Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[liminalOyster]

Thanks, lO! All the people I would love to hang out with, even if a couple had one foot the MKULTRA world (Leary and Burroughs). Interesting people all, despite the excesses of Chogyam Drunkpa...

WRT Burroughs and MK, there's some pretty damning footage in there of him openly riffing on the "good" (progressive, futurist) CIA vs the "bad" CIA.

Apart from the American Buddha stuff, Is there other material in the bowels of this long thread about the CIA Tibetan program and/or what may have been going on around Colorado in the two decades before this was shot? I'll look when have the time and patience.........

[American Dream]

I don't love this piece but it is a treasure trove on "liberal CIA" themes for those who dig very carefully:


THE ''GRASSROOTS'' MYTH: ''LIBERAL CIA'' NETWORK OF ''NEW LEFT'' FOUNDATIONS, MEDIA AND ACTIVIST GROUPS - MUCH MORE THAN JUST GEORGE SOROS

As to CIA/Tibet/Colorado, beyond American Buddha commentaries from the Carreons is also material on Camp Hale in Colorado, where Tibetan monks were secretly trained for mountain warfare in that era (was there any double duty paving the way for Naropa?, I dunno). I find particularly intriguing the claim that various CIA officers were ultimately commited to Tibetan Buddhism by their involvement with the Independence Movement. That might well be a faction of the "liberal CIA"!

[liminalOyster]

I don't love this piece but it is a treasure trove on "liberal CIA" themes for those who dig very carefully:


THE ''GRASSROOTS'' MYTH: ''LIBERAL CIA'' NETWORK OF ''NEW LEFT'' FOUNDATIONS, MEDIA AND ACTIVIST GROUPS - MUCH MORE THAN JUST GEORGE SOROS

As to CIA/Tibet/Colorado, beyond American Buddha commentaries from the Carreons is also material on Camp Hale in Colorado, where Tibetan monks were secretly trained for mountain warfare in that era (was there any double duty at Naropa?, I dunno). I find particularly intriguing the claim that various CIA officers were ultimately commited to Tibetan Buddhism by their involvement with the Independence Movement. That might well be a faction of the "liberal CIA"!

I've seen some Camp Hale stuff but the possibliity of a Naropa crossover is what most intrigues me. Didn't the new-age military stuff (first earth battalion) have a direct connection to Naropa or am I off?

[American Dream]

I don't remember that at all, but that certainly don't mean it never happened.

[American Dream]

AFTER THE ORDEAL

After all that, are “delusions of enlightenment” alright? Some would ridiculously say so:

Better these people should think they’re enlightened, which is a wonderful aspiration, than be robbing stores or taking heroin or beating their wives or kicking their dogs. I think that one of the most wonderful things is the delusion of enlightenment, even if it is a delusion. At least it represents an aspiration that is better than an aspiration to be a murderer (Joan Halifax, in [Caplan, 2001]).

Yeeeiikes!!!

Are the “best” of history’s “sages” really better than our world’s bank robbers, drug addicts, wife abusers or animal mistreaters? Are they not arguably worse? For, note that more than one of them has allegedly misused (i.e., effectively stolen) temple funds, or feasted while his most devoted followers starved, thus exhibiting less moral sense than the average bank robber. (Stealing from a church or from one’s friends and admirers, after all, has got to be morally worse than stealing from a faceless corporation or a bank.)

In the same vein, more than one has been accused of physically beating or otherwise brutally oppressing his or her spouse. As the Mill Valley Record (Colin, et al., 1985) reported:

On one occasion during a raucous party at the church sanctuary in Clear Lake, eyewitnesses say they saw [Adi Da] push his wife Nina down a flight of stairs. They also claim that during that party Jones pulled a sizable hunk of hair from her head.

“Concerned physicians.”

[Rajneesh] wasn’t the Master [Deeksha had] fallen in love with. She’d witnessed him beating Vivek once, she swore (Franklin, 1992).

Recall also Swami Rama reportedly kicking women in the buttocks. And further:

Chögyam Trungpa wrote that Marpa, the tenth-century Tibetan guru, “lost his temper and beat people.” Marpa is also considered an incarnate Buddha, the spiritual father of Tibet’s greatest yogi Milarepa. Maybe his beatings were compassion in disguise, but it is hard to understand why the same argument could not be made for the drunk who abuses his wife and children (Butterfield, 1994; italics added).

In terms of the aforementioned (and above-denigrated, by Halifax) use of illicit and abused prescription substances: Included among the usage attributed to various “genuine sages” have been LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, nitrous oxide, and the opium derivatives Percodan and Demerol. Also amyl nitrite, a blood vessel-dilator used to cause a “high” or to improve sex; and, it goes without saying, marijuana. Not to mention Quaaludes reportedly given as a medical treatment in Rajneeshpuram. (That only Percodan, Demerol, Quaaludes and nitrous oxide among all those are recognized as being—like the opiate heroin—physically addictive, seems somewhat beside the point.) And God only knows what the police were expecting to find when they raided Trungpa’s Scottish center. (People with nothing to conceal generally do not feel the need to desperately hide themselves, as Trungpa did, in such circumstances.)

Even metaphorically, the analysis fares no better:

Fred [Stanton]’s final comment on Andrew [Cohen] was, “Andrew creates addicts. It’s like giving people heroin” (Tarlo, 1997).

On top of that, we again have “genuine masters” allegedly building secret passageways leading to the dormitories of young girls in their care. (Caplan quotes frequently and respectfully from Muktananda in her books, thus inadvertently providing a bad, bad example from him of how not to do the guru-disciple relationship properly. Both of her relevant books were written well after the 1994 New Yorker exposé of him by Lis Harris.) Plus, we have the reported pedophilia/ephebophilia of universally revered figures such as Ramakrishna, as an early precursor to the allegations against Sai Baba. Also, holy Zen masters “beating the crap out of” their disciples, even to the point of death, and being celebrated for their macho, “ego-killing” abuse by foolish persons who themselves have obviously never been thus “beneficially” beaten. And all of that is ever done, of course, “in the name of God, for the compassionate benefit of all sentient beings,” by great bodhisattvas and otherwise. And woe unto any “disloyal” disciple who should even think otherwise, and thereby risk his “one chance at enlightenment” in this life.

I myself am again in no way anti-drug, anti-dildo, anti-secret-passageway-to-the-dormitory, anti-whorehouse, anti-orgy or anti-leprechaun. It is simply obvious, by now, that any of those, when put into the hands of “god-men” who have carved islands of absolute power for themselves in the world, only make an already dangerous situation much worse.

We can surely agree with Ms. Halifax in her three decades of experience, though, that the delusion of enlightenment generally “represents an aspiration that is better than an aspiration to be a murderer.” Unless, of course, you’re Charles Manson. For, he borrowed heavily from Eastern philosophy in creating his own pre-rational view of the world, hinted at “deity status” for himself, and believed that “since all is one, nothing is wrong.”

Manson ... called himself “a.k.a. Lord Krishna, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, the Buddha” during a 1986 parole hearing (Agence, 1999).

After all that, it should be painfully clear that the delusion of enlightenment is the most dangerous, not the most wonderful, delusion. (Again, Jim Jones and David Koresh had similar messianic regards for their own enlightenment as does the still-incarcerated Manson. In all three of those “worst” cases, the delusion of enlightenment/divinity undeniably helped create the violent tragedies for which they are each known.) That most-dangerous regard is so if for no other reason than the effect that it has on the ensuing naïve followers. For, those end up throwing their lives and sanity away on persons who, even while laying claim to the highest levels of enlightenment (whether validly or psychotically), grandiosely deceive themselves, and then mislead others, all with the apparent goal of being given the proper obeisance due to themselves as “enlightened masters.”

And as far as the treatment of animals goes, the spellbinding writer Deborah Boliver Boehm (1996) relates her experiences in a Japanese Zen monastery in Kyoto, upon being presented with two stray kittens:

“Will you keep them?” Saku-san asked.
“What if I didn’t?” I asked.
“Then they would be left to die, or to be found by someone else if they were lucky.”
“But why doesn’t the sodo adopt them?”
“Because then we would become a dumping ground for every unwanted cat in town, and they would tear up the tatami [straw meditation mats]. Besides, some monks have allergies.”
“But what about the vow you take every day, to save all sentient beings?”
“It’s a nice idea, but not very practical,” said Saku-san with a wide-shouldered shrug.

At least they don’t kick their dogs, swat bugs, or drain water with mosquito larva in it, though. That, after all, would violate the precept of not doing harm to other creatures.

And yet—

[B]eneath the smiles Tibetans obviously are not perfect. It’s not all loving-kindness here; I see a monk beat a dog, another one smokes and while Buddhist texts forbid meat, the fleshy bodies of sheep hang in roadside butcher boxes attracting swarms of flies and shoppers galore....
I know the Dalai Lama has tried to turn vegetarian but so long as he and other Tibetan Buddhists continue to eat meat, the tinge of hypocrisy will remain (Macdonald, 2003; italics added).

Well, at least they don’t ... at least they don’t, um ... no, wait, they do that too, um....

* * *
Having said all of that, one can still sadly strike a much more negative note, when it comes to the effects of messianic delusions of enlightenment/divinity on both leaders and their followers:

Adolf Hitler had a mystical awakening at Pasewalk Hospital in 1918, following the defeat of Germany; it led to his decision to enter politics (Oakes, 1997).
Hitler by now was possessed by delusions of grandeur.... Convinced that he was Germany’s political messiah, his supporters unashamedly referred to Hitler as a prophet.... After reading Mein Kampf, Joseph Goebbels, later the Party’s propaganda chief, wrote “Who is this man? half plebian, half God! Truly Christ, or only St. John?” For the growing number of “disciples” gathering around Hitler at this time—referred to as the “charismatic community”—Hitler was more than just a politician offering political and economic solutions, he was a messianic leader embodying the salvation of Germany (D. Welch, 2001).

As if to further close the circle, then, we find this, in Goodrick-Clarke’s (1994) Occult Roots of Nazism:

The Ariosophists, initially active in Vienna before the First World War, borrowed from the theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in order to prophesy and vindicate a coming era of German world rule....
At least two Ariosophists were closely involved with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in the 1930s, contributing to his ... visionary plans for the Greater Germanic Reich in the third millennium....
Ravenscroft adapted the materials of Rudolf Steiner ... to the mythology of occult Nazism.

Nor was that the only relevance of Eastern metaphysics to the Nazi cause:

Savitri Devi, the French-born Nazi-Hindu prophetess, described Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu and likened Nazism to the cult of Shiva with its emphasis on destruction and new creation....
[She] was sure that Hitler had realized he was an avatar while still a youth (Goodrick-Clarke, 2003).

Overall, truly believing that you are “enlightened and can do no wrong”—as every “messiah” and nearly every “meditation master” has role-played himself into believing—gives you unlimited license to mistreat others “for their own good.” Indeed, it actually places your conscience farther out of reach than if you were knowingly manipulating them purely for your own selfish benefit, as a simple con man (or woman).

As Professor J. H. von Dullinger insightfully observed over a century and a quarter ago:

All absolute power demoralizes its possessor. To that all history bears witness. And if it be a spiritual power which rules men’s consciences, the danger is only so much greater, for the possession of such a power exercises a specially treacherous fascination, while it is peculiarly conducive to self-deceit, because the lust of dominion, when it has become a passion, is only too easily in this case excused under the plea of zeal for the salvation of others.

http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsam ... rdeal.html

[American Dream]

More at: http://freecheweyproject.org/chewey/wp- ... guilty.pdf

[American Dream]

On March 20, 1956, 10 P.M. a thought of a very remote possibility entered my mind, which I fear will never leave me again. Am I a spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women? Are my children offspring of the first interplanetary race? Has the melting-pot of interplanetary society already been created on our own planet, as the melting-pot of all earth nations was established in the U.S.A. 190 years ago? … What inspired this thought? It was seeing the science-fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about a spaceman who comes to Earth in a flying saucer to save us from self-destruction in a nuclear war. … All through the film I had a distinct impression that it was a bit of "my story" which was depicted there, even the actor's expressions and looks reminded me and others of myself as I had appeared 15 to 20 years ago.

-Wilhelm Reich

See/know/understand:


Wilhelm Reich and the Day the Earth Stood Still –
A Tall Tale of Spacegun ‘54


http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/2016/05 ... egun-54-2/

[American Dream]

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/onl ... ding-rock/

JAKE FRIEDLER
The Gentrification of Standing Rock

As allies flooded in, indigenous leadership was increasingly drowned out in a sea of noise.



Jake Friedler visited Standing Rock Indian Reservation in November 2016. These are Friedler’s observations from that time. Since then, the Trump Administration made it clear that construction of the Dakota Access pipeline would not be halted, and it may be in use as soon as this month.

SOMETIME IN MID-OCTOBER, a school bus full of New Orleanians pulled into Oceti Sakowin, the largest of the prayer camps at Standing Rock. It was followed by a truck hauling poles for a forty-foot tipi. They raised their shelter at the western edge of camp, near the tent of a Lakota elder named Grandma Redfeather. They came to stand in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens the waters of the Lakota people as well as millions who live downstream.

The bus and the tipi were owned by white folks from the Rainbow Family, a loose network of hippies united by utopian principles. Through the free gatherings they host on public lands around the world, the Rainbow Family practices various forms of counterculture. These particular Rainbows had been serving food for flood victims in western Louisiana when they heard about the prayer camps in North Dakota. They stopped in New Orleans, where they picked up some locals: Creole folks, Mardi Gras Indians, white allies, Choctaws from Louisiana, and others of indigenous descent. The Rainbows and the New Orleanians journeyed together to Standing Rock.

While they were setting up camp, some indigenous elders came by to offer advice. Many had never seen such a tall tipi, and they wanted to make sure it stood strong. The Rainbows refused help. They’d slept in this thing at plenty of gatherings, where they’d dug latrines, built fire pits, and run kitchens outside. They knew what they were doing—and soon enough, they promised, they’d be serving food for everyone.

Lit by a fire inside, the giant tipi became a social melting pot, where people of all skin tones came to eat gumbo and learn songs like “Li’l Liza Jane.” The eclectic delegation from New Orleans became known as “the tribe of the Gumbo Ya-Ya.” They connected with Grandma Redfeather, who knew some of the Rainbows from attending their gatherings. One of the original members of the American Indian Movement, Grandma Redfeather took up arms against the government in the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee and hasn’t stopped fighting since.

The Gumbo Ya-Ya stayed for a few days, trading stories and songs, and left on the night of a full moon. The Rainbows and their tipi stayed behind.

As the full moon rose, the night was alive with drumming and yelps. A group of women and Two-Spirits from the Ojibwe tribe led a moon ceremony. It was a moment for the many different peoples at Standing Rock to come together and heal. The suppression of their efforts to protect the river was the latest trauma in a long history of colonial violence.

The next morning began with a fierce wind, which Grandma Redfeather said was going to blow some bad energy out of camp. Not two hours later, a cry went up around the spirit fire at the center of Oceti Sakowin: the giant tipi’s coming down!

The winds had torn the canvas flaps where the tipi poles come together, threatening the entire structure. Some Natives rushed over to try to help, taking hold of the canvas and explaining how the tipi might be saved. Once again, the Rainbows didn’t listen. They insisted on handling the crisis alone. Soon, their canvas was ripped all the way around, leaving only the poles standing. It looked like a giant ribcage.

The Rainbows packed their stuff and were gone from camp by nightfall. Nobody asked them to leave; they just couldn’t find their place.


THIS STORY WAS RECOUNTED TO ME by my friend Sal, a mystic of Sicilian and Navajo descent. He arrived at Standing Rock with the Gumbo Ya-Ya but remained with the Rainbows after the others returned to New Orleans. When the tipi fell, Grandma Redfeather rolled up in her Subaru and told Sal to come camp with her. She adopted him, and he became her right-hand man.


A LAKOTA PROPHECY SAYS that a black snake would cross the land, causing great destruction and threatening the balance of life. The Dakota Access Pipeline, a long and snaking beast that would pump oil across the continent, is the black snake, and the Lakota, who started the prayer camps on their treaty lands at Standing Rock, will be remembered as the ones who cut it at the head.

Sal said that the rivers are the blue snakes. As the capitalists would have it, oil pumped through this pipeline would eventually reach refineries at the mouth of the Mississippi: the black snakes and blue snakes intertwined, wrestling. Sal invited me to accompany him and Dezy, a friend from New Orleans, on a road trip back to Standing Rock. We would be joined by my friend Cole, who drove out from California.

Our mission was to help winterize Camp Dancing Horse, the camp started by Grandma Redfeather within Oceti Sakowin. “Oceti Sakowin” is the proper name of the Seven Council Fires that unite the Lakota and Dakota people, sometimes known as “the Great Sioux Nation.” Grandma Redfeather started Camp Dancing Horse many years ago on her land in Wounded Knee, South Dakota and moved it up to Standing Rock in the summer, just as Oceti Sakowin and the other prayer camps were taking shape. Now winter was approaching, and Sal, Dezy, Cole, and I hoped to build Grandma a yurt so she and her family could see the protest through.

I devoured a series of orientation packets put out by Solidariteam:

Add more resources to the camp than your presence will use up.

When you are with indigenous people, listen more than you speak.

Practice noticing and regulating how much space you take up.

Impact is more important than intention.

We left New Orleans on a Monday and drove through the night, continuing north on Election Day. We drove through South Dakota and on to the Standing Rock Reservation in the black of night, as the radio relayed election returns that sounded like an awful dream. After crossing seven red states, we finally made it to Oceti Sakowin, and it felt like the safest place we could be. I fell asleep in a tipi, unsure how any of this could be real.

Daybreak brought some confirmation. The camp, which seemed so small at night, was splayed all around us in the morning, a vast sea of tipis, tents, and cars flowing across the flat expanse of plains. Camp Dancing Horse was at eastern edge of Oceti Sakowin, close to the sunrise and where they kept the horses. I later learned that though many of these horses were still being broken, they were allowed to roam freely. Proud creatures, chestnut and dappled, walked themselves past our camp at all hours of the day.

To the west of us was the camp’s center, marked by a trail of variegated flags. Standing tall on behalf of hundreds of tribes and nations, those flags were always flapping in the wind. South of us was the Cannonball River, a tributary of the Missouri, where each morning some indigenous women led the camp in a ceremony to honor and bless the water.

We went down to the river on our first morning and watched as the women sang water songs, then made offerings of water to the river. Dezy and I joined the men in coming forward to offer tobacco. Sal identifies as Two-Spirit, a term used by some tribes to describe a person who embodies both masculine and feminine spirits. He was invited to offer both water and tobacco. Cast in the early light of a sun still low on the horizon, the ceremony was beautiful from start to finish. When it was over, I heard one Native woman tell another that it was the largest water ceremony she’d seen.

“Where did all these people come from?”

GRANDMA REDFEATHER WAS AWAY from camp when we arrived. We spent that first day meeting our neighbors, many of whom Sal already knew. Camp Dancing Horse was, for the moment, inhabited by a bunch of white hippies, half of them with dreadlocks. They told us they were part of the Rainbow Family. Some knew Grandma from Rainbow Gatherings, but most had found their way to her camp haphazardly. Four who’d arrived together in a van admitted that they hadn’t even heard of Standing Rock until they learned about it from a hitchhiker they picked up a couple days before. He was now at Dancing Horse, too.

Sal brought Dezy, Cole and me to dinner at Winona’s kitchen, a warm refuge on the other side of camp. Then we walked back to Dancing Horse, where the Rainbow kids were holding court around the fire. They played guitar and spoke loudly of dark moments with liquor and drugs, in a camp where both those things were forbidden.

We were woken in the middle of the night by a din of angry cursing. Grandma Redfeather had returned and wanted to know who the hell was sleeping in her tipi. Sal got up to reassure her that it was just him and the friends he’d brought to help. Grandma decided to sleep in her car and the rest of us went back to bed.

In the morning, Cole, Dezy, and I felt sheepish. We were clearly imposing on this woman’s space, though Sal told us not to worry. Meanwhile, the hippie kids spit and threw cigarette butts into Grandma’s sacred fire, while their dogs shat up and down the camp. That night, Grandma unleashed another stream of ugly curses when she couldn’t find a place to warm herself by the firepit she herself had dug. So Sal sent the Rainbow kids packing. They loaded their van with six people and three dogs and departed for California, leaving a mess in their wake. Half-eaten bowls of chili froze in the night; I spent more than an hour chiseling away at dishes as others hunted dog poop and cleaned out the fire. In the time it took to evict them and cleanse our camp of their debris, we lost half a day’s worth of time needed for winterization. There was talk that the first blizzard could be less than a week away.

Continues at: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/onl ... ding-rock/

[American Dream]

Peter Marshall

HIPPIED0M AND THE NEW SOCIETY


Neo-Hippies’ are back, it seems, in fashion. But I suspect many are like ‘neo-capitalists’ with little conscience. Perhaps it is being like Sir Richard Branson with his long hair on his private Caribbean island with ex-President Obama and his wife while travellers on his overcrowded Virgin trains in Britain are forced to sit on the floor in front of toilets. Perhaps it is being ‘rebellious’ like Mick Jagger while possessing millions. Perhaps it is practising ‘sacred commerce’ which implies that one can get mightily rich while being ‘spiritual’ at the same time.

But many people have not entirely abandoned the best ideals of the Hippies of the 1960s. They have taken up their celebration of solidarity, joy, freedom and living lightly on the planet. They have formed communes which try to be voluntary, co-operative, and work the land in common. They are for worker’s control and greater autonomy. They seek to bring up children together in a libertarian way in the city and the countryside. They try to practice sexual and racial equality and not to dominate each other.

And, yes, some have even turned their back on ‘conventional’ society. They try to live closer to the earth and seas and yet participate in the wider community. They do not forget their ideals. They become vegetarian or vegan and attempt to widen the sphere of freedom for all beings. They avoid the mad rush of much modern life in Western society, preferring slow organic food which does not ruin the land or empty the seas, slow life and work, slow cooking and slow eating. As the 'supertramp' poet W.H. Davies once wrote:


What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.


One way to rebel against a so-called ‘hippy’ upbringing is to reject it entirely and become desperately conventional. But this is like the general son’s turning himself into a pacifist or an atheist’s daughter becoming a minister. I believe one should go beyond mere reaction and seek to feel, think and act independently for oneself and others. One can reject the ‘bad’ but take up the ‘good’ of one’s upbringing.

I suspect many ‘neo-Hippies’ are making now a narcissistic lifestyle choice, being personally calmer and close to the earth, as some original hippies were, but not wanting genuinely to change society and culture and form a new relationship with nature.

Another way is to take up the 60s’ rejection of materialism and consumerism and apply it to a wider sphere. ‘Flower power’ is preferable to brutal power and it is generally better to make tender love than organized warfare. Property, rather than possession for one’s own needs, is indeed a form of ‘theft’ if it is based on the exploitation of others and prevents the fair distribution of wealth. Again, government is generally bad for you if it blocks the realization of participatory democracy, of people running their own affairs in their own regions and linking up with others to the benefit of all.

Incidentally, I would never describe myself purely as a ‘hippy’ of the 60s, especially those hippies intent only on personal pleasure and liberation, egotistically ‘doing their own thing’. I am not to be dismissed as an ‘old Hippie’. But I have developed many of their values such as loosening unnecessary restrictions, rejecting domination and hierarchy, and celebrating communal solidarity and the joy of freedom. It involves a new way of libertarian and experimental living, applying such values to the individual, society and the planet as a whole.

Fortunately, I know many young people who are not merely cynical or ironic but reject the dominant materialism and consumerism, the dehumanizing aspects of modern technology, and the widespread governmental surveillance and authoritarianism. They would instead like to participate in a more free, equal and ecological society.

None of us are perfect, we all have our contradictions, but at least some try to aspire to a better world and hope that they can pass on the torch of truth and justice, which has been kept alive in the past but is dimming in the present, to future generations to nurture and rekindle.

http://www.pmpress.org/content/article. ... 0114205842

[American Dream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls1ddrT7HPc

[American Dream]

‘These days are not to be missed’ – 1990s Rave and Club Culture in Fiction

Drugs and other highs

If many of the settings were real, some of the storytelling also doesn’t get much further than describing the experience of going out clubbing, or perhaps re-imagining the actual experience with more sex and better drugs. Writers work their way through a pharmacopeia of late night substance use, but it is the description of coming up on ecstasy that is a more or less obligatory feature of rave fiction – rendered both as an internal sensation and a changed perception of the user’s relationship to the world and all the people in it.

In Starfishing (2011), Sarah Monaghan sexualises this experience: ‘I got this feeling in my head, like an orgasm in my brain. Then, like after an orgasm, the way your body aches and you feel tired but in a lovely, satisfied, How-Great-Thou-Art, birdsong-and-bright-sky-on-a-spring-morning kind of way … round me the colours that had been bright before shone out like they had lights behind them’.

Taking the drug for the first time, Shahid in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1996) feels that ‘everyone was looking so beautiful. But before he could think why this might be, or why he was enjoying himself so much, an undertow of satisfaction rippled through him, as if some creature were sighing in his body. He felt he was going to be lifted off his feet. The feeling left him and he felt deserted. He wanted it back. It came and came. In a pounding trance he started writhing joyously, feeling he was part of a waving sea. He could have danced for ever’.

Mike Benson, in Room Full of Angels (1997), dwells on the chemically-infused perception of the music: ‘I can hear thumping banging grooving pulsing sounds all around me. I can feel it feel me. I’m inside it as it enters me… I don’t hear music I feel it absorb it sense it become it hold it in my soul and thank it so much for being there, and I’m so glad I’m here and not somewhere else, there is nowhere in the world I would rather be than in this body at this place in this head at this time’. A character in Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House likewise remarks that ‘the music is in me around me and everywhere, it’s just leaking from my body’.

There is a long literary tradition of writing about drug experiences, from De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) to Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954) and beyond. The difference with rave fiction is that it does not deal with drug taking as a solitary experiment and/or addiction but as a social event. As such it is not always possible to separate out the effect of the drug from everything else that’s going on.

In Paris Trance (1998), Geoff Dyer foregrounds the bass and the energy of the crowd: ‘You could feel the throb of the bass outside but the music hit you as you went in, as you passed into another world, where the rules of outside ceased to exist. It was packed. The throb felt outside was not simply the bass: it was the pulse of all the energy confined inside… Everyone was a spectator, everyone was a participant’.

That sense of relative equality – of everybody or nobody as a star – is also highlighted by Gavin Hills: ‘Radiant girls come up and kiss you, the boys to chat and hug. It was as if the veils of pretence and reservation had fallen and truth was allowed to dance naked. Quite literally on some occasions. There were few stars, only extras, and we all had speaking parts. Well, gibbering ones at least… I remember thinking it in full 3D: the eighties have been shit and this is fucking excellent’. In the days before people turned to face ‘superstar DJs’, there is also a basic equality between the dancers and those playing the music. Describing an early 1990s rave in New York, Tony Fletcher (2003) observes: ‘this crowd is in adulation only of itself. The room is all on one level, dark and crowded; whereas at Hedonism [another club in the novel] the DJ looks down from his exalted position above, the decks here could be anywhere in the room. No one seems to any extent interested in finding them’.

For Morvern Callar, the pleasure is tied up with the possibility of escape from a small town where everybody knows your name and life story to the welcoming, polymorphous anonymity of the ‘rave catacombs’ of the Spook Factory: ‘Immersed in the darkness… I was so close some boy or girl that their sweat was hitting me… You felt the whole side of a face lay against my bare back, between shoulder blades. It was still part of our dance. If the movement wasn’t in rhythm it would have changed the meaning of the face sticking there in the sweat. You didn‘t really have your body as your own, it was part of the dance, the music, the rave’.

Perhaps we should avoid the chemical determinism of attributing all this to MDMA. After all everyone can recall mind-blowing nights without it, and the narrator of Junglist , while dismissive of E’d up house music clubs with ‘that false high, that false hope, that false love’ still has the sensation of ‘The rhythm that heartbeat which entwines itself around your own, pulsing with it… The bassline becomes you on a level that’s impossible to define, so close are you’.

Indeed going back deeper into the historical literature of social dancing we can find euphoric descriptions from long before ecstasy had even been invented. Witness for instance Herman Hesse’s vision of a masqued ball in Steppenwolf, first published in 1927: ‘I was myself no longer. My personality was dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in water. I danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the other women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to the same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic flowers, belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one another. And the men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no strangers to me…. Our feet moved in time to the music as though we were possessed, every couple touching, and once more we felt the great wave of bliss break over us’...



Come downs, cults and cultural pessimism

Rave fiction is not all about utopian spaces of desires and possibilities. There is the downside of come downs and casualties, not to mention a recognition of the underlying current of violence associated with the dodgy characters selling the drugs. Nicholas Briscoe’s Acid Casuals (1995) portrays the sometimes murderous conflict for control of dealing in Manchester nightlife, while Jake Arnott’s truecrime (2004) is partly a fictionalised account of the 1995 Rettendon murders, where three men involved in club security (including at South West London’s Club UK) and drug smuggling were found shot dead in a Range Rover in Essex. One of the characters declares: ‘It’s who runs the doors, Gaz. That’s what this thing is going to be all about. It doesn’t matter who runs the club, who promotes the event or whatever. It’s who’s in control of security, that’s going to be the thing. That way you decide who can bring in drugs and deal inside the place’.

The full moon party scene is likewise portrayed by Garland as being underpinned by police corruption and gangster activity, with drug dealing overseen by an older ‘beach guru’ who sets up a young helper to be arrested: ‘Police happy because they got their arrest. Dealers happy because the police were off their case. Travellers happy because they got their full moon party’.

There also concerns about the wider commercial exploitation of the scene: ‘Some essentially good vibe had been there at the outset…. But now the energy and karma of all these kids was just being siphoned out as cash by some businessmen. They had been sucked dry. Pure energy converted to pure marketing’ (Rushkoff, in Champion 1997)

The gathering together of large numbers of people to enter different states of consciousness has often prompted comparisons with religious experiences and rituals, indeed the naming of one trajectory from techno as ‘trance’ made this link explicit. On the psychedelic fringe of the trance scene there was a whole scale revival of 1960s/70s new age mysticism, and one of the more dystopian tropes of rave fiction imagines this current giving rise to spiritually-tinged exploitation or even cult control scenarios.

In Electrovoodoo (1997), Michael River imagines a club where somebody is regularly chosen to be electrocuted on stage in order to achieve some kind of cosmic breakthrough, while in Jonathan Brook’s Sangria (1997) a hypnotist hides subliminal messages under the music, manipulating ‘the blank-eyed tourist clubbers’ to drink: ‘Drug someone and condition them with repetitive perception stimulation and they will do what you want them to do’.

Jeff Noon’s DJNA (1997) features a totalitarian state which has banished ‘wild dancing’ to the devils ‘entwining repetitive beats’ through the ‘Law of Gentle Pop’, with clubs taken over by ‘Jesus Boom’ with its mixture of Christianity, sacramental drugs (‘Disco biscuit and Jesus blood’) and ‘nice’n’easy dance’ to subdue the populace. As well as satirising the British Government’s anti-rave Criminal Justice Act, the story may also have been inspired by allegations of sexual abuse at the Christian rave Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield in the mid-1990s.

Rushkoff’s The Ecstasy Club (1997) is set in ‘an old abandoned piano factory in the warehouse district of Oakland’ (California) where the plans for an ‘industrial utopia’ party venue come ‘communal live in workshop’ degenerate into paranoid violence, corruption and full blown cult behaviour. The mastermind conceives of parties as ‘an ongoing pagan mass… Each party is a beat of the drum’. The aim is to challenge ‘consensus reality’ and ‘to evolve towards higher states of consciousness and social organisation’ with the help of ‘herbs, smart drugs, mind gym, music, lights, lasers’ and psychedelics, triggering global if not cosmic change. But ‘the next evolutionary level of the human species’ is founded on paying off corrupt cops and ripping off punters, not to mention underpinned by anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. There is competition between ‘Renn A. Sanz’ (seemingly a fictionalised Genesis P. Orridge) and ‘Dr Samuel Clearwater’ (Timothy Leary?) to steer the Ecstasy Club but it ends up being absorbed into the Scientology-like ‘Cosmotology’ cult as its youth project.

At times Rushcroft portrays the very communal basis of the party as something unhuman: ‘the dancing mass… pulsed up and down in time with the music. Like a sea creature, it waved its tentacles back and forth, revealing patterns… It made sounds, too, and shouted with glee from hundreds of
little mouths at once’ (Rushkoff).

There are echoes here of a deeper cultural pessimism about crowds and collective behaviour reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel about partying after the First World War: ’Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris- all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies’.

More at: http://datacide-magazine.com/these-days ... n-fiction/

[Elvis]

One way to rebel against a so-called ‘hippy’ upbringing is to reject it entirely and become desperately conventional.
[. . .]
Incidentally, I would never describe myself purely as a ‘hippy’ of the 60s

Another person writing about hippies who doesn't know how to spell "hippie."

[American Dream]

Thanks Luther for pointing me towards "Stay Behind" networks in Alaska!

The only lead police developed to Hassler's death was a man named Jim Teegarden, said to be a former Alaska state trooper and bush pilot. His name had been found on Hassler's list. He was questioned about the killing but gave detectives no information and promptly disappeared.

Hmm- a likely GLADIO type recruit?:

To lend credibility to this plan, consideration should be given to carefully selected· bush pilots as potential agents.

Proposed Plan for Intelligence Coverage in Alaska in the Event of an Invasion (Stay-Behind Agent Program) (Documents referred from the FBI to the Air Force for release disposition), 1947-1954, Page 4

Ukiah Daity Journal, Ukiah, Calif.
Wednesday, February 7, 1979

'Judo Connection' linked to Cal killings

SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) — An international drug smuggling ring involving elite Black Belt judo experts around the world has been linked to a series of murders in California. The "Judo Connection" is believed to be responsible for massive quantities of LSD distributed in the United States and Britain in recent years. The ring, for example, was the supplier for Francis Ragusa, an LSD kingpin who was savagely murdered with his wife and sister in their Oakland home a year ago. The death of Lee Hassler, a little known 35-year-old University of California drop-out with an interest in judo, has also been directly tied to the ring. Hassler's body, trussed and shot in a canvas tarpaulin, was found on a Sierra mountain road in 1976. Hassler, it developed, had an apartment in Hanover, West Germany, which served as a drug smuggling base. Central figure in the case currently is a man namied William Backhus, 42, of Philadelphia. He is on trial in Frankfurt, Germany, on drug Smuggling charges. In the 1960s Backhus lived in Tokyo among the judo experts who gathered there from throughout the world to practice their art. His associates included several high ranking judo athletes, including one who who won a bronze medal at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Backhus turned up in Germany in 1972 after living for several years with judo friends in Holland: European detectives, after breaking up a major drug smuggling ring in Europe through "Operation Julie" in 1976, found that the supplies of illicit drugs continued flowing almost without interruption. They traced the new supplies to the "Judo Connection." A substance called " ET" (ergotamine tartrate) was being purchased in Germany and shipped to the United States. At secret laboratories this substance was converted into LSD and put on the market, some of it going back to Europe. As the 'drug chain continued to unravel, police discovered that many of the couriers, buyers and other traffickers happened to be judo practitioners as well, thus establishing the "Judo Connection." U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigators estimated that the Backhus group smuggled at least 44 pounds of ET — enough to produce 50 million LSD "trips." The Ragusas, a well-to-do family who lived quietly in the Oakland hills, were savagely stabbed to death Jan. 25,1978. Investigators found $275,000 worth of LSD in their house and it was learned that Ragusa, 29, posing as "David Lovelace," a rug merchant, had made eight or nine trips to England in the preceding months. It was also learned he had salted away many millions of dollars in real estate, mines and other investiments throughout the world. Lawrence Reilly, 29, of San Rafael, Calif., was arrested as a suspect in the Ragusa killings. He is still awaiting trial. In one of the bizarre developments in the case, Reilly was virtually kidnapped from the Alameda County Jail by federal agents and taken away for questioning elsewhere last summer. County prosecutors did not know of this until after it was done. Besides the Ragusa and Hassler slayings, investigators have linked the "Judo Connection" with five other drug-related murders in the United States.

Ukiah Daily Journal, Ukiah, Calif.
Thursday, February 15, 1979

Obscure murder leads to 'Judo Connection' drug ring

By RICHARD M. HARNKTT SAN FRANCISCO (UPl) -

When the body of Lee Frickstad Hassler was found wrapped in a tarpaulin with two bullets in his head by a couple of hikers in El Dorado County on Oct. 6, 1976, few paid much attention. The name of this 35-year-old UC dropout and judo fan did not ring a very loud bell anywhere. But soon Lee Hassler's name was ringing bells for international drug agents throughout Europe and Asia as well as in the United States. Hassler was a key link in a web of international drug smuggling that involved a worldwide group of Black Belt judo experts. He was a supplier for Francis^ Ragusa, a drug dealer who was brutally slain with his wife and sister a year ago in Oakland. Two men in the "Judo Connection" are currently on trial in Germany, William Backhus, of Philadelphia, and Clarence Watson, of Portsmouth, Va. The prosecution of a suspect in the Ragusa killings is on the back burner while federal agents pursue the many remaining strands in the web. Besides the murders of Hassler and Ragusa, a half dozen other deaths have been linked to the case. None has been solved. Hassler's body had been stripped of identification and his boots (where he kept thousands of dollars hidden) were gone. Police identified him from fingerprints and found he lived with his elderly parents in Berkeley, was unmarried and secretive. In autos Hassler owned, and in his room, they found guns, drugs and a list of names and telephone numbers — apparently including some thai convinced agents Hassler was "the link" between the drug ring and the mystet-ious 29-year-oid Ragusa, who lived quietly in a plush, heavily guarded, Oakland hills home. Investigators learned that Hassler had been behind the scenes in several other drug cases in California, Uiat he, mel Ragusa and agreed to supply him with three kilos of "ET," a substance from which LSD is made, and that he maintained an af>artment in Hanover, Germany. Meanwhile detectives in Germany 'ooking into the ",Judo Connection" which had been buying illegal drugs had come up with the name "Lee." At that point in the investigation there occurred one of those dramatic sequences as bizarre as the wildest fiction. Backhus, also a judo Black Belt, acquired the uniform of a U.S. Army Military Police major. He went to Hassler's apartment in Hanover, with another confederate posing as an interpreter. He told the landlady he was there to collect Hassler's effects. Backhus found money and papers but did not find the key to Hassler's safety deposit. Police later found the keys in a pair of sox in the apartment. Cash and drugs were in the bank vault. Backhus then made a quick trip to the United Stated, to let his buyers know that he "had nothing to do with Hassler's killing." The only lead police'developed to Hassler's death was a man named Jim Teegarden, said to be a former Alaska state trooper a nd bush pilot. His name had been found on Hassler's list. He was questioned about the killing but gave detectives no information and promptly disappeared. One arrest was made in the Ragusa slayings. Lawrence Reilly, 30, is in the Alameda County Jail awaiting trial. Police say he will not talk because "he says ho is dead if he talks" and is safer in jail than out. Reilly, like Ragusa, is from New York, and both are said to have Mafia links. One judo expert, Garry Friedrichs, of Reno, has been, tried and sentenced for receiving drugs through the "connection."

[American Dream]

Speed & politics: an amphetamine political economy



Building on the society of stimulation, this long-read post is a theoretical examination of pharmacology as material practice and as metaphor. Today capital operates via the production of hyperaroused bodies but in doing so it also creates the conditions under which the nervous system itself becomes a site of the refusal of work. [TW: eating disorder, suicide, drug dependency].

http://libcom.org/blog/speed-politics-a ... y-22032014

[American Dream]

The Doom that Came to Chelsea

ALAN CABAL
PUBLISHED JUN 10, 2003 AT 6:01 AM (UPDATED NOV 11, 2014)

My ex-wife died back in March, after a long and heroic bout with cancer. She walked out on me in 1997, but we remained on good enough terms that I hosted her first and only visit to Vegas in October of 2001. Las Vegas was a refuge from the maudlin hysteria of the time. She was dazzled by it. I got to spend a week with her last year, just before I drove to California. I didn’t think I’d be coming back, and we both knew that this would probably be our last time together.

She had just enough strength to walk down the driveway to the mailbox, so we spent the week just hanging out, smoking pot and watching television, going over old times. The pot counteracted the nausea from the chemo and kept her appetite up. I brought her a stuffed toy camel from the Hard Rock Cafe in Bahrain and a keffiya from Beirut, and offered pep talks about spontaneous remissions and her old Lotto habit.

"The odds on Lotto are pretty bad," I said, "but you played it twice a week. Your chances of beating this are much better."

I managed to hold back the tears until I got back to my apartment in Manhattan. I had a tricky moment in the airport bar, but then again, I always do in those places.

I first laid eyes on Bonnie at a bar called the Bells of Hell on 13th St. just west of 6th Ave. where the Cafe Loup now resides. The Bells of Hell was a hardcore Irish joint with a bar in the front and a good-sized performance space in the back. The location and name made the place a natural watering hole for the customer base of Herman Slater’s Magickal Childe, up in Chelsea at 35 W. 19th St. The Magickal Childe was ground zero for the occult explosion in New York City in the 1970s.

Herman Slater and his lover Ed Buczynski had a little occult emporium on Henry St. in Brooklyn, just off Atlantic Ave., back in the early 1970s. They mainly sold herbs, candles and oils, but they also carried a modest selection of books. The Warlock Shop was just a hole in the wall, but despite its humble appearance, it was a true cash cow. In 1976, the duo pulled up stakes and moved the operation to Chelsea.

At the Magickal Childe, there was enough space to dramatically increase the merchandise offered, and since Herman had the cash and the connections, the new store became, in effect, the one-stop-shop for any and all conjuring needs. In addition to herbs, oils, candles, books, robes, swords and other accoutrements of the Art, one could find human skulls, dried bats, mummified cat’s paws and a wide variety of unusual jewelry, a large portion of which was created by Bonnie, my ex-wife-to-be. A room in the back of the store served as a temple and classroom for the various strains of wicca that began to gravitate to the place.

That temple also served as the launching pad for the explosive growth of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in the city in the late 70s and early 80s.

Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he’d grown weary of explaining to customers that H.P. Lovecraft’s fabled forbidden tome was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more. He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a "genuine" Necronomicon could be huge–with the right packaging. In 1977, the book made its debut in the window of Herman’s little shop of horrors in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad, unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus trilogy, and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping through counterculture circuits. Grady McMurtry was attempting to jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in California and had just succeeded in having Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck published. Punks and proto-goth/industrial types searched out obscure Satanic treatises and rare tracts from the seemingly defunct Process Church of the Final Judgement. Unrepentant hippies and uber-feminists found common ground in the gentle, woodsy eco-cult of the wicca, available in enough variant "traditions" to suit any palate with an appetite for sweets.

None of the wiccan "traditions" were any older than the electric light bulb, and the OTO had its origins in a very dubious Masonic lineage of no greater antiquity than aniline dyes, but that didn’t stop any of us from having a good time. The Necronomicon was not merely the icing on the cake: It was the hideous formless mass that squatted gibbering and piping where the bride and groom should be.

This was the 1970s, and the whole scene was awash in drugs and crazy sex. Herman had an appetite for rough trade and kept a steady stream of dope-crazed street hustlers flowing down from the Haymarket Saloon up on 8th Ave. above Port Authority. He’d keep them around until they ripped him off, then give them the boot and move on to the next one. He liked them big and stupid, a total contrast with Eddie’s graceful and intelligent demeanor.

The differing wicca groups were squabbling over the supposed validity of lineage, and there were no fewer than four established OTO groups internationally, each claiming exclusive dominion over the brand and trademarks. As a lifelong student of what Crowley termed "magick" (the "k" inserted to distinguish the practice from prestidigitation), I have never been a big fan of what I call the "booga-booga" school of magick. I tend to see the practice more as a form of radical self-help and advanced covert sales technique than any kind of actual traffic with disembodied critters and goblins. That said, between the copious amounts of hallucinogens ingested and the spells and counterspells hurled around, there were times when the vibes around the store congealed and quivered like a great Waldorf Salad.

Continues at: http://www.nypress.com/the-doom-that-came-to-chelsea/