Kelly, who also performed as a singer at the bar, was dosed during one of her singing performances in 1960, according to CIA documents. Evans says, as CIA document confirm, 'She nearly flipped out during her set, but somehow managed to hold on. After she finished, she ran outside and got a cab to take her to the hospital. A few days later she was okay.'"

(ibid, pg. 290)

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Considering how many of George White's former associates recall him dosing unwitting peoples with acid, it seems pretty safe to assume the above-mentioned instances were not isolated. Virtually all such instances were outside his role in MK-Ultra, at least officially. By all accounts, however, his actual test subjects for MK-Ultra at the safehouses did not fair much better. Besides LSD, a whole host of other exotic drugs were also toyed with, typically with disturbing results.

"In addition to LSD, which they knew could cause serious, if not fatal problems, TSS officials gave White even more exotic experimental drugs to test, drugs that other Agency contractors may or may not have already used on human subjects. 'If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco,' recalls a TSS source. According to a 1963 report by CIA Inspector General John Earman, 'In a number of instances, however, the test subject has become ill for hours, including hospitalization in at least one case, and [White] could only follow up by guarded inquiry after the test subject's return to normal life. Possible sickness and attendant economic lose are inherent contingent effects of testing.'"
(The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate, John Marks, pgs. 105-106)

While it's impossible to tell just how many victims White tallied during the 1950s and early 1960s, the number is seemingly significant. Another mystery is just how long White's safehouse operation lasted.

"The MKULTRA crew continued unwitting testing until the summer of 1963 when the Agency's Inspector General stumbled across the safehouses during a regular inspection of TSS activities. This happened not long after Director John McCone had appointed John Earman to the Inspector General position. Much to the displeasure of Sid Gottlieb and Richard Helms, Earman questioned the propriety of the safehouses, and insisted that Director McCone be given a full briefing. Although President Kennedy had put McCone in charge of the Agency the year before, Helms --the professional's professional --had not bothered to tell his outsider boss about some of the CIA's most sensitive activities, including the safehouses and the CIA-Mafia assassination plots. Faced with Earman's demands, Helms --surely one of history's most clever bureaucrats --volunteered to tell McCone himself about the safehouses (rather than have Earman present a negative view of the program). Sure enough, Helms told Earman afterward, McCone raised no objections to unwitting testing (as Helms described it). A determined man and a rather brave one, Earman countered with a full written report to McCone recommending that the safehouses be closed. The Inspector General cited the risks of exposure and pointed out that many people both inside and outside the Agency found 'the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior... to be distasteful and unethical.' McCone reacted by putting off a final decision by suspending unwitting testing in the meantime. Over the next years, Helms, who then headed the Clandestine Services, wrote at least three memos urging resumption. He cited 'indications... of an apparent Soviet aggressiveness in the field of covertly administered chemicals which are, to say the least, inexplicable and disturbing,' and he claimed the CIA's 'psotive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing.' To Richard Helms, the importance of the program exceeded the risks and the ethical question, although he did admit, 'We have no answer to them oral issue.' McCone simply did nothing for two years. The director's indecision had the effect of killing the program, nevertheless. TSS officials closed the San Francisco safehouse in 1965 and the New York one in 1966."
(ibid, pgs. 108-109)

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Richard Helms (top) and John McCone (bottom)

There were actually at least five known safehouses, two in New York City, two in San Francisco, and one in Mill Valley, located about 14 miles north of San Fran (the Agency apparently liked the isolation of this safehouse). What's more, its interesting to note that White's safehouse operations were winding down right around the time San Francisco's grassroots acid scene was emerging. By the time 1965 rolled around, the streets were full of acidheads the CIA could (and did) study, making White's operation superfluous. Coincidence?


http://visupview.blogspot.com/2012/12/t ... te_25.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 28, 2013 12:29 pm

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