Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[undead]

[American Dream]

Thanks for posting all that, undead.

Just found this to poke a few more holes in my (previous) un-nuanced hero worship:

As a sort of postscript, another new book should be mentioned for 60s completists. Scholars of the era readily know who Owsley "Bear" Stanley was -- the famed LSD chemist, genius Grateful Dead soundman, and much more. Rhoney Gissen Stanley, his longtime girlfriend, then wife and mother of his child, then lifelong friend, has just penned her memoir of her time with him from the 1960s on in My LSD Family.

Owsley was a key 1960s figure, who some would say "turned on" a generation more so than even Tim Leary, but his own life has long been shrouded in mystery. Here's a firsthand recollection, as "intimate" as is likely to be penned. Reading it, alas, is sort of a curative for anybody who might still romanticize the man, and even the times. The Washington Post obituary for Owsley -- he died in an auto accident two years ago in Australia, where he had moved in order to avoid a looming climatic apocalypse he just knew was coming -- contained this: "Mr. Stanley always had been a controlling personality - when he rented a house for the Grateful Dead in 1965, he refused to allow 'poisonous' vegetables inside, and everyone subsisted on meat for months. That stubbornness helped contribute to his break with the band in the mid-1970s."

Gissen Stanley's book amplifies that impression in spades. Owsley practically forces acid on anybody he thinks is not enlightened enough, "doses" people without their knowledge, and treats his multiple girlfriends in a manner that can only, nowadays, be called abusive, even borderline violent at times. Maye it was the raw meat smoothies, but when Gissen Stanley decides, after years of emotional and financial dependence on Owsley, to pursue scientific education, her recollection is a textbook case of emotional abuse and escape. "I won't have to ask Bear for money. It was so public asking Bear for money...He would meet me onstage during a show, peel out hundred-dollar bills, and make me dance for them."

From this retelling, Rhoney's insecurity makes her an easy mark for men with what was then called "power-tripping' personalities. As a very bright young woman, she nonetheless comes off here as desperate for attention and approval. Owsley gets fame and fortune as the undisputed king of underground chemists, tells virtually everybody -- even Tim Leary! -- that they don't take enough of his LSD to be truly enlightened, sets up a landmark sound system for the Grateful Dead, gets busted, goes to prison, comes back, and eventually vanishes down under. Here are firsthand backstage accounts of the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock, Altamont, and much more -- none of which sound like much fun, even via helicopter -- with various Beatles, Stones, San Francisco musicians, of course, and other famed counterculture figures popping in and out. Rhoney is no 60s casualty -- she becomes an orthodontist. Their son Starfinder ("Starf") becomes a veterinarian. True survivors, one could say. They stay loyal to Owsley to the end, in a moving sort of way.

But her book, written with Tom Davis, a former Saturday Night Live writer and comedian, is itself a sort of riddle -- is it intended to read like an extended SNL spoof on the 60s, or is it wholly serious? Only the author knows. "Ever since the bust, the owl was acting weird," she writes about their pet bird. Indeed. In any event, back then, there was a lot of debate about whether one was truly "On The Bus" or off it, and over four decades later, some people are still trying to figure out whatever that meant.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-hei ... 66239.html

[American Dream]

http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... loitation/

Capitalists Want You To Be Happy: Self-Improvement and Exploitation
Posted by: Kenji Liu Posted date: April 08, 2013



Since we’re looking at Stolen Lands, Stolen Culture, Stolen Time this month at Turning Wheel, it’s worthwhile to examine capitalism. What is the fundamental mechanism that allows capitalists to accumulate wealth?

It seems like every week we hear another outrageous story of skyrocketing corporate profits while many of the rest of us struggle or worry about basic needs. While some of these newsworthy profits are due to outright deception and consequent lack of prosecution, how is it that many of us are working harder than ever to achieve the same quality of life or less?

How does profit get extracted from our work? The best illustration of this problem is of a worker who gets paid based on how many hours she works, yet the full value of what she produces in those hours is greater. For example, she may be hired for an hour’s work and be paid $10. The capitalist has her use a machine to make meditation cushions, and she is able to make a $50 cushion every 15 minutes. At the end of an hour, the capitalist gains $200 of work for paying the worker only $10, capturing $190 in gross revenue. After deducting operating costs for the cushion’s raw materials and depreciation of the machine, the capitalist is left with, say, $140. Since the worker doesn’t own the machine or the products she makes with it, the capitalist has been able to extract a significant surplus value (profit) from her one hour’s work. From a Marxian point of view, as long as the worker is not being compensated for the actual amount of work done, she is being exploited.

For those of us who might work for a salary, the principle is similar. Take a full-time, exempt staff person working at a community non-profit organization for a salary of $25,000 a year, which comes out to about $12 an hour. Those of us who have been part of such hard-working organizations are probably familiar with the culture of working endless hours beyond the usual 40 hours a week, in the name of a good cause. If this staff person works more than 40 hours a week in order to accomplish what is necessary, they are not being compensated for the overtime. The organization is able to extract surplus from this person’s work, which is in many ways less visible than the previous example—the non-profit professional often does not produce a measurable product that can be said to have X dollar value. While it may pain non-profit professionals to say so, this is still exploitation.

Another important example of exploitation, pointed out by feminists, is the unpaid labor of women at home. Care of others, whether physically or emotionally, is traditionally allocated to women. Domestic chores are performed without compensation and on top of any paid work women might do outside of the home. Women also often perform unpaid emotional labor within nuclear families, caring for the suffering of family members. Such labor helps the family reproduce and nurture new laborers, and has enormous economic value that the larger system of capitalism benefits from without having to pay for it.

In the United States, mindfulness and yoga practices have become part of the culture of many major corporations—using the rhetoric of care and self-care to improve the health of its employees—which would seem to be a good thing. The call for self-improvement through these practices is often in the name of a more productive, innovative workforce—which facilitates better surplus extraction. Happier, calmer, loyal, and more focused employees working harmoniously together is a good thing for corporations because they believe it will benefit their bottom line.

This brings up questions of “right livelihood,” since working for, say, the oil industry is certainly different from working for a community non-profit in terms of whether your work causes or reduces harm in the world. Being happier, calmer, and more productive in the name of peace and justice is not such a bad thing, though your organization may still be extracting surplus value from your work. We live in an economy that is based on such extraction, and not participating in it is almost impossible. We still have to purchase products made under such conditions.

We need to remember that Buddhism is in many ways not about happiness. It is about ending suffering. If we focus only on achieving happiness, then we can actually accept all kinds of injustices. We might be happy while our bosses extract hundreds of dollars from our one hour of work, or happy working for a harmful corporation because it encourages our self-improvement, or happy constantly performing unpaid emotional labor at home for miserable men, or happy while purchasing products made in sweatshop conditions or by slave labor. If we remember to focus on ending suffering for everyone, then none of these situations will make us happy. Sometimes we might have no choice but to be in these situations, in which case we can work on developing our equanimity or compassion. But ultimately, the extraction of surplus value is not an economic method that facilitates the end of suffering for all.

[American Dream]

http://www.american-buddha.com/trungpa.bio.htm

CHOGYAM TRUNGPA BIOGRAPHY

by Charles Carreon

Few could begin their first written work, their autobiography, with these words:

"My birthplace was a small settlement on a high plateau of north eastern Tibet. Above it, the celebrated mountain Pago-punsum rises perpendicularly to more than eighteen thousand feet, and is often called the 'the pillar of the sky'. It looks like a tall spire; its mighty crest towers under perpetual snows, glittering in the sunshine."

Such were the origins of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was born in February, 1939 in Eastern Tibet, and died forty-eight years later, leaving a legacy as the most influential and controversial teacher of Buddhism in the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Oxford-educated and well-known for the quality of his wit, this high lama wore civilian clothes, and was often photographed in suit and tie during the early seventies. Comfortable swigging hard liquor with anarchist poets, he sped to the head of the guru crew when, in the late seventies, he founded the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and in one incredible summer, made Ram Dass feel like an idiot poseur, and cut the long renunciate braid off the head of the renowned sacred songster, Bhagavan Dass, as Dass lay insensate on the floor after a night of dissipation. Or so the stories went.

In the late seventies, Trungpa's milieu was the focus of the lead story in Harper's magazine called "Toward Spiritual Obedience," which featured a cover picture of a pure white megaphone, held in the hand and resting in the lap of a berobed person whose head had been cropped out of the frame. The story told how Trungpa, at a Halloween party he held at Naropa, was miffed that the poet W.S. Merwin and his wife wouldn't consent to appear naked along with him at a party. Trungpa ordered them seized and stripped naked so the party could begin. Merwin and many in the academic establishment didn't take it well. But for a generation of hippies who had lived through the Summer of Love, Woodstock, and Altamont, that kind of hellraising was just alright. For people who were sorry they missed the opportunity to be on the bus with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, tripping on an endless supply of LSD, someone who wouldn't get naked probably should be helped out of their clothes.

Trungpa's books of teachings didn't disappoint, either. The first one, Meditation in Action, didn't mark off much new territory, but with chapter titles like "The Manure of Experience and the Field of Bodhi," there was some suggestion that his teachings were taking an original turn. The next book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, was slightly less provocative than a molotov cocktail heaved into a yoga class. The lights sere kept burning in ashrams and college dorm rooms way past midnight, as people who had been earnestly practicing breath retention and focussing on the third eye of wisdom began to wonder if they might be missing the boat if a bona fide Tibetan lama said things like this:

"It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego's constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism."

First of all, what the hell was he doing using a word like "bureaucracy?" That wasn't the sort of word a guru used, because it makes you feel uptight, like you're in a government building to fill out forms and get a license. Next, it poses a problem, and it doesn't sound like an easy one to resolve. If "ego" is going to subvert even spiritual efforts, then where can we take refuge? This isn't what gurus do. They don't sow doubt and uncertainty. They package the problem and a solution together. Trungpa seemed to be declaring a holiday from mysticism to give us all a change to dry out from the long spiritual bender that young people had been on every since Leary and Alpert got kicked out of Harvard and bathtub acid started irrigating every careless brain cell in the 16 - 25 age group.

I think Trungpa showed up on the American scene and was both charmed and dismayed by the unreasoning optimism of the early seventies. You don't know it, but we were everywhere, hitchhiking, doing and distributing psychoactive drugs, screwing on the beach and in the fields, surfing, smuggling, dancing, making music, and believing, believing, believing that heaven was just down the road, around the corner, and right here and now. Trungpa probably saw us as ignorant victims of Eastern religion toxicity, high on the unreleased byproducts of boundless hope fed by chemical realization, sexual exhilaration, meditative exercises and nature worship. "Stop everything!" he seemed to shout. "Stop it now before you dance right off that cliff!"

People hated him, said he was evil, cited his drinking and womanizing as evidence of depravity, and for all the people it deterred from seeking him out as a teacher they might as well have given him a ticker tape parade. He was taking bread out of the mouths of child-gurus like the precocious Maharaj-ji, and stealing disciples from kind old men like Swami Muktananda. Supposedly he called the Berkeley-to-Tennessee guru Steve Gaskin, a "demonic hippy." Who knew the truth? It was all believable. On the spiritual scene, he was like a wrathful deity, appearing everywhere, making anyone feel like an asshole if they flinched. Naturally, legions bowed.

His next book, The Myth of Freedom, was exquisitely designed, a small, square book in a five-by-five format, illustrated with Tibetan line drawings by the amazing Glenn Eddy, the only guy who could make a one-eyed dakini with a shriveled tit and one triangular tooth look cool. Supposedly a former heroin addict, Eddy was one of Trungpa's incredibly cool students, to whom were soon added luminaries like Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. Even as Trungpa stories evermore circled around his drinking and screwing, it seemed his students affected more and more the trappings of legitimacy.

As a cultural hand-grenade, The Myth of Freedom landed in a populated area in the middle of spiritual rush hour. The casualties were enormous, more even that the ashram conflagration ignited by Cutting Through. People could not stop reading the book, or flagellating themselves and each other with its provoking statements. Again Trungpa showed his command of the connotations of language. Using "myth" in the pejorative sense, to mean a false belief, he turned his back on Jungians and Campbellians who had seized on myths as doors to the archetypal unconscious. Saying that "freedom" was a myth, he challenged Americans to examine their most prized political possession. And that was before you even opened the cover.

When you did, the book's force was overwhelming. Starting with discourses on suffering that were as cosmopolitan as a quip by Oscar Wilde, as trenchant as an essay by Orwell, Trungpa proceeded to skewer every sacred cow, both secular and sacred that appeared in his broad-sweeping path. His observations were as irritating as an infestation of ants taking up residence inside your suit of armor. You found yourself wanting to strip off vital protection just to end the torture. The Myth lampooned spiritual striving as a pathetic game of self deception, and activated our own self-doubt to demonstrate for us our tendency to hide our ignorance about what end is up, who we are, and what the hell to do about it.

From then on, the game was pretty much his. Nobody ever threatened Trungpa Rinpoche's pre-eminence as a presenter of Buddhist thought during his lifetime. His crew and vast numbers of others presumed him to be a MahaSiddha of the highest order. His drunkenness and sexual infantilism were accepted as the price of perfection. He lived in paradox as comfortable as a pig in mud or as Guru Rinpoche in the midst of the flames, embracing his beautiful consort.

Trungpa Rinpoche chose a successor who harvested extraordinary opprobrium when he infected several of his students with the lethal AIDS virus due to a mistaken belief that he could do nothing wrong. Whatever Trungpa got right, his successor seems to have missed, leaving an object lesson for all -- do not imitate the deeds of your betters, or be prepared to pay a price.

Return to Table of Contents

[American Dream]

http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspo ... -1988.html

Acid House 'Trip to Hell' 1988

KRS-Dan on Flickr has been uploading some yellowing newspaper clippings from the acid house era. This one from the Sun, 2 November 1988, sums up the late Thatcher period. A ludicrous acid house 'trip to hell' cartoon next to an image of Margaret Thatcher as Superman!



Well with Duke Dumont's slice of retro-house Need U topping the UK charts in the week of Thatcher's death, we can safely say that house music has outlasted her. Even if bizarrely Need U has been knocked off the top slot by people buying Judy Garland's Ding Dong The Witch is Dead to mark the demise of the one-time Iron Lady.



From Music Week, 10 April 2013 - Thatcher should never have messed with the Friends of Dorothy

Related: Thatcher's War on Acid House by Michael Holden (vice.com, April 2013):

'First she came for the milk. Then she came for the mines. Then she ran out of things to come for, so she went after the soccer fans and acid house. It might sound unlikely in an age where there are a pair of TV screens showing Sky Sports in every pub in the UK, but if you wanted to go toe-to-toe with the establishment at the tail end of the Thatcher years, the fast track to getting a beat down from the police was to watch soccer or listen to a series of repetitive records with the intention of dancing.

If you were looking for a measure of how the country has adjusted since Thatcher's reign, you could do worse than consider how two constants of the modern mainstream—soccer and electronic music—were once painted as folk devils by a regime fast running out of new things to point its police horses at... for young people, the harshness of the establishment’s war on the twin evils of soccer and dance music came as something of a surprise. It wasn’t till I fled a party in Dalston in 1989 that I felt it firsthand. The motivation for my hasty departure was the sudden entrance of a group of cops based at Stoke Newington Police Station who were notorious in the area for their thuggery. They'd come in, take the numbers off their uniforms, and break things up about as violently as they could without firearms, swinging at male and female ravers alike...'

[American Dream]

The Delusion of Lord Vishnu

Which sage, ascetic, hero, poet, learned or virtuous man in this world, greed has not mocked? Again, whom has the infatuation of Lakshmi (goddess of wealth) not perverted? Who has not been deafened by the lust for supremacy? Which person has not been smitten by the arrow-like glances of a fawn-eyed young woman?


http://hariharji.blogspot.com/2012/03/6 ... -kand.html

[American Dream]

BAD TRIP TO EDGEWOOD

[American Dream]

Here is the rest of "Bad Trip to Edgewood":

[American Dream]

http://www.negrophonic.com/2013/mudd-up ... never-die/

[American Dream]

"The trip is the moment where the spectacle has become so overdeveloped that it becomes participatory. It recovers the subjective activity lacking in the spectacle, but runs into the limits of the world the spectacle has made - limits absent in the spectacle precisely because it is separate from daily life."

The Society of Situationism and Notes Towards a Situationist Manifesto

[American Dream]

http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/arch ... ernational

The Acid: on sustained experiment with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD by “Sam”
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

The author of The Acid (Vision, London 2009) uses the pen name Sam, but is probably better known to most readers of this blog as Chris Gray. For me, and probably for many of you, The Acid reads like a continuation of where Chris left off in the essays he contributed to his English language Situationist anthology Leaving The 20th Century (1974). There he wrote: “What needs understanding is the state of paralysis everyone is in. Certainly all conditioning comes from society but it is anchored in the body and mind of each individual, and this is where it must be dissolved. Ultimately the problem is an emotional, not an intellectual one. All the analyses of reification in the world won’t cause a neurosis to budge an inch…”

In The Acid, Chris says of the counterculture: “Looking back on that time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of de-conditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set 60s and 70s radicalism apart from previous insurrectionary politics, it was insistence that individual subjectivity had to be transformed. The political was the personal. Politics were psychopolitics. Our own hearts and minds were precisely where the old order was ingrained – and if we couldn’t change ourselves, then what hope was there we could ever change the world?”

Many of those around Gray, including my mother Julia Callan-Thompson, took acid far more seriously than he did – but this was precisely because in the 1960s they were heads (whose attempts at personal transformation were doomed to failure because there was no accompanying social revolution) and he was a radical.

The Acid begins with a lucid overview of psychedelic literature and an account of Gray’s previous experiences with mind expanding substances. Chris also provides a potted autobiography, so that his readers can understand the material that comes up in the trips he describes. These vary from being joyous to total bummers. He was tripping every two to three weeks for three years as a self-prescribed acid therapy; an attempt to break down personal blockages. He tried different approaches to tripping: initially putting on a blindfold and listening to music in his flat, before moving on to outdoor excursions on Hampstead Heath. These accounts are very informative about ways of understanding and structuring trips, and will provide most readers with new approaches to the subject.

The back cover of the The Acid stresses that the breakthrough insight from these sessions is that the visions are serial. Drawing heavily on Stanislav Grof”s Realms of the Human Unconscious, Chris underlines the need to work through bad trips in order to transform oneself and achieve a sense of wholeness. The thrust of this argument I can run with, although I’m not sympathetic to all the psychoanalytic and religious elements drawn into the narrative. This is partly a generational difference, with the materials Gray used to structure his understanding of his ‘inner experiences’ very much mirroring those adopted by my mother and many of her friends in the 60s and 70s (that said, the psychedelic hermeticism my mother was involved in with Terry Taylor was quite different – and as far as I can tell, superior – to such deployments of Hinduism).

My view is that the varieties of Hinduism drawn upon by both my mother and Chris, and much of their ‘turned on’ generation, are too hierarchical to enable us to rediscover the forms of consciousness that characterised primitive communist societies. By way of contrast, shamanism (particularly in its voodoo and candomblé manifestations) does provide us with pathways to disalienation. LSD is, of course, a fantastic tool for inducing shamanistic experiences.

Mirroring Gray’s activities with King Mob in the 1960s, he draws on Keats and the English romantics as sources for understanding his experiences, whereas when it comes to LSD I would opt more for figures such as William Hope Hodgson (and others whose books currently exist outside the literary canon). This is not a matter of huge importance, and obviously reflects personal tastes and reading experiences. I went through Keats as a teenager and concluded I disliked his poetry.

The Acid is an engaging and thought provoking book, and while it is one man’s trip, it is also intended as a map that will assist any interested party in their own exploration of ‘inner space’. The text works on many levels, most obviously as a piece of writing that is a joy to read. If you have any interest in acid at all, then get your hands on this book!

But let’s give more or less the last word to Chris. He writes the following about his attendance at a San Francisco psychedelic conference in the early part of this millennium: “A well established, even well-heeled, cult I had been expecting; but not one thriving like this. The hall was so packed you could barely move. Of all the revolutionary groups of my youth – the Hippies, the New Left, the students, the blacks, the feminists – it was, however improbably, the druggies and the druggies alone who had made it through in one piece. And not just survived, but boomed.”

Well, throw in some voodoo or candomblé and I think we have a revolutionary situation!

This book has been republished by Park Street Press as The Acid Diaries by Christopher Gray and is currently fairly easy to obtain. (Note added 15 December 2010).

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!



King Mob’s Chris Gray RIP
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

I just got an email from Charlie Radcliffe telling me that Chris Gray died last Thursday morning (14 May 2009). Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that over a long period was to have an enormous impact.

I got to know Chris around 2002 when I was researching the life of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. At that time Chris had been ill with hepatitis c for some years, but it didn’t stop him from getting out on the streets to join anti-war and other demonstrations. He was extremely upbeat about the ongoing possibilities for the revolutionary transformation of society, and never complained about his illness. Chris told me several times he felt really sorry for those who got hep c from blood transfusions etc.; his attitude was that despite becoming ill from needle sharing, at least he’d had and enjoyed the smack that went with it.

When I saw Chris it was usually at his spartan flat in New Court, Hampstead. For health reasons, he was dividing his time between London and Cornwall. Despite the minimal decor in his London pad, Chris was really hospitable and always cooked for visitors. He viewed both me and his own daughter Mob as numbering among what he humorously referred to as ‘the lost children of Ladbroke Grove’. The first time I visited Chris, he told me he’d been aware of what I’d been doing for a long time, and said it was a shame we hadn’t met before because we had so much in common; viz, shared political and cultural interests alongside his acquaintance with my mother. Nonetheless, Chris hadn’t known my mother nearly as well as two of his former partners did in the late-sixties and early-seventies; both Brenda Grevelle and Hazel Gray saw her more much more regularly than he did back then.

During the years I knew Chris he was working on a book about LSD, and he seemed particularly curious about his own mother’s medical treatment with this drug in the 1950s. There is no need to repeat here the many anecdotes about Chris that have led some to view him as legendary, you can find them elsewhere but obviously not everything that has been written about him can be described as strictly factually accurate. Suffice to say I found Chris great company and appreciated him for his sharp mind. Rapping with him really brought home for me the fact that his translations of Situationist texts were intended to have an effect on the political climate of Britain and America; he was not aiming for the dry pseudo-objectivity of an academic.

Some of the lines that most impressed me when I first read the translations Chris made from French were his interpolations; added because he wanted to ensure these incendiary Situationist tracts worked for an Anglo-American audience. My absolute favourite among them is in his translation of On The Poverty Of Student Life. Here he threw in something along the lines of: “If the anarchists will tolerate each other they will tolerate anyone…” Chris assured me this addition was based on a throwaway line of conversation the pamphlet’s author Mustapha Khayati had tossed at him, he’d merely substituted ‘anarchists’ for ‘English’.

To the best of my knowledge, Hazel Gray died many many years ago. But Chris was still in close contact with Brenda Grevelle when I knew him. So my thoughts are with her and their daughter Mob.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

ACID: A NEW SECRET HISTORY OF LSD




“[Black has] no interest in drugs as a retreat from a brutal environment, or as a salve to assuage guilt and anxiety, or as a trick to vex one’s elders… He describes the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in mind-control trials and suggests that LSD was used by undercover secret service agents in Britain and the USA to infiltrate the radical youth movements of the 1960s. ‘Fans of the X-Files and such classic paranoia movies such as the Manchurian Candidate’, he declares, ‘will recognise the factual basis of some of the plot lines in the following examination of covert experimentation.’
Richard Davenport-Hines, Times Literary Supplement



This is great. Well-researched… this book covers all aspects of this story- from the CIA-fronted research project tothe Leary-Weather Underground imbroglios; from the “Great British LSD Plot” (Frendz, the Angry Brigade,et al) to the much revered Sam Hutt (Boeing Duveen)and his tincture of cannabis scam… And at the centre of it all is the enigmatic Ron Stark, a master puppeteer – an acid alchemist with links to both organised crime and the secret service (ie. a very heavy geezer).
J Barrington-Phillips, Sweet Floral Albion



“Acid isn’t the first book to delve into the dark history of the American and British intelligence agencies’ clandestine experimentation with lysergic acid diethylamide and other powerful hallucinogens, but it is undoubtedly one of the best… a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. By no means is all of Black’s information new, but he’s a fine writer, and his synthesis of many sources is excellent and extremely readable… Black concludes, as others have before him,that LSD became a vehicle for security agencies to infiltrate and control youth culture and radical groups, and he makes a convincing argument. The pleasant thing about Acid is that he entertains along the way.“
Barnes and Noble Review


http://blackbooksetc.wordpress.com/2008 ... ry-of-lsd/

[American Dream]

The Wise Investigator: Sayadaw U Tejaniya explains how taking an interest in life as it is can lead to liberation | Tricycle

Wisdom inclines toward the good but is not attached to it. It shies away from what is not good, but has no aversion to it.

…

You seem to emphasize practicing mindfulness in everyday life as opposed to sitting meditation. Can you say something about that? This is basically what the Buddha wanted, for people to practice all the time. I’m just advertising the Buddha’s words. Sitting meditation can still be part of the practice. I emphasize mindfulness in daily life because people neglect that so much, and it’s a very helpful, valid practice—especially when there’s not that much time to sit.

What role, then, does sitting meditation play? I often say that it’s not the posture that’s meditating; it’s the mind. That’s how I understand meditation.

How do you define meditation? It’s cultivating good qualities in the mind. It’s making conditions right so good qualities can arise. If, while sitting, you’re dreaming up things the mind can feel greedy about, I don’t call that meditation. That’s why I say that the mind working to do the meditation is more important than the posture. But people associate the word “meditation” with “sitting.” The two words have become synonymous, but this is a mistake. There are two kinds of meditation. In samatha [calm abiding], you need to sit and be still. My emphasis is Vipassana [insight meditation]. For Vipassana practice, sitting is not necessary. The purpose of practicing Vipassana is to cultivate wisdom.

To what end? We cultivate wisdom to understand, to see clearly, to know. You don’t remove the defilements; wisdom does.

…

You’ve spoken often of the depression you experienced as a layperson, and how you got through it. Can you say something about that? I began practicing at age fourteen, so long before I experienced depression I’d already developed the ability to regard anything that came up in my mind and deal with it objectively, without getting involved or taking it personally when ugly stuff came up. When I became depressed I could apply all these skills. I’ve been depressed three times. The first time I made a strong effort, just snapped myself out of it. And the second time, too. But each time the depression came back, and each time it came back stronger. The first two times I overcame depression, my recovery didn’t last long. I know now that the first two times I’d used effort but no wisdom, no understanding. During the last depression, I had no energy left in me to make the effort. Depression followed me everywhere.

What did you do? The key for me in dealing with my depression was right attitude. I realized I’d have to use my wisdom to learn about it, understand it.

How? By just recognizing the depression and being present with it. I would just recognize that this was nature, that this was just a quality of mind; it was not personal. I watched it continually to learn about it. Does it go away? Increase? What is the mind thinking? How do the thoughts affect feelings? I became interested.

You often use the word “interest” to describe this attitude of investigation. Why? I saw that when I’d do the work with interest, my investigation would bring some relief. Before that I’d been at the depression’s mercy, but I learned I could actually do something. I was choosing to be proactive, to find out about depression, and then it lightened.

…
Why do you think “interest” was successful while “effort” ultimately failed? With interest and investigation there’s wisdom. Effort alone, without wisdom—the way people generally understand it—is associated with strained activity because it is usually motivated by greed, aversion, and delusion. Effort with wisdom is a healthy desire to know and understandwhatever arises, without any preference for the outcome.

Are you using “interest” for right effort? Right effort is effort with wisdom. Because where there is wisdom, there is interest. The desire to know something is wisdom at work. Being mindful is not difficult. But it’s difficult to be continuously aware. For that you need right effort. But it does not require a great deal of energy. It’s relaxed perseverance in reminding yourself to be aware. When you are aware, wisdom unfolds naturally, and there is still more interest.

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You say that we can cultivate awareness in all our activities. Yet the challenge is great. Can you give a practice that is particularly suited to lay life, one you found useful as a businessman? For laypeople, speech is a great opportunity to practice. The four precepts of right speech [the precepts cautioning against false speech, malicious speech, harsh speech, and useless speech] gave a real boost to my awareness as a layperson and businessman. Since awareness and wisdom had to come into the picture whenever I spoke, I had to apply them all day.

Saying things you shouldn’t say or speaking much more than is necessary brings a lot of agitation to the mind. The other extreme, complete silence, or not speaking up when it is useful or necessary, is also problematic. Applying right speech is difficult in the beginning; it takes practice. But if you practice every time you talk to someone, the mind will learn how to be aware, to understand what it should or should not say, and to know when it is necessary to talk. Of course you will make many mistakes. Every mistake is a learning opportunity that will teach you how to do better next time.

You point out again and again that silence and sitting aren’t the be-all and end-all of practice. Why? [Laughs.] It’s when I began to really understand the nature of Vipassana that I began to say that. Very often we start with sitting, but we must remember what it’s used for. We sit to calm the mind, but once it’s calmer, we need to develop wisdom. To develop wisdom, we don’t have to be sitting. I don’t say people shouldn’t sit, I don’t want to eliminate sitting. But people begin to think, “I must sit.” You don’t have to.

You also discourage the common technique in Vipassana practice of “labeling” thoughts as a means of identifying them and letting them go. Why? Labels are to explain things to other people. Do you need to explain them to yourself?

The mind wanders—can’t labeling bring you back to yourself? You don’t have to use a conscious label. The mind knows what it’s thinking, the mind has already recognized its thinking by the time you label it. And there’s a risk. For example, if we label “pain, pain, pain,” it can get worse because the mind knows the meaning of the words it uses. It can reinforce pain. The point is not to change states, just to know them as they are. I would also like to add that we say the mind “wanders,” but in fact it doesn’t go anywhere. Thoughts arise, that’s all. The only problem is that we think they shouldn’t!

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But humor aside, different things work for different people. What would indicate we’re practicing in the right way? When there is awareness, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom; when we feel light, alert, and awake. Over time, you find you’re discovering that awareness becomes more firmly established and that the mind becomes steadier. You understand things you didn’t before. If, however, you’re getting tired, agitated, or depressed, you are practicing the wrong way. You always need to check the quality of mind; only if the quality is good are you practicing in the right way. This is how the quality of practice should be measured; not by posture or by the number of hours of sitting, walking, or standing meditation you do.

[American Dream]

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