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Aldous Huxley felt that the "scientific" approach was utterly hopeless. "Those idiots want to be Pavlovians," he said, "[but] Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The 'scientific' LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics." The practitioners of psychedelic therapy, on the other hand, were cognizant of the complex interaction between set and setting, and they worked to facilitate insight and personal growth.
Of course, even the best set and setting could not always guarantee an easy, pleasant, or uncomplicated experience. The goal of a therapeutic session was not to have a "good trip" per se but to work through emotional, creative or intellectual blockages and further the process of self-discovery -- an ordeal that could be very painful at times. Certain schools of psychiatry -- R. D. Laing, for example -- recognized that "freaking out" might actually herald a positive breakthrough to a new level of awareness if properly integrated by the patient. [2] The idea that a turbulent acid trip could have therapeutic consequences reflected an ancient understanding of the human psyche and the principles governing the healing process.
The "perilous passing" through the chaotic realm of the bummer was structured into the drug rituals of primitive societies as part of the sacred "vision-quest." The key figure in the hallucinogenic drama was the shaman, the witch doctor, the medicine man (or woman, as was often the case) who gave song to dreams and provided spiritual access for the entire tribe. A connoisseur of the drug-induced trance state, the shaman derived his or her strength from confronting the terror of ego death -- the quintessential trial by fire that was seen as a necessary prelude to an ecstatic rebirth, the resurrection of a new personality.
The drug experience informed every aspect of life in traditional cultures. With the aid of hallucinogenic plants the witch doctor cured the sick, communicated with the spirits of the dead, foretold the future, and initiated young people in coming-of-age rites. The use of mind-altering substances within an ethos of combat and aggression was also common in primitive communities. Whatever the specific purpose, the shaman always employed the hallucinogen in a ceremonial context. An elaborate set of rituals governed every step of the process, from gathering the roots and herbs to preparing and administering the brew. The power plants were often poisonous and could be fatal if not prepared properly. Only a ritually clean person who had endured weeks or months of prayer and fasting, often in isolation from the community, was deemed ready to ingest these substances. Because of the shaman's familiarity with states of consciousness induced by hallucinogenic drugs, he or she was considered qualified to pilot others through the experience.
"Primitive man," wrote Huxley in 1931, "explored the pharmacological avenues of escape from the world with astounding thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered." To Huxley, the urge for transcendence and visionary experience was nothing less than a biological imperative. "Always and everywhere," he asserted, "human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in the Wordsworthian phrase, 'far more deeply interfused.' ... I live, yet not I, but wine or opium or peyote or hashish liveth in me. To go beyond the insulated self is such a liberation that, even when self-transcendence is through nausea into frenzy; through cramps into hallucinations and coma, the drug-induced experience has been regarded by primitives and even by the highly civilized as intrinsically divine."
The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular time and place but characterized nearly every society on the planet (with the possible exception of certain Eskimo and Polynesian communities). For the Aztecs there was peyote and ololiuqui, a small lentil-like seed containing lysergic acid; the Aborigines of Australia chewed pituri, a desert shrub, the natives of the Upper Amazon had yage, the telepathic vine. Those who floated into a sacred space after ingesting these substances often projected ecstatic qualities onto the plants themselves. Certain scholars believe that the fabled Soma of the ancient Vedic religion in northern India was actually the fly agaric mushroom, and there is strong evidence that ergot, from which LSD is derived, was the mysterious kykeon used for over two thousand years by the ancient Greeks in the annual Eleusinian Mysteries. [3]
When Christianity was adopted as the official creed of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, all other religions, including the Mysteries, were banished. Christian propagandists called for the destruction of the pagan drug cults that had spread throughout Europe after the Roman conquest. Like its shamanistic forebears, paganism was rooted in rapture rather than faith or doctrine, its mode of expression was myth and ritual, and those who carried on the forbidden traditions possessed a vast storehouse of knowledge about herbs and special medicaments. The witches of the Middle Ages concocted brews with various hallucinogenic compounds -- belladonna, thorn apple, henbane and bufotenine (derived from the sweat gland of the toad Bufo marinus) -- and when the moon was full they flew off on their imaginary broomsticks to commune with spirits. [4]
The ruthless suppression of European witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition coincided with attempts to stamp out indigenous drug use among the colonized natives of the New World. The Spanish outlawed peyote and coca leaves in the Americas, and the British later tried to banish kava use in Tahiti. Such edicts were part of an imperialist effort to impose a new social order that stigmatized the psychedelic experience as a form of madness or possession by evil spirits. It wasn't until the late eighteenth century that industrial civilization produced its own "devil's advocate," which spoke in a passionate and lyrical voice. The romantic rebellion signified "a return of the repressed" as drugs were embraced by the visionary poets and artists who lived as outcasts in their own society. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, catalyzed the literary talents of Coleridge, Poe, Swinburne, De Quincey, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while the best-known French writers, including Baudelaire, de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, gathered at Le Club des Haschischins, a protobohemian enclave in Paris founded by Theophile Gautier in 1844. [5]
For the visionary poets modern society was the bummer, and they often viewed the drug experience as a tortured means to a fuller existence, to a life more innately human. It was with the hope of alleviating his own tortured mental condition that Antonin Artaud made an intercontinental trek in the 1930s to participate in the peyote ritual of the Tarahumara Indians in the Mexican highlands. Artaud did not undertake such a risky journey as a tourist or an anthropologist but as someone who wished to be healed, as a spiritual exile seeking to regain "a Truth which the world of Europe is losing." The desperate Frenchman experienced a monumental bummer -- "the cataclysm which was my body ... this dislocated assemblage, this piece of damaged geology." Yet somehow, despite the nightmare visions and the somatic discomfort, he managed to scratch out a perception of the Infinite. "Once one has experienced a visionary state of mind," Artaud wrote in The Peyote Dance, "one can no longer confuse the lie with truth. One has seen where one comes from and who one is, and one no longer doubts what one is. There is no emotion or external influence that can divert one from this reality."
Like Artaud and the romantic poets, some psychiatrists who used LSD in a therapeutic context believed that a disruptive experience could have a curative effect if allowed to proceed to resolution. Many other researchers, however, dismissed transcendental insight as either "happy psychosis" or a lot of nonsense. The knee-jerk reaction on the part of the psychotomimetic stalwarts was indicative of a deeply ingrained prejudice against certain varieties of experience. In advanced industrial societies "paranormal" states of consciousness are readily disparaged as "abnormal" or pathological. Such attitudes, cultural as much as professional, played a crucial role in circumscribing the horizon of scientific investigation into hallucinogenic agents.
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argues that the scientist's overriding need to make sense of his data compels him to mold it to the prevailing scientific paradigm, which defines "legitimate" problems and methods for a given historical era. There are moments, however, when the orthodox framework cannot bear the weight of irrefutable new evidence. A period of controversy ensues until a new paradigm emerges to encompass and transcend the previous ideology. During this transition period scientists who buck the status quo are often castigated as eccentric, irresponsible, and unscientific. Galileo, for example, was branded a lunatic and a heretic for suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun. In a similar fashion the psychedelic evidence challenged the entrenched world view of the psychiatric establishment, and proponents of LSD therapy were summarily denounced and ridiculed by those who were fixated on the model psychosis concept.
Dr. Humphry Osmond defended his position by emphasizing that the pathological bias, from a historical perspective, was clearly the exception and not the rule. In many cultures that were less sophisticated technologically but more so ecologically, the drug-induced trance state was revered as an enlargement of reality rather than a deviation from it. Osmond pleaded with his fellow researchers not to dismiss something that struck them as unusual or different simply because "it transcends those fashionable ruts of thinking that we dignify by calling logic and reason." He urged psychiatrists to change their outlook in order to realize the full potential of psychedelics.
While many young doctors rallied to his call, there were others, including certain influential scientists working under CIA and military contract, who refused to budge from the psychotomimetic posture. The debate between the two camps came to a head at the first international conference on LSD therapy in 1959. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (at times a CIA conduit), it was perhaps the most important gathering of LSD researchers to date for it enabled workers in the field to compare notes and analyze their findings as a group. The conference was chaired by Dr. Paul Hoch, a prominent and well-connected scientist who was, in the words of Sanford Unger, "an opinion leader." Hoch was also a longtime CIA consultant and a contract employee of the US Army Chemical Corps. Dr. Harold Abramson, a veteran of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program, served as recording secretary, and a number of other scientists who rented their services to the CIA and the military were featured speakers. Hoch and Abramson did not just stumble into their respective roles at this event. Their status as dominant figures in above ground LSD research suggests the extent to which covert interests influenced the course of the debate over hallucinogenic substances and their effects.
Despite ample evidence to the contrary Dr. Hoch stubbornly insisted that LSD and mescaline were "essentially anxiety-producing drugs." He asserted that they were "not especially useful " in a therapeutic context because they disorganize the psychic integration of a person. LSD experiments, according to the chairman, could not be compared with "results obtained in patients where tranquilizing drugs were used to reduce, instead of stir up the patient's symptoms."
Dr. Hoch was incredulous when other participants in the Macy conference reported that their patients found the LSD session beneficial and personally rewarding and were usually eager to take the drug again. "In my experience," Hoch announced, "no patient asks for it again." His experience included the following mescaline experiment conducted on a thirty-six-year-old male diagnosed as a "pseudoneurotic schizophrenic."He had some visual hallucinations. He saw dragons and tigers coming to eat him and reacted to these hallucinations with marked anxiety. He also had some illusionary distortions of the objects in the room. The emotional changes were apprehension and fear -- at times mounting to panic, persecutory misinterpretation of the environment, fear of death, intense irritability, suspiciousness, perplexity, and feelings of depersonalization. He verbalized the feelings of depersonalization as "floating out of space," seemed "between this life and the next," and had the feeling of being born. The paranoid content concerned essentially why the doctors were taking notes and fear that he would be attacked by them. He also expressed an ecstatic grandiose trend of having the feeling that he was God in heaven and then, however, had the feeling of being in hell ... The mental picture was that of a typical schizophrenic psychosis while the drug influence lasted.
As an afterword, Hoch noted, "This patient received transorbital lobotomy and showed temporarily a marked improvement in all his symptoms, losing most of his tension and anxiety. Postoperatively he was again placed under mescaline. Basically the same manifestations were elicited as prior to the operation with the exception that quantitatively the symptoms were not as marked as before."
Dr. Hoch also tried electroshock treatment on patients who had been given mescaline. "It did not influence the clinical symptoms at all," he reported matter-of-factly. "The patients continued to behave in the same way as prior to electroshock treatment." On the basis of these tests Hoch concluded that electroshock "has no influence on mescaline-produced mental states." He might have revised his "objective" assessment if he had taken the drug himself and had one of his assistants apply the volts while he tripped the lights fantastic. But those who secretly funded his research required only that he dish it out to mental patients and prisoners.
"An interesting theory can always outrun a set of facts," declared psychologist Audrey Holliday. She found the whole psychotomimetic approach guilty of using "unscientific and intemperate terms." Yet the semantic inaccuracies were still being bandied about even when most researchers had agreed that LSD did not really mimic endogenous schizophrenia.
Despite widespread acknowledgment that the model psychosis concept had outlived its usefulness, the psychiatric orientation articulated by those of Dr. Hoch's persuasion prevailed in the end. When it came time to lay down their hand, the medical establishment and the media both "mimicked" the line that for years had been secretly promoted by the CIA and the military -- that hallucinogenic drugs were extremely dangerous because they drove people insane, and all this talk about creativity and personal growth was just a lot of hocus pocus. This perception of LSD governed the major policy decisions enacted by the FDA and the drug control apparatus in the years ahead.
2.. Whereas most psychedelic therapists were prepared to assist their patients should difficulties arise, Dr. Salvador Roquet, a maverick Mexican psychiatrist, consciously sought to induce a bummer as part of his "treatment." Roquet utilized various hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, datura, and ketamine. Known as "a master of bad trips" and "a pusher of death," Roquet subjected people to adverse stimuli while they were drugged; Jewish subjects, for example, were given acid and then forced to listen to a recording of Hitler's speeches
American Dream » Wed Sep 24, 2014 9:18 am wrote: https://ce399esoterica.wordpress.com/20 ... s-to-yoga/From UFOs to Yoga
By Martin A. Lee
George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party until his violent death in 1967, gushed about having had a mystical experience when he first read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “I realized that National Socialism [was] actually a new religion,” said Rockwell, who considered April 20th the holiest day of the calendar year.
That’s when neo-Nazis around the world celebrate Hitler’s birthday at secretive gatherings with Aryan shrines, devotional rituals, white power regalia, and other racialist kitsch.
These annual conclaves are akin to religious ceremonies where true believers worship Hitler as an infallible diety whose every utterance is gospel.
The bizarre quasi-religious and mythic elements that proliferate in sectors of the contemporary neo-Nazi milieu are explored by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his important, new book Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity.
Although there has always been a theocratic strain in fascist movements, several factors are contributing to a latter-day, “folkish” (or tribal) revival among white youth who are beset by an acute sense of disenfranchisement in Western societies.
In response to the challenges of globalization, multiculturalism, and large-scale Third World immigration, neo-Nazi racism in the United States, Europe and elsewhere has sometimes morphed into what the author describes as “new folkish religions of white identity.”
This neo-folkish resurgence — reminiscent of some early Nazi ideas — encompasses a hodgepodge of anti-Semitic neo-Pagan sects, Christian Identity churches, skewed variants of eastern mysticism, occult influences, New Age conspiracies, and Satanists into the “black metal” music subculture.
Goodrick-Clarke, a British scholar who writes in an engaging and accessible style, has long foraged on the farther shores of right-wing extremist politics.
His first book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, is a masterful study of a much sensationalized subject — racist groups in early 20th century Austria that embraced forms of mystical nationalism and helped incubate Aryan racial ideas.
Building on his previous work, Goodrick-Clarke draws a parallel in Black Sun between folkish ferment in Hitler’s Austria and the role of today’s marginalized neo-Nazi sects, many of which have repackaged Aryan racism in new forms influenced by eastern religions.
A crucial difference, the author maintains, is the shift from the virulent German nationalism of the Third Reich to a broader racist ideology of global white supremacy.
“It is highly significant that the Aryan cult of white identity is now most marked in the United States,” says Goodrick-Clarke, adding that American neo-Nazi groups behave like persecuted religious sects preparing for the final confrontation with a corrupt world.
Although each have their specific eccentricities — ranging from anti-Semitic Christian Identity churches to anti-Christian, racist Odinist groups — almost all of them espouse millenarian visions of a white racial utopia.
Satan Meets the Führer
Early American neo-Nazi James Madole, who rejected Christianity as a degenerate Jewish construct, became a key figure in developing bizarre forms of fascism after he founded the National Renaissance Party, the first U.S. neo-Nazi organization, in 1952.
Although he never attracted many followers, Madole became known as “the father of postwar occult fascism” by saturating his ideology with a mish-mash of science-fiction and other notions drawn from eastern traditions and theosophy, a mystical religious movement originating in late 19th century America.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Madole’s party cultivated close links with a Church of Satan spin-off — an alliance that anticipated the recent emergence of a violent, international fringe network devoted to Nordic gods, black magic, occultism and devil worship.
David Myatt, chief representative of Nazi Satanism in Great Britain, defends human sacrifice and praises a new wave of satanic black metal Skinhead bands that spout demented lyrics and anti-social rants.
Myatt’s “religion of National Socialism” owes much to Savitri Devi, the grand dame of postwar neo-Nazism, who had traveled from her native France to India as a young woman. An admirer of the racist caste system, Devi immersed herself in early Hindu texts.
Noting that the Nazi swastika is also an ancient, mystical Indian symbol, she romanticized the Third Reich as “the Holy Land of the West.” Devi was the first Western writer to acclaim Hitler as a spiritual “avatar,” a supernatural figure who pointed the way toward a future Aryan paradise.
The Jews, whom Devi blamed for all the world’s suffering and alienation, were predictably pegged as the main obstacle on the path to the Golden Age.
Devi’s obsession with the pre-Christian origins of Indo-European culture was shared by Julius Evola, an Italian Nazi philosopher whose racial theories were adopted and codified by Mussolini in 1938.
Calling for a “Great Holy War” to battle national and ideological enemies, Evola exerted a significant influence on a generation of militant neofascist youth in postwar Italy.
Among his protégés were leaders of right-wing terrorist organizations linked to numerous bomb attacks from the 1960s to the 1980s. Evola’s mystical fascist writings include books on Zen Buddhism, yoga, alchemy, Tantrism (a kind of sexual mysticism), and European paganism.
After he died in 1974, his esoteric musings were rediscovered by New Age publications. Today, many of Evola’s books are available in English translation in trendy New Age bookstores in the United States, despite his status as an avowed fascist.
UFOs, Polar Bases and the Black Sun
Another influential figure in the occult-fascist underground is Miguel Serrano, a former Chilean diplomat and Nazi die-hard who touts yoga, meditation, and hallucinogenic drugs as ways of raising consciousness in order to make contact with higher Aryan intelligence.
Serrano blends exotic oriental religious themes with dubious lore about secret religious societies. He likens the Nazi SS — which was condemned in its entirety for war crimes — to an order of initiates seeking the Holy Grail.
This notion appealed to Wilhelm Landig, an Austrian SS veteran and postwar Nazi activist who coined the idea of the “Black Sun,” a mystical energy source allegedly capable of regenerating the Aryan race.
Goodrick-Clarke credits Landig with reviving the folkish — and far out — Germanic mythology of Thule, the supposed Arctic homeland of the ancient Aryans, in order to prophesy the recovery and resurrection of Nazism as an earth-conquering force.
Landig and other occult-fascist propagandists have circulated wild stories about German Nazi colonies that live and work in secret installations beneath the polar icecaps, where they developed flying saucers and miracle weapons after the demise of the Third Reich.
The abundance of UFO sightings, which began in the early 1950s, is attributed to the amazing prowess of Nazi science and technology.
The fall of the Third Reich is cast merely as a temporary setback; at any moment, a battalion of Nazi extraterrestrials could zoom forth in their magical discs to deliver Aryan folk from the ills of democracy and Judeo-Christian decadence.
A hot item among New Age conspiracy theorists and promoters of Holocaust denial, stories about Nazi UFOs may seem ludicrous to anyone with their feet firmly planted on terra firma. And, certainly, this kind of thinking does not dominate even the contemporary world of the extreme right.
But these sci-fi legends underscore, in the words of Goodrick-Clarke, how “Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world.”
Moreover, if the past is any kind of prologue, these bizarre, new religious sects “may be early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies.”
“The risks of race religiosity are great. … Whenever human groups are interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness,” Goodrick-Clarke cautions, “both the human community and humanity itself are diminished.”
A timely warning, indeed.
How a DEA Enforcer Became the Godfather of the New LSD Revolution
Shulgin hard at work
In 2000, the DEA busted two men who had an LSD production lab in a missile-silo in rural Kansas. The silo was psychedelia’s equivalent of an oil gusher, supplying an estimated 90% of the world’s acid. Following the agency’s “Operation White Rabbit,” the pipelines ran dry and, for the first time since the hallucinogen was popularized in the mid-1960s, planet Earth faced a psychedelic winter—the death of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, as Burning Man turned into Boring Man.
The winter was a short one, however. Within five years, new LSD labs sprang up selling new types of the drug dazzling and blinding in number and diversity. Also on offer were analogs of mescaline, psilocybin, DMT and other hallucinogens that had long been banned. To participant-observers of this subculture, like James Oroc—the author of Tryptamine Palace and [font=][/font]A Journey From Burning Man to the Akashic Field—the dawning of Psychedelics 2.0 promises to usher in a kinder, gentler—and saner—revolution. One of its benefits is the growing scientific research into the potentially therapeutic effects of MDMA (ecstasy) and LSD into disorders of the brain, including schizophrenia, PTSD and addiction, and the despair that often comes with late-stage terminal disease.
The history of LSD’s second coming is predictably rich with colorful/shady characters, none more so than the chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, who Oroc calls “our one and only Psychedelic Godfather.” Shulgin first made his mark at Dow Chemicals, producing the first biodegradable pesticide. After taking a job in the early 1970s at the University of California at Berkeley, he learned of the recreational drug MDMA from his students. Having tried mescaline in the late 1950s and “learned that there was a great deal inside me,” he was already sympathetic. He did the “love drug” and loved it, dubbing it his “low-calorie martini.”
“From his remarkable home-lab that looks more like a garden shed, Shulgin would discover, synthesize and bio-essay over 260 psychoactive compounds during the following 35 years, often publishing the results in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature and The Journal of Organic Chemistry,” Oroc writes.
The story takes a most interesting turn. The DEA got in touch with Shulgin, seeking his expertise in its criminal investigations and legal cases. A deal was struck: Shulgin was put on the payroll and granted a special license to pursue his otherwise illegal development of MDMA and LSD derivatives. Then the intrigue begins. How Shulgin became an enforcer for the DEA to a target of the agency to the Godfather of the Second Psychedelic Revolution is an epic tale—one that, as Oroc brilliantly explains, could only happen in America.
Through his friend Bob Sager, head of the U.S. DEA's Western Laboratories, Shulgin formed a relationship with the DEA and began holding pharmacology seminars for the agents, supplying the DEA with samples of various compounds, and occasionally serving as an expert witness in court. In 1988, he authored a then-definitive law enforcement reference book[ on controlled substances, and received several awards from the DEA.
Bennett, Drake (2005-01-30). "Dr. Ecstasy". New York Times Magazine (New York Times)
Shulgin, Alexander (1988). Controlled Substances: Chemical & Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws. Ronin Publishing. ISBN 0-914171-50-X.
conniption » Fri Jan 30, 2015 5:44 am wrote:Misri Jogi & Companion with Murli (Snake Charmers of Sindh)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34OWd4k3Igs
American Dream » Sat Jan 31, 2015 4:58 pm wrote:A very legitimate question regarding the use of language in that article.Through his friend Bob Sager, head of the U.S. DEA's Western Laboratories, Shulgin formed a relationship with the DEA and began holding pharmacology seminars for the agents, supplying the DEA with samples of various compounds, and occasionally serving as an expert witness in court. In 1988, he authored a then-definitive law enforcement reference book[ on controlled substances, and received several awards from the DEA.
Bennett, Drake (2005-01-30). "Dr. Ecstasy". New York Times Magazine (New York Times)
Shulgin, Alexander (1988). Controlled Substances: Chemical & Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws. Ronin Publishing. ISBN 0-914171-50-X.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_ ... and_career
American Dream wrote:A very legitimate question regarding the use of language in that article
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