Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

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

Postby American Dream » Fri Oct 17, 2014 12:26 am

From Deep Space to the Nine
How Gene Roddenberry was hired to prepare Earth for an alien invasion

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ImageWhat would you do if you were asked to write a movie preparing mankind for the arrival of a race of godlike alien beings? David Sutton examines on of the strangest episodes in the life of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.


By 1975, no one could deny that Gene Roddenberry – B17 pilot during WWII, commercial aviator, Los Angeles cop, television writer and creator of Star Trek – had enjoyed a varied career, but in May of that year it took a turn for the strange when he was approached with an unusual proposition by a wealthy Englishman called Sir John Whitmore.

Whitmore explained that he had sought out Roddenberry on behalf of an organisation calling itself Lab Nine. His proposal was that the TV producer and writer should pen a film screenplay based on the group’s research into the paranormal and its belief that Earth was soon to be visited by extraterrestrial beings traveling in spacecraft; Roddenberry, in other words, was to prepare the ground for the aliens’ arrival by writing a movie script that would prime the human race for first contact.

Lab Nine was, in fact, the direct descendent of the Round Table Foundation, an organisation set up in Glen Cove, Maine, in 1948 by MD, inventor, and paranormal researcher Dr Andrija Puharich (with, some claim, backing from the US military and/or intelligence agencies) to study telepathy, ESP and related phenomena; the celebrated psychics Peter Hurkos and Eileen Garrett, for instance, passed through the Foundation’s doors, as did an Indian medium by the name of Dr Vinod, who promptly went into a trance and began to channel messages from mysterious entities calling themselves ‘The Nine Principles and Forces’.

Vinod had no memory of the messages, and soon returned to India, but Puharich continued to receive communications from ‘The Nine’, initially via flying saucer cultists Charles and Lillian Laughead, [1] and later from none other than Uri Geller, who Puharich had met in 1971 and helped catapult to international fame.

According to Puharich, in his bizarre biography Geller, he began hypnotising his young Israeli protégé only to discover that he was channeling an extraterrestrial intelligence called Spectra, a hawk-headed super computer entity aboard a spacecraft. Puharich suspected a connection to The Nine, which Spectra confirmed, claiming that it was they who had ‘programmed’ Geller with his remarkable powers when he was a three-year-old child. Puharich, by now convinced that Geller was himself an ET, planned to use the Israeli’s psychic powers to help bring The Nine’s message to the world and prepare humanity for the imminent arrival of their spacecraft. [2]

When Geller, presumably sensing that things were about to get a little too strange, backed off, Puharich wasted no time in finding others who could get in touch with the space entities, eventually lighting on the unlikely team of former racing driver and business coach Sir John Whitmore, Florida healer and psychic Phyllis Schlemmer and the pseudonymous ‘Bobby Horne’, a cook from Daytona who became the new channeller of the extra terrestrial communications. ‘Horne’ burnt out quickly; he became suicidal and fled after suspecting that he had become the victim of cosmic jokers. From this point on, Schlemmer became the group’s official channeller and the ‘voice’ of The Nine.

By now the circle had a home – Lab Nine, a 15-acre estate in Ossining, New York, where prominent visitors from the worlds of science, politics and business were greeted in some style; those spending time there included, allegedly, various Stanford Research Institute scientists, Supernature author Lyall Watson, [3] quantum physicist Jack Sarfatti and counterculture icon (and soon to be wanted murderer) Ira Einhorn (see FT166:24–25).

Gene Roddenberry’s name was added to this heady mix when the residents of Lab Nine decided that they needed some PR in advance of the landings, now scheduled for 1976 (like most such deadlines, it would become something of a moveable feast). Roddenberry, though, was perhaps a misguided choice – an avowed humanist with a deep mistrust of all organised religions as well as a hard-line sceptic when it came to tales of UFOs and alien visitors. He did, though, have an interest in altered states of consciousness. [4] Psi phenomena in particular fascinated him, although in a 1968 letter to SF legend John W Campbell, who’d alerted Roddenberry to some particularly outrageous claims of something that sounds remarkably like an experiment in deadly remote viewing, Roddenberry wrote:

I do believe we have something loosely and incorrectly tagged a ‘sixth sense’ and I do believe there exist such things as clairvoyance and psychokinesis. But as for a guy killing Japanese beetles from 500 miles away just by looking at a picture of the field, in fact doing it so selectively he can kill them off one leaf and leave them alive on another, my life experience adds up to a belief that this is impossible. In other words, I’ve read and seen enough examples and read enough documented reports concerning instances of telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis to indicate that we do indeed have latent abilities in these areas which we do not yet understand or really know how to use. Those instances which do happen are largely haphazard or the ‘power’ ebbs and flows to a point where it is rarely controllable enough to produce any long-term or meaningful results on a scientifically controlled test.



Continues at: http://www.forteantimes.com/specials/st ... _nine.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Oct 17, 2014 12:44 am

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/16/docume ... tists.html

Documentary about an artist's relationship with extraterrestrials

David Pescovitz at 6:18 am Thu, Oct 16, 2014




Brad Abrahams is making a documentary about a 70-year-old man named David Huggins who has had a lifetime of close encounters with extraterrestrials (including losing his virginity to one) and shares his experiences through oil paintings. Above, the trailer for "Love And Saucers: The Far Out World Of David Huggins"
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Oct 24, 2014 10:53 am

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/53/archibald.php

Mass Effect

Sasha Archibald


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A meeting place for flying objects, identified and unidentified. Undated postcard of Giant Rock during the Van Tassel family’s occupancy of the site. The café sign features an image of a UFO.

Two hours east of Los Angeles, three hours west of Las Vegas, and many miles from the nearest traffic light or roadside diner lies a single boulder in the Mojave Desert claimed to be the largest rock in the world—at least until 2000, when a large chunk broke off, neatly and without provocation. Now split in two, it is still called Giant Rock. Graffiti blackens the lower surface and ATVs roar nearby. There is an occasional tourist.

For two eccentric Californians, Frank Critzer and George Van Tassel, the immense girth of Giant Rock was not simple geological happenstance but a sign portending mystical significance. In the hands of these two men, Giant Rock became the locus of a strange episode in the twentieth-century history of the American West. Like all Western heroes, Critzer and Van Tassel felt themselves poised between worlds, and at the threshold of civilization. Both felt vitalized and validated by the rock, and both saw it as a natural hub, laboring for decades to make it a gathering place. Absolutely inert and yet fecund, Giant Rock was less a rock than a destiny.

There is little trace of this history at the rock itself, except for a dusty slab of concrete. The concrete conceals a cavern, built by Critzer as a home, and later used by Van Tassel for telecommunication sessions with aliens. No one knows how Critzer stumbled on Giant Rock in the 1930s, or why he decided to move there, but he was obviously clever and resourceful. Critzer saw that the rock’s immense shadow offered succor from the heat and, following the lead of desert tortoises that dig holes in the sand in which to cool themselves, he used dynamite to blast out an abode beneath its north face. Engineering a rainwater-collection system and a narrow tunnel for ventilation, the home he excavated was never warmer than eighty degrees Fahrenheit and never cooler than fifty-five. Perfectly suited to its site, Critzer’s abode refuted the paradigmatic inhospitality of the desert.

The area surrounding Giant Rock at the time was untrammeled, uninhabited government land, marked on maps as “unsurveyed.”1 Critzer was a squatter, and his closest neighbor, Charles Reche, a long five miles away.2 No more than half a dozen men had seen Giant Rock in the last two decades, Reche told Critzer, and Critzer, motivated by entrepreneurial ambition, loneliness, or the pioneer’s sense of duty to domesticate the landscape, took that as a challenge. Giant Rock sits beside an ancient lakebed, flat and firm, which Critzer transformed into an airplane runway, dragging a leveler behind his 1917 automobile. Tacking up a windsock and whitewashing a nearby boulder—Giant Rock is only the largest of many towering rocks in the vicinity—Critzer opened Giant Rock Airport for business. Then he turned to the terrain, using his car to clear thirty-three miles of road that eventually connected Giant Rock to two mines, Reche’s home, and, finally, the nearest paved street. A 1937 article about Critzer in the Los Angeles Times admiringly described these homemade roads as “the straightest desert road that anybody ever saw,” reckoning that Critzer held the world record for one-man road building.3

By 1941, Critzer’s Giant Rock Airport averaged a plane a day, flown mainly by amateur pilots who also kept Critzer supplied with food and company. As legend goes, his visitors ate German pancakes at his kitchen table, their legs propped up on spare boxes of dynamite. Critzer hoped to spur investment in the area, and fantasized about opening a winter resort. His plans came to naught. On 25 July 1942, during a police visit gone awry, Critzer’s stash of dynamite exploded and he was killed. His exit from Giant Rock is as shrouded in mystery as his entrance; according to various accounts, the three officers were inquiring about missing dynamite, or gasoline theft, or the antennae Critzer used to attract a radio signal. Some speculated that the combination of a German name and isolated airfield during World War II justified a visit. Perhaps the explosion was an accident, or perhaps it happened exactly as the officers claimed, with Critzer shrieking, “You’re not taking me out of here alive! I’m going, but another way, and you’re going with me!” before he blew himself up.4

One man was particularly intrigued by these events, and made his way out to Giant Rock from Los Angeles as soon as he could.5 Thirty-two-year-old George Van Tassel noted that when he arrived, Critzer’s cavern was stripped of belongings and the car gone. The only trace of Giant Rock’s tenant was a bit of blood splattered on the walls of his cave. The United States still had several laws in place that rewarded intrepid settlers with free land, such that Critzer’s industriousness at Giant Rock almost certainly would have guaranteed him legal ownership. At his death, however, the land reverted back to the government’s newly created Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Van Tassel was not deterred, and began brewing a plan to relocate. Five years later, in 1947, he managed to lease the property from the BLM and left Los Angeles for good, bringing along his wife, Eva, and their three young daughters.


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Giant Rock today. Photo Sasha Archibald.

There is little record of Van Tassel’s life other than his own words. He dropped out of high school in Ohio and emigrated to southern California, joining the World War II-era aeronautics industry at a time of unparalleled growth and expansion. Though he later glorified his career, describing himself as a flight test engineer, test pilot, or even personal pilot to Howard Hughes, he told the 1940 census-takers he was a tradesman, a tool and die maker. At the time, he was working for the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica and living in a modest home with his wife and children, as well as his mother-in-law and his wife’s three younger siblings. He moved from Douglas to Hughes Aircraft, and then to Lockheed, leaving the factories for good in 1947, a year of massive layoffs as aeronautics production recalibrated to peacetime. The vacancy of Giant Rock must have presented itself as a golden opportunity.

Relieved of his nine-to-five job and invigorated by the desert environs, Van Tassel began a flurry of activity—writing, meditating, publishing, and building. He founded a religious non-profit, the Ministry of Universal Wisdom, and an associated college, and began mass mailing its official organ, the Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom. In a few short years, Van Tassel emerged as a central figure in atomic-era ufology. His first book, I Rode a Flying Saucer (1952), was a diary of alien messages “radioned” by otherworldly intelligences to Van Tassel’s telepathic mind; shortly after, he met aliens in the flesh, whom he described as “white people with a good healthy tan,” all measuring exactly five feet six inches.6 The leader, Solganda, spoke excellent English “equivalent to [actor] Ronald Colman,” and through thought transference conveyed to Van Tassel directions for building a time machine, the Integratron.7 The Integratron was to become Van Tassel’s lasting monument.

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Van Tassel’s boulder, crowned with a car hoisted using a windlass and cable, was featured as a “Picture of the Week” in the 15 October 1951 issue of Life. Photo Larry Frank.

Like an automatic car wash, the Integratron was an amalgam of architecture and machine. Its purpose was not to transport a fixed body to a different time, as time machines typically do, but to eliminate time’s effect on a body; the machine produced time, rather than suck it away. An architect drafted plans for the building’s distinctive dome-shaped design—two stories high, supported by arched fir beams brought in from Washington state, constructed without any metal, and painted a brilliant white—and Van Tassel broke ground in 1954, on a plot of land three miles south of Giant Rock. Construction proceeded in piecemeal fashion for twenty-four years, up until Van Tassel’s death in 1978. Van Tassel never pronounced his time machine complete, perhaps because he couldn’t achieve the promised effect, or perhaps because funds solicited to complete the Integratron constituted a crucial source of income. It still stands, carefully maintained and fantastically incongruous with the contorted Joshua trees and endless-shades-of-beige shrubbery.

Devotees claim that Van Tassel’s plans for completing the design were stolen, but he may have had no plans. He alternately described the device as very complicated and very simple, and was always inscrutable when pressed about mechanical details. During one television interview, he boasted vaguely that the Integratron was built following the directives of a seventeen-page equation given to him by aliens and tested by specialists in Chicago; elsewhere he said the formula was very simple and made known to him by alien thought transference: f=1/t where (f) is frequency and (t) is time.

In truth, the Integratron was an elaboration of the research of George Lakhovsky, an iconoclastic Russian scientist whose writings circulated among anti-establishment types in southern California. Lakhovsky understood bodies not as factories or battlefields, but as electrical conductors, an analogy that reached back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies in bioelectricity.8 Individual cells, Lakhovsky argued in his 1925 book, The Secret of Life: Cosmic Rays and Radiations of Living Beings, are designed to receive and transmit electric impulses, with each of the microscopic components of a cell analogous to a component in an electrical battery. Electromagnetic energy causes cells to infinitesimally move back and forth, and the rate of these movements directly corresponds to the health of the living creature. When cells do not receive enough, or the wrong sort of, electromagnetic stimulation, their vibrations slow; a man dies when his cells cease to oscillate.

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1957 Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention at Giant Rock. The fifth gathering of this annual meeting was photographed by Ralph Crane for Life’s 27 May 1957 issue. The image above depicts the cavern blasted out of the rock by Critzer.

Lakhovsky believed that the rate of cellular oscillation could be increased through the body’s proximity to metal conductors. Donning a metal bracelet or attaching metal plates to the soles of shoes would create an uptick in cellular vibration and thus improve health. (In Lakhovsky’s limited experiments, a young woman suffering excessive flatulence was cured by wearing a heavy metal belt, and a “cancerous” geranium began to thrive when a coiled wire was attached to its stem.)9 Lakhovsky’s theories in fact culminated in a device designed to cure cancer, the Multiple Wave Oscillator. This machine existed in several iterations but the main components were two large copper coils of wire buzzing with high-frequency voltage. (Later, Lakhovsky came to believe the coils alone were sufficient, and far more convenient.) The patient sat between these coils for healing sessions of varying duration. The copper coils intensified some cosmic rays and filtered out others, creating a restorative electromagnetic charge that was received by the body’s two coil-shaped receptors—the wavy mitochondria inside each cell and the inner cochlea of the ear—and directly conveyed to individual cells.

Van Tassel made a few inspired changes to Lakhovsky’s invention. He increased the size of the coil so that it was as large as the building itself, lining the entire width of the Integratron with thin copper wire that spirals out from the building’s inner core.10 The building’s current owners, three sisters who use the space for “sound baths”—sonorous performances of tonal reverberations made by sweeping the rims of quartz bowls with rubber mallets—suggest that the healing area of the Integratron is at the center of this copper spiral, within the building’s circular core. Van Tassel had originally planned otherwise; subjects would be transformed, he wrote, as they walked the interior perimeter of the structure, entering one door and exiting another, in a precise 270-degree arc. In any case, whereas Lakhovsky sought to cure cancer by placing his subjects between two spirals, Van Tassel hoped to restore youth by immersing his subject within a spiral. The other difference, of course, is that while Lakhovsky’s device was transportable, Van Tassel’s was not. Had the Integratron worked as promised, it would have been a healing experience bound up in landscape and pilgrimage. Indeed, even today, it is impossible to disentangle the various effects of the copper spirals, the domed sanctuary, and the desert calm.

As he was building the Integratron, Van Tassel continued to host an annual UFO convention, an event he first convened in 1953. Critzer’s roads were put to good use as ufologists followed Van Tassel’s hand-drawn map, camping out nearby, exchanging grainy photographs, and beseeching the skies for a mass visitation. There were speeches from a podium almost as tall as Giant Rock and performances by airplane stuntmen; in 1960, Van Tassel went so far as to use the convention to launch his presidential campaign. Attendance was reported at anywhere between three hundred and twelve thousand, depending on the year and source, but it remained a newsworthy event for well over a decade until, in 1970, the Los Angeles Times hinted the Van Tassel might cancel for lack of interest. “People see so many flying saucers, they’re just not a novelty any more,” he lamented.11

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The Integratron today. Photo Sasha Archibald.

Van Tassel continued writing, however, eventually publishing four books.12 His later texts are especially scattered and repetitive, and sometimes degenerate into nonsensical wordplay. Sundry bits of Mesmerism, Mormonism, Scientology, and the writings of Nikola Tesla are patched together with Van Tassel’s tendency to megalomania and enthusiasm for fringe science. He endorses studies proving that a person can tune into the frequency of another by touching a drop of their blood; a head of cabbage mourns the death of another head of cabbage; clothes can be cleaned with sound; breathing patterns will make a man levitate; razors set beneath an inverted pyramid-shape will never dull; and by encircling the city with seven pyramids, Los Angeles could eliminate smog. Sprinkled amid such claims are his biblical interpretations. As a Christian ufologist, Van Tassel understood the Bible as a literal history of interplanetary visitations. Angel, he clarified, is just another word for alien, and the Ark of the Covenant is correctly spelled the Arc of the Covenant.13

At dusk at Giant Rock, Van Tassel’s fanaticisms seem benign. To the urban traveler, the desert landscape feels so still and empty that to entertain an improbable something is a sympathetic alternative to accepting an apparent nothing. Van Tassel and Critzer understood the desert void to be a deception; emptiness was only a disguise for an invisible force field, a potent thrum of archaic energy. Van Tassel liked to muse on the fact that his first name, George, contained not one but two combinations of the letters ge, which he understood to be an acronym for Generate Electricity, while Critzer, not to be outdone by his successor, is remembered for boasting that his body was so full of energy he could recharge batteries by sleeping with them under his pillow. In the midst of a blistering nothing, Giant Rock was the totemic conductor of a great something.

Lynn J. Rogers, “Pioneer Establishes Unique Desert Home,” The Los Angeles Times, 9 May 1937.
Reche was the owner of an original Mojave homestead dating from the previous century, and also a local hero; he was a former police sheriff permanently injured during the famous 1909 manhunt for Willie Boy, a Chemehuevi Indian who kidnapped a girl to whom he was engaged, killed her father, and escaped to the backcountry. Led by a bloodthirsty posse, the manhunt lasted nearly three weeks and ended in the girl’s murder and Willie Boy’s suicide.
Lynn J. Rogers, “Pioneer Establishes Unique Desert Home.”
“Dynamite Suicide Climaxes Desert Search,” The Los Angeles Times, 26 July 1942.
Van Tassel claimed he knew Critzer from a chance meeting years previous when Critzer had stopped by an auto repair garage in Santa Monica owned by Van Tassel’s uncle. According to Van Tassel’s story, Critzer was down on his luck and needed a car repair; they fixed the car for free, let Critzer crash on the garage floor, and sent him off the next day with $30 and a backseat of groceries. Critzer subsequently mailed Van Tassel a map of his whereabouts and Van Tassel made the first of many visits to Giant Rock. The story may be mostly true, but has some inconsistencies. Van Tassel described the automobile as a 1917 four-cylinder Essex, for instance, a model that didn’t exist, and the gift of $30—$400 in today’s currency—seems an extraordinarily generous amount for a young boy and auto mechanic during the Great Depression.
“The Extraordinary Equation of George Van Tassel,” television interview by Jack Webster for Webster Reports, aired on KVOS, 18 June 1964. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZbFsFWk__c.
“The Extraordinary Equation of George Van Tassel.”
Van Tassel likely encountered Lakhovsky’s work not through primary texts but through excerpts published by the Borderland Researchers Foundation. The Foundation also published directions for a DIY Multiple Wave Oscillator (MWO), no bigger than a briefcase and under fourteen pounds: “The deluxe MWO diagrammed here can be built by any intelligent 16-year-old with readily available electronic parts for under $35.” The instructions resulted in at least one FDA sting. See Bob Beck, “The Russian Lakhovsky Rejuventation Machine,” Journal of Borderland Research (November 1963), reprinted in Thomas Brown, ed., The Lakhovsky Multiple Wave Oscillator Handbook (Garberville, CA: Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, 1988), p. 1.
Lakhovsky reported that plants will grow “tumors similar to those of cancer in animals” when they are inoculated with Bacterium tumefaciens. See Lakhovsky, “Curing Cancerous Plants with Ultra Radio Frequencies,” Radio News (February 1925), reprinted in Thomas Brown, ed., The Lakhovsky Multiple Wave Oscillator Handbook, pp. 34–37.
Aluminum foil was to have lined the interior of the Integratron’s high, rounded ceiling and intensified the electromagnetic rays.
Charles Hillinger, “Flying Saucer Business Not What It Was,” The Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1970.
He also claimed to have given exactly 297 lectures and appeared on 409 radio and TV shows, numbers that cannot be substantiated.
Van Tassel’s interpretation of Genesis is particularly disconcerting: Eve was not a woman but a wild animal, and the original sin to which Christian doctrine refers was bestiality. Through Eve’s debased genetic line descend all the horrors of the modern world: materialism, corruption, nuclear bombs, and even taxes.


Sasha Archibald is a writer and curator in Los Angeles, and a frequent contributor to Cabinet.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Oct 24, 2014 9:19 pm

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv- ... 1at6m.html

Bert Newton given LSD for mental collapse: book

October 23, 2014

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Bert Newton's unwitting LSD trip was "like being thrown into the Indian Ocean without a life jacket".


Bert Newton suffered a "ghastly" LSD trip after the legendary Australian entertainer was injected with the hallucinogenic drug as part of treatment for a mental breakdown, a new book reveals.

In his unauthorised biography, titled Bert, actor and producer-turned author Graeme Blundell details Newton's terrifying experience when his doctors tried out the radical treatment in the 1960s.

In 1964, the then 25-year-old was admitted to a Melbourne psychiatric ward after a severe breakdown. He soon returned to work at Channel Nine, but after several relapses resigned from the network on his doctor's orders.

Newton embarked on full-time treatment, during which he underwent one particularly radical method.

"His recovery was set back when a doctor into whose hands he had entrusted his return to health injected him with something called LSD," Blundell writes in the book.

Blundell writes that Newtown had "no idea that a drug of that nature was going to be given to him".

"It was like being thrown into the middle of the Indian Ocean with a life jacket," Blundell quoted Newton as saying.

"You knew that, for a moment, you could float, but you kept wondering for how long you'd be safe," Newton is quoted as saying.

The book says the potent dosage led Newtown to have a "bad trip", which he described as "the most ghastly experience" of his life.

Noting Newton's distress, the treating doctor was forced to administer another drug to neutralise the effect, which Newton described as "like coming back from Hell".



The LSD experiments on patients at Sacred Heart Hospital near Melbourne that Bert Newton suffered through are also mentioned in a very different and intriguing context, here:


We expose Ronald Conway, the church's "hands-on" psychologist

By a Broken Rites researcher

For thirty years a prominent Australian Catholic psychologist, Ronald Conway, had a part-time role in assessing and helping trainee priests in the church's Melbourne seminary. Conway also worked as a consulting psychologist in psychiatric hospitals and in private practice, and some of his male patients say that Conway touched them sexually when they consulted him for professional help.

These former patients say that, during "therapy", they were masturbated by Conway, who encouraged the patients to touch him sexually in the same way as he touched them.

These disclosures throw new light upon the church's problem of clergy sexual abuse, as Conway was regarded highly by Australian Catholic leaders.

The seminary was preparing the trainees for their future life of so-called celibacy. In articles that he wrote for newspapers, Conway pointed out that being "celibate" merely means not being married. Furthermore, he pointed out, "clerical concubinage and clerical homosexuality have been commonplace in church history".

Conway himself never married. So, by his own definition, he too was "celibate", even when he was sexually touching one of his private patients.

We will return to Conway's hands-on therapy later in this article.

Praised by archbishops
Conway died on 16 March 2009, aged in his early eighties. On 26 March 2009, he was commemorated by a requiem mass in Melbourne's cathedral.

Cardinal George Pell, of Sydney, sent condolences. Before becoming an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne in 1987, Pell had been the head of the Melbourne seminary and he is said to have liked Conway's work in assessing trainee priests.

At the requiem mass, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart gave a homily praising Conway. Hart acknowledged that Conway had been an adviser to the Melbourne archdiocese on priestly vocations. He paid tribute to Conway's "immense contribution to the evaluation of seminarians, the ongoing assistance given to clerical and religious [people], helping people to discern their vocation."

Hart added: "We shall never know how much following up he did with these people — in some cases, over many years."

A bachelor advising on marriage
Archbishop Hart said that Conway also helped the Melbourne archdiocesan Marriage Tribunal — where Catholic couples must reveal their marital (including sexual) problems when asking the church for an annulment of an unsuccessful marriage.

Hart said that the Melbourne archdiocesan records "contain many psychological evaluations, especially in our Marriage Tribunal", written by Conway.

In an article in the Weekend Australian on 21 March 2009, federal politician Tony Abbott (who himself was originally a trainee priest in a Catholic seminary in New South Wales) wrote about Conway: "He never contemplated joining the priesthood (as might have been expected of a bright young man of his temperament in that era) and never seems seriously to have considered marriage. He seems largely to have come to terms with any demons of his own and, in any event, chose not to make a spectacle of himself."

To what "demons" was Abbott referring? And what did he mean about Conway not "making a spectacle of himself?

Conway's career
Ronald Victor Conway (born on 4 May 1927) came from humble beginnings. Educated at Catholic parish schools in Melbourne, he left school early but later returned to studies, eventually working as a secondary teacher. From 1955 to 1961 he taught English and history at De La Salle College in Malvern, in Melbourne's inner south-east.

In 1988, aged in his early sixties, Conway published an autobiographical book, Conway's Way, in which he tells some things (but not everything) about his rise to prominence as a psychotherapist.

He had a Bachelor of Arts degree which included studies in psychology. In the 1950s, psychology graduates were not as numerous as in later decades. In 1960 (according to Conway's autobiography), Melbourne psychiatrist Dr Eric Seal (a fellow Catholic) needed a psychologist to help provide counselling to patients. Seal invited Ron Conway to share Seal's consulting rooms in Collins Street in central Melbourne. From about 1960, with help from Seal, Conway also developed a role for himself as an honorary consulting psychologist at a large Catholic hospital in Melbourne, St Vincent's. In 1964, Seal became the head of St Vincent's psychiatric department, giving Conway a further boost in a psychotherapy career. Seal and Conway also saw patients at the Catholic Church's Sacred Heart Hospital, Moreland, in Melbourne's north.

Conway developed contacts with the Melbourne Catholic archdiocesan welfare agency. Through such avenues, various clients were referred to Conway for private counselling, which provided Conway with an income.

In the 1970s, Conway lived in a house in Torrington Street, Canterbury (in Melbourne's east), and many therapy clients visited him there for private counselling. In the early 1980s, he moved to a house in Swinburne Avenue, Hawthorn (also in Melbourne's east), and he continued seeing clients there.

A number of his male clients say that Conway befriended them during therapy. He continued associating with them socially, in some cases for many years after the original consultations. Occasionally, Conway would arrange for a former male therapy client to move into Conway's house as a live-in friend.

Conway and the drug LSD
Beginning in 1963 (according to Conway's autobiography, page 98), he was involved in experimenting with psychodelic drugs on patients. He says these drugs eventually included LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, which has sometimes also been known as "acid") and "the milder psilocybin (derived from the magic mushroom)". He says that such drugs were "stocked in the special restricted cupboards of the hospital pharmacy".

Conway writes: "[At St Vincent's psychiatric department] we helped many a patient with LSD when all other resources, counselling, medication, psychotherapy, ECT [electro-convulsive therapy] and even thoughts of psychosurgery, had been abandoned. From my own work I concluded that no more appropriate substance for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive neuroses existed than LSD in resourceful hands.

"Its virtual abandonment due to hippy excesses and irresponsible and ignorant reporting remains one of the great tragedies of modern psychiatry [pages 98-99]."

Newhaven private hospital
Conway's autobiography says that he began his LSD uu administered LSD to them at the Newhaven psychiatric hospital which was situated at 86 Normanby Road, Kew, in Melbourne's inner east.

In the late 1960s and during the 1970s, Newhaven hospital was owned and managed by Marion Villimek, a member of a "New Age" sect called the Santiniketan Park Association, also known as "The Family". A leader of the sect, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, was also an administrator at the Newhaven. Conway, Eric Seal and other therapists hired consulting rooms there on a sessional basis, and were not involved with the sect. Newhaven ceased being a hospital in 1992.


Continues at: http://www.brokenrites.org.au/drupal/node/136
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Fri Oct 24, 2014 9:31 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Sun Oct 26, 2014 12:17 pm

I don't have the time or energy to reproduce the full article with all its embedded links here, but it leads towards a conclusion that is very relevant to the above allegations of Roman Catholic linkages to sexual abuse and LSD experimentation in Australia:



http://visupview.blogspot.com/2014/10/o ... t-iii.html
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 27, 2014 3:58 pm

The Last Amazon

Wonder Woman returns.

BY JILL LEPORE


Image
Wonder Woman, introduced in 1941,
was a creation of utopian feminism,
inspired by Margaret Sanger and the ideals of free love.



Superman débuted in 1938, Batman in 1939, Wonder Woman in 1941. She was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. A press release explained, “ ‘Wonder Woman’ was conceived by Dr. Marston to set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men” because “the only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.” Marston put it this way: “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”


“In the days of ancient Greece, many centuries ago, we Amazons were the foremost nation in the world,” Hippolyte explains to her daughter in “Introducing Wonder Woman,” the character’s début, in a 1941 issue of All-Star Comics. “In Amazonia, women ruled and all was well.” Alas, that didn’t last: men conquered and made women slaves. The Amazons escaped, sailing across the ocean to an uncharted island where they lived in peace for centuries until, one day, Captain Steve Trevor, a U.S. Army officer, crashed his plane there. “A man!” Princess Diana cries when she finds him. “A man on Paradise Island!” After rescuing him, she flies him in her invisible plane to “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”

Wonder Woman’s origin story comes straight out of feminist utopian fiction. In the nineteenth century, suffragists, following the work of anthropologists, believed that something like the Amazons of Greek myth had once existed, a matriarchy that predated the rise of patriarchy. “The period of woman’s supremacy lasted through many centuries,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in 1891. In the nineteen-tens, this idea became a staple of feminist thought. The word “feminism,” hardly ever used in the United States before 1910, was everywhere by 1913. The suffrage movement had been founded on a set of ideas about women’s supposed moral superiority. Feminism rested on the principle of equality. Suffrage was a single, elusive political goal. Feminism’s demand for equality was far broader. “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,” as one feminist explained. They shared an obsession with Amazons.

In 1913, Max Eastman, a founder of the New York Men’s League for Woman Suffrage and the editor of The Masses, published “Child of the Amazons and Other Poems.” In the title poem, an Amazonian girl falls in love with a man but can’t marry him until “the far age when men shall cease/ Their tyranny, Amazons their revolt.” The next year, Inez Haynes Gillmore, who, like Mary Woolley, the president of Mount Holyoke College, had helped found college suffrage leagues, published a novel called “Angel Island,” in which five American men are shipwrecked on a desert island that turns out to be inhabited by “super-humanly beautiful” women with wings, who, by the end of the novel, walk “with the splendid, swinging gait of an Amazon.”

Gillmore and Max Eastman’s sister Crystal were members of Heterodoxy, a group of Greenwich Village feminists. So was Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In 1915, Gilman published “Herland,” in which women live free from men, bearing only daughters, by parthenogenesis. (On Paradise Island, Queen Hippolyte carves her daughter out of clay.) In these stories’ stock plots, men are allowed to live with women only on terms of equality, and, for that to happen, there has to be a way for the men and women to have sex without the women getting pregnant all the time. The women in Gilman’s utopia practice what was called “voluntary motherhood.” “You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity,” Gilman wrote, “but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.” At the time, contraception was illegal. In 1914, Margaret Sanger, another Greenwich Village feminist who attended meetings of Heterodoxy, started a magazine called The Woman Rebel, in which she coined the phrase “birth control” and insisted that “the right to be a mother regardless of church or state” was the “basis of Feminism.”

In 1917, when motion pictures were still a novelty and the United States had only just entered the First World War, Sanger starred in a silent film called “Birth Control”; it was banned. A century of warfare, feminism, and cinema later, superhero movies—adaptations and updates of mid-twentieth-century comic books whose plots revolve around anxieties about mad scientists, organized crime, tyrannical super-states, alien invaders, misunderstood mutants, and world-ending weapons—are the super-blockbusters of the last superpower left standing. No one knows how Wonder Woman will fare onscreen: there’s hardly ever been a big-budget superhero movie starring a female superhero. But more of the mystery lies in the fact that Wonder Woman’s origins have been, for so long, so unknown. It isn’t only that Wonder Woman’s backstory is taken from feminist utopian fiction. It’s that, in creating Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston was profoundly influenced by early-twentieth-century suffragists, feminists, and birth-control advocates and that, shockingly, Wonder Woman was inspired by Margaret Sanger, who, hidden from the world, was a member of Marston’s family.


Beginning in 1925, Marston, Holloway, Byrne, and a librarian named Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, whom Marston had met during the war, attended regular meetings at the Boston apartment of Marston’s aunt, Carolyn Keatley. Keatley believed in the teachings contained in a book called “The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ,” by a preacher named Levi H. Dowling. She thought that she was living in the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the beginning of a new astrological age, an age of love: the New Age. Minutes for the meetings held at Keatley’s apartment describe a sexual “clinic,” involving Love Leaders, Mistresses (or Mothers), and Love Girls. A Love Leader, a Mistress, and their Love Girl form a Love Unit, a perfect constellation. There is much in the minutes about sex itself; e.g., “During the act of intercourse between the male and his Mistress, the male’s love organ stimulates the inner love organs of the Mistress, and not the external love organs,” but “if anyone wishes to develop the consciousness of submission, he or she must keep the sexual orgasm in check, and thus permit the nervous energy to flow freely and uninterruptedly into the external genital organs.” There is also much in the minutes about Marston’s theory of dominance and submission; females, “in their relation to males, expose their bodies and use various legitimate methods of the Love sphere to create in males submission to them, the women mistresses or Love leaders, in order that they, the Mistresses, may submit in passion to the males.”

In 1926, Olive Byrne, then twenty-two, moved in with Marston and Holloway; they lived as a threesome, “with love making for all,” as Holloway later said. Olive Byrne is the mother of two of Marston’s four children; the children had three parents. “Both Mommies and poor old Dad” is how Marston put it.

Holloway said that Marston, Holloway, and Byrne’s living arrangements began as an idea: “A new way of living has to exist in the minds of men before it can be realized in actual form.” It had something to do with Sanger’s “Woman and the New Race.” Holloway tried to explain what she’d taken away from reading it: “The new race will have a far greater love capacity than the current one and I mean physical love as well as other forms.” And it had something to do with what Havelock Ellis, a British doctor who was one of Margaret Sanger’s lovers, called “the erotic rights of women.” Ellis argued that the evolution of marriage as an institution had resulted in the prohibiting of female sexual pleasure, which was derided as wanton and abnormal. Erotic equality, he insisted in 1918, was no less important than political equality, if more difficult to achieve. “The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box,” he wrote. “That is why the erotic rights of women have been the last of all to be attained.”



http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/ ... ast-amazon
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 28, 2014 9:57 am

http://psypressuk.com/2014/03/25/a-psyc ... 1938-2012/


A Psychedelic Trickster: A Steve Abrams Obituary (1938-2012)
BY PSYCHICDELI · MARCH 25, 2014

ImageThis obituary appeared in the PsypressUK 2013: Anthology of Pharmacography.

I got to know Steve in 2006 after having seen his name down to speak at the LSD conference in Basel, Switzerland, to celebrate Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday. Steve was billed in the programme to give a talk on ‘synchronicity and the problem of coincidence in the psychedelic experience.’ I was just finishing up my PhD on parapsychology and luck at the time, and was doing survey research on psychedelics and extrasensory perception (ESP) on the side, so I had a yearning to hear what he had to say.

Steve‘s blurb on the conference website said that he intended to draw upon Jung and Whitehead, “to resolve the contradiction between the ubiquity of meaningful coincidence and the paucity of experimental evidence for so-called psychic phenomena.” It also said he was based in the UK. This was a stroke of luck, as it happened, because I had been lamenting the lack of any serious academic interest in both psychedelics and ESP existing this far from California, circa 1967. Anyone who juggled Jung, LSD and “ESP research at Oxford secretly funded by the CIA” in their bio had my attention. Unfortunately, I never made it to Basel for that conference, but then neither did Steve, but we finally met up at his place in Notting Hill, London, and he told me his story.

In 1957, while just starting out in academia as an undergraduate, aged 18, Stephen Abrams wrote a letter to C.G. Jung about his desire to use parapsychology to test the great psychologist’s idea of synchronicity. Surprisingly, Abrams received an in-depth reply, initiating a communication that continued until Jung’s death just a few years later (Adler 1976).

Abrams completed his psychology degree at the University of Chicago, his hometown, where he was president of the Parapsychology Laboratory between 1957 and 1960 (Melton 2001). He began to work as a visiting research fellow during his summer breaks with the patriarch of parapsychology at that time, J.B. Rhine, at his famous laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina (Black 2001). Upon completing his degree, Abrams moved to the UK and became an advanced student at St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University from 1960 to 1967. He headed a parapsychological laboratory at the university’s Department of Biometry and, having some skill in hypnosis, he investigated extrasensory stimulation of conditioned reflexes in hypnotized subjects (Melton 2001). He was also responsible for organising the first conference outside of the US of the American-based Parapsychological Association, at Oxford University in 1964 (Luke 2011).

Image
Steve Abrams

His PhD studies at Oxford were part-funded by the CIA via the Human Ecology Fund, a secret front organization for the CIA’s classified MK-ULTRA mind control project. It was under the auspices of MK-ULTRA that the CIA funded numerous academic projects investigating LSD and other methods of altering consciousness, with the aim of finding truth serums and techniques for interrogation and brainwashing.


Abrams didn’t know it at the time but, while embarking on his PhD, he was about to depart on a whirlwind ride to Kansas, via Alice’s rabbit hole. Dr James Monroe, the executive secretary at the Human Ecology Fund (HEF), based in New York, had sent Abrams a letter in April 1961 saying that they were interested in assisting his ESP research at Oxford. Abrams, having no idea who HEF were, arranged to travel back to the US to meet with Monroe to discuss funding. Prior to leaving, he met with Arthur Koestler, the writer who would later leave almost his entire estate to establish a parapsychology research unit and chair at the University of Edinburgh. Koestler had given a talk in London for the Society for Psychical Research and invited Abrams along afterwards for dinner, along with the anthropologist Francis Huxley – (son of Sir Julian Huxley, and nephew of Aldous Huxley). Koestler was heading to America to attend a conference on mind control organized by another secret CIA front organization, called the Joshua Macy Foundation – although he probably didn’t know it at the time because the CIA were operating at a very underground level. Abrams suggested that Koestler go to Duke University to visit his old mentor J.B. Rhine at his parapsychology lab, and Huxley suggested that Koestler should also go and see Timothy Leary at Harvard.

Taking the slow route home, Abrams sailed to New York and met with James Monroe and Preston Abbot, the programme director of HEF. Following a seemingly successful meeting with his new potential funders, he caught a flight to Duke University to see Rhine, and changed planes in Washington. ‘Just for a laugh’ (Black 2001, 50) he tried calling the CIA via the operator and asked to speak to the director regarding recent communications he had had with the Russian parapsychologist, Leonid Vassiliev – the first cold war Russian to communicate across the iron curtain about ESP research. He was told that someone would come to meet him at the airport within the hour. Abrams was met by the MK-ULTRA second-in-command, Robert Lashbrook, and discussed his Soviet link up.

Having called the CIA so soon after his meeting with HEF executives, the CIA did a security check on Abrams at Duke University. Abrams later reasoned that they must have thought that he was either ‘telepathic or taking the piss’ (Black 2001, 51) because the link between HEF and the CIA was a very deep national secret at that time. Abrams later discovered, through freedom of information access years later, that he had been given security clearance concerning his knowledge of the link, which seemed to be better than what must have been a fairly grisly alternative. Their security check would also have discovered that Abrams was about to take psilocybin with Rhine any day, and must have put them in mind of the CIA’s earlier project, codenamed ARTICHOKE, a forerunner of MK-ULTRA that aimed, as part of its mind control remit, to discover drugs which could be used to develop telepathy and clairvoyance (Lee 1985). ARTICHOKE had sent agents to Mexico with R.G. Wasson in 1952 while on one of his seminal trips to discover the Psilocybe mushroom cult among the Mazatecs (Stevens 1988). Many years later, in an interview with David Black, Abrams looked back upon his unwitting intuitive manoeuvres and declared that, ‘I was rather in a position where I could write my own ticket. I was asking the spooks to give me money to study spooks. And to overcome their reserve I had to spook them’ (Black 2001, 51).

Arriving at Rhine’s lab, Abrams was invited to take part in a drug experiment the following day and signed a consent form. Koestler had taken up Huxley’s suggestion and had been to see Leary at Harvard a week earlier, and the pair were flown down to Duke by Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) in his private plane. Leary had brought a bottle of psilocybin pills with him and along with Rhine and his research team everyone had got high, and even attempted some ESP experiments, although there was apparently way too much laughter for the tests to have been taken seriously (S. Abrams, personal communication, August 14, 2006; S. Krippner, personal communication, January 19, 2006). Koestler had a bad trip and had ‘lived through world war three’ (S. Abrams, personal communication, April 25, 2009). Rhine, on the other hand, was quite inspired and kept Leary’s bottle of pills for further research, although he had terminated the nascent psychedelic ESP project by the end of the year, despite an improvement in test scores (Horn 2009) and not before Steve had his first trip.

Curiouser and curiouser, upon returning to the UK, Abrams found in his letterbox a funding cheque from HEF as well as a letter from Vasiliev offering copyright on a manuscript in Russian on his telepathy research, hoping that Abrams could get it published in English. Abrams wrote to Lashbrook at the CIA asking for help to get the book translated, but Lashbrook, seeing that Abrams had security clearance, wrote back in January 1962 telling him not to write to the CIA because HEF would deal with it, by which point the penny must have truly dropped for Steve.

Image
Steve catching a hypnotized subject

Later that year, the Human Ecology Fund programme director Preston Abbott arrived in the UK to meet with Steve and ask him how his ESP research was going. Abrams asked him about getting Vasiliev’s manuscript translated but Abbott replied that it would cost too much. Surprised at this, Steve surmised that Abbott was not aware of the secret CIA relationship with HEF and so, deciding to have some fun, said, ‘But, the agency said you’d be glad to do it’ (Black 2001, 53). Abbott initially turned white, and then fumed, having previously turned down an invitation to work for the CIA he was not best pleased to find the agency were his paymasters after all. According to Abrams, ‘He phoned long distance to Harold Wolff, the chair of the Human Ecology Foundation [Fund], and insisted that James Monroe – his superior – be fired on the spot, as he was’ (Black 2001, 53). A massive reshuffle began at the Human Ecology Fund and most of the board of directors were replaced in a short time. In the late 1970s, Abrams met Abbott again in London and the former HEF director informed him that half of the organization’s staff had had no idea that they were being run by the CIA.

After shooting himself spectacularly in the foot with the CIA funding, Abrams patched up his finances with grants from more legitimate funders to continue his PhD research, such as the Perrott Scholarship, a bequest administered by Trinity College Cambridge, set up to fund psychical research (i.e. ESP). But Abrams was never awarded the qualification, even though he submitted a worthy thesis and sat his viva voce in 1967, largely because he had by then become one of UK’s leading drug law reform activists and had organised a number of demonstrations and other actions with Oxford students during the sixties, which had embarrassed the university.

Having just formed SOMA, the Society of Mental Awareness, Abrams wrote an essay on ‘The Oxford scene and the law’ that was covered by the student newspaper and which claimed that cannabis users were treated more harshly than heroin users by the law, because heroin addiction was still considered a medical problem at that time. In January 1967, The People newspaper got hold of the story and emphasized the claim that 500 Oxford students were using cannabis. The Senior Proctor at Oxford had claimed that about 30 people were using dope and that they were all nervous wrecks. In response, and on behalf of the one Oxford student being prosecuted for weed, a lively ensemble of about 500 students marched through Oxford in protest of the cannabis laws. The story escalated and in February the University Student Health Committee heard evidence from Abrams who argued that the Home Secretary should be pressed to set up an investigation, and the committee did just that. The Government responded positively in April by setting up the Wootton Committee to investigate hallucinogens, but not cannabis (Black 2001).

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Legalize Pot Rally

Things then continued to hot up in the press with Paul McCartney saying he had seen God on LSD, and with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in court on cannabis and speed charges. Following the heavy sentencing of the two Stones at the end of June a number of angry protests, backed by SOMA, began in London, and the musicians were released immediately on bail. A massive legalize pot rally in Hyde Park was organized and presided over by Abrams, who had devised a plan to draw flack away from the Beatles’ acid image and take the pressure off the Stones by placing a one-page advert in The Times stating that, ‘The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.’ The text of the advert was prepared by Abrams and was paid for secretly by the Beatles, who also signed it, as did Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, and a number of MPs, leading medical experts and other notable public figures. The advert did its job and sparked a national debate, ultimately influencing the Wootton Committee to go beyond their initial remit and report on cannabis, stating that, ‘The long asserted dangers of cannabis were exaggerated, and that the related law was socially damaging, if not unworkable’ (Black 2001, 73).

By July 1968, the News of the World were regarding Steve as the UK’s equivalent of Timothy Leary and ran a front page story with a maniacal image of Abrams stating that, ‘This dangerous man must be stopped.’ This had come about because Abrams had discovered a loophole in the law that enabled cannabis tincture to be prescribed freely even though cannabis in its ordinary state was illegal. Abrams had met with Bing Spear, the head of the Drug Inspectorate at the Home Office, who had thereafter made arrangements with the UN to increase the UK’s meagre legal cannabis importation quota some 17-fold to 254 kilos. As a result, the organisation Abrams had founded, SOMA (which had Francis Crick, Francis Huxley and psychiatrist R.D. Laing as directors), was able to manufacture cannabis tincture for prescription by medical doctors that were SOMA members, such as the medic Sam Hutt (better known as the country musician Hank Wangford). SOMA were also researching alkaloids derived from cannabis, and investigated the use of pure THC, the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis. After some initial problems with the formula, which was corrected by Crick, SOMA’s chief chemist Dick Pountain manufactured an experimental batch of seven grams of relatively pure THC at the cost of £1,600 – a considerable amount of money at the time. Abrams, as he delighted in telling me, smoked the whole thing over a weekend with his acquaintances and remarked that, ‘It was like the very finest Moroccan kief with a hint of cocaine. It was very, very good dope’ (Black 2001, 75).

Listening to Steve’s stories – all well evidenced – over the years I came to admire his association with what Jung identified as the trickster archetype. He was an exceptional and humorous intellect who could run rings around people, never suffered fools, and yet seemingly always remained honest and compassionate – no matter whom he was dealing with. He was also an exceptional raconteur and named the good and the great among his friends, be they leading musicians, politicians, scientists, psychiatrists, parapsychologists, activists or LSD-ring mastermind criminals on the run.

Perhaps my favourite story of Steve’s concerned the occasion he and R.D. Laing were visited by detective inspector Richard Lee, the lead officer of Operation Julie – the UK’s largest LSD bust that ended in the arrest of 130 people and put an end to a conspiracy that had produced over 100 million doses of acid in Britain over a six-year period. Because of their association with one of the ring leaders of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – the world’s biggest LSD manufacturers, busted in 1972 – the police had been interested in Abrams and the psychiatrist Laing, a leading figure in the anti-psychiatry movement who had pioneered the use of LSD therapy for schizophrenia. Through Bing Spear at the Home Office, Lee made arrangements to visit Laing and Abrams in 1977, shortly after the bust, for a ‘social’, and arrived at Laing’s place with his driver. Informing them both that they were in the clear over Operation Julie, the four of them had a frank discussion, over copious whiskies, concerning psychiatry and the politics of LSD and cannabis. Lubricated by the scotch, Laing and Abrams were able to convince both officers of the folly of the drug laws and urged them both to quit the force, which, upon staggering back into work later that day, they both did, as did several other members of the Operation Julie team (Black 2001).

Fast-forwarding to 2006, Steve never gave this talk at the Basel conference as he was unable to leave his house in Notting Hill, London, to make the trip, because he had emphysema. To my knowledge Steve never left the house from that point on as he had difficulty breathing, and was ultimately unable to breathe at all without a near continuous supplement of oxygen throughout the day. That is until he re-discovered cannabis tincture, and had it supplied by an underground dispensary in London, which, after only one dose, allowed him to come off oxygen for several hours a day. He continued with his own treatment against his doctor’s wishes, and it afforded him a lot of relief. He had hoped to further investigate the benefits of cannabis tincture and aerosol as a vasodilator in the treatment of emphysema. Unfortunately, before he was able to take his research any further than mere personal assay, Steve died at his home in Notting Hill on 21 November, 2012, aged 74 (b. 15 July, 1938).

References:

Adler, G.. C.G. Jung letters: Volume 2, 1951-1961. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1976

Black, D.. Acid: A new secret history of LSD. London. Vision Paperbacks. 2001

Horn, S.. Unbelievable: Investigations into ghosts, poltergeists, telepathy, and other unseen phenomena, from the Duke parapsychology laboratory. New York. Ecco Press. 2009.

Lee, M. A., & Shlain, B.. Acid dreams: The complete social history of LSD: The CIA, the sixties, and beyond. New York. Grove Press. 1985.

Luke, D.. Experiential reclamation and first person parapsychology. Journal of Parapsychology, 75, 185-199. 2011.

Melton, J. G.. Encyclopedia of occultism and parapsychology: Volume 1, A-L (5th ed.). London. Gale Group. 2001.

Stevens, J.. Storming heaven: LSD and the American dream. London. William Heinemann. 1988.
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 28, 2014 3:24 pm

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... sited.html

LSD's ability to make minds malleable revisited

October 2014 by Kevin Franciotti

Could taking LSD help people make peace with their neuroses?

Psychiatrists in the 1960s certainly thought so. They carried out many studies looking at the effect of LSD and other psychedelics on people undergoing psychotherapy for schizophrenia, OCD and alcoholism.

The idea was that the drug would mimic the effect of hypnotherapy, making people more suggestible and open to changing their thought patterns. The results were reportedly positive, but the experiments rarely included control groups and so don't stand up to modern scrutiny.

The work ground to a halt when recreational use of LSD was banned in 1971 – even though using LSD for research purposes was exempt.

Several decades on and LSD research is less of a contentious issue. This has allowed a team of researchers to revisit LSD's suggestive powers with more care.

The mind's eye

A team at Imperial College London gave 10 healthy volunteers two injections a week apart, either a moderate dose of LSD or a placebo. The subjects acted as their own controls, and didn't know which dose was which. Two hours after the injection, the volunteers lay down and listened to the researchers describe various scenarios often used in hypnotherapy. They were asked to "think along" with each one. These scenarios included tasting a delicious orange, re-experiencing a childhood memory, or relaxing on the shore of a lake.

"Sometimes the suggestions had a kind of irresistible quality" says team member Robin Carhart-Harris. "In a suggestion which describes heavy dictionaries in the palm of your hand, one of the volunteers said that even though they knew that I was offering a suggestion and it wasn't real, their arm really ached, and only by letting their arm drop a little bit did the ache go away."

Once all the scenarios had been read out, the participants had to rate the vividness of the mental experiences they triggered on a standard scale.

The volunteers rated their experiences after taking LSD as 20 per cent more vivid than when they had been injected with the placebo.

Power of suggestion

Treating neuroses with psychotherapy requires the therapist to be able to influence the patient's way of viewing themselves and their obsession. Co-author David Nutt, also at Imperial College, says the work suggests that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy may provide a unique opportunity for the brain to enter the plastic, or malleable, state required for this to happen.



David Nutt is the head of the lab and co-author of the study:

David Nutt

David John Nutt (born 16 April 1951) DM FRCP FRCPsych FMedSci is a British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety and sleep. He was until 2009 a professor at the University of Bristol heading their Psychopharmacology Unit. Since then he has been the Edmond J Safra chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, London.[5] Nutt was a member of the Committee on Safety of Medicines, and was President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Career summary and research
Nutt completed his secondary education at Bristol Grammar School and then studied medicine at Downing College, Cambridge, graduating in 1972. In 1975, he completed his clinical training at Guy's Hospital.[9]

He worked as a clinical scientist at the Radcliffe Infirmary from 1978 to 1982 where he carried out important basic research into the function of the benzodiazepine receptor/GABA ionophore complex, the long term effects of BZ agonist treatment and kindling with BZ partial inverse agonists.

...Government positions
Professor Nutt worked as an advisor to the Ministry of Defence, Department of Health and the Home Office.




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

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 29, 2014 6:47 pm

THE PSYCHEDELIC 'DRUGS WIZARD' WHO RAN ONE OF ENGLAND'S BIGGEST LSD LABS

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Casey making 2C-B in 2001 in the back of a school bus he lived in for seven years.



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Casey and his wife, Charlotte Walsh, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, during a road trip around the western United States after his deportation from the UK last year



More at: http://www.vice.com/read/casey-william- ... hemist-254
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Re: Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 29, 2014 6:49 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Thu Oct 30, 2014 2:51 pm




We must get closer to the essence of life,
but be aware, it takes courage and strife.
Expand your mind, don't let it wither and die,
you'll find that it lifts your spirit high to the sky

so meditate.....come on let's contemplate.

Talk to the heavenly bodies of the universe...

We must get closer to the essence of life
but be aware, that it takes courage and strife,
expand your mind don't let it wither and die
you'll find that it lifts your spirits high up to the sky

Come on meditate, let's contemplate...

Talk to the heavenly bodies of the universe
of the universe.....



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

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 01, 2014 3:11 pm

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

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 01, 2014 3:21 pm

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John Coltrane in Jazz (dir. Ken Burns, 2000)


American Dream » Wed Nov 13, 2013 8:47 pm wrote:Love's Secret Ascension: Coil, Coltrane & The 70th Birthday Of LSD

Peter Bebergal , November 13th, 2013 05:03

Author and new Quietus writer Peter Bebergal celebrates the original synthesis of LSD with a thoughtful look at acid and transcendent, magickal music

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Continues at: http://thequietus.com/articles/13857-ls ... trane-coil





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

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 04, 2014 11:54 pm

http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/2013/12 ... -book.html

Far Out 70s Science Text Book Illustrations by Phil Kirtland.

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