Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Jack Spicer’s LANGUAGE


http://martin-cj.tumblr.com/post/905700 ... edition-of

[American Dream]

http://www.psychedelicpress.co.uk/news- ... ed/7997052

Messiah apprehended at Heathrow: Preface to Science Revealed

By psychedelicpress, Apr 24 2014 10:44AM

This is the preface for our newly published book Science Revealed - details of which can be found by clicking on the non-fiction tab at the top of this page.

To the Manic Messianic Man,


Clinical stages of type 3 [Jerusalem Syndrome]

• Anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension, plus other unspecified reactions.

• Declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone…

• A need to be clean and pure: obsession with taking baths and showers; compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting.

• Preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, toga-like gown, which is always white.

• The need to scream, shout, or sing out loud psalms, verses from the Bible, religious hymns or spirituals…

• A procession or march to one of Jerusalem’s holy places.

• Delivery of a ‘sermon’ in a holy place. The sermon is usually very confused and based on an unrealistic plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.’

- The British Journal of Psychiatry


Jerusalem Syndrome was first described back in the 1930s, and struck with increasing frequency as the new millennium approached, with hundreds of enthusiastic tourists ranting in the streets about the end of days. The peak has become a plateau. Every year since 2000, around 40 cases have been so severe as to require hospitalisation.

Such episodes are not limited to Israel: my friend went messianic suddenly in the street in India, giving his rupees to the wind, and also giving up his daily shower. He became unmanageable at the ashram, and was eventually put in a taxi bound for the airport, where he sang Imagine at the check-in desk. When airport staff exchanged his stinking clothes for a cotton smock to match his scraggly beard, his Old Testament persona was completed. He sang Lennon’s hymn again in the cabin, before throwing off his smock and launching naked into a spirited sermon. The police were waiting at Heathrow.

My own interest in things apocalyptic began in the 1990s, with a knock on the door and a fistful of colourful pamphlets depicting the fate awaiting those who would not witness Jehovah. The apocalypse, and apocalyptic people, have fascinated me ever since. From the Greek apo- (away) + kalyptein (to cover), its English synonym is revelation, from the Latin: ‘removal’ (re) of a ‘veil’ (velum). An apocalypse is an unveiling or disclosure, when the previously unknown becomes known, or the unconscious becomes conscious. Nemu’s End is about the process of apocalypse. It is about how limitations arise and what happens when they collapse, both collectively in society and individually in our brains.

This book, Science Revealed, considers the apocalypse in science, as discovery (or dis-cover-y – when something hiding undercover has its cover dissed). Biographies of scientists such as Tesla and Einstein reveal how our most groundbreaking ideas result not from rational thinking and tapping on calculators, but from visions, dreams and other non-rational revelations. The controversies that blow up when such insights clash with embedded patterns of thought are often resolved in a manner most unscientific, and this is just one of the ways in which what is simplistically called ‘rationalism’ often obfuscates truth in a fundamentally complex world.

Book 2, Neuro-Apocalypse, is about the mechanics of revelation at the scale of the individual. We will explore how the architecture of thought channels the mind towards certain aspects of the world, and obscures others. When normal linguistic boundaries are dissolved, with autistic savantism, with degenerative brain disease, and occasionally with a knock on the head, incredible feats of perception and intuition can become possible. Meditation can also lead people to extraordinary capabilities and insights, and so can psychedelic drugs, which we will find in pre-industrial quantities in the pages of our high and holy Bible.

Book 3, Apocalypses Past, Present and Personal, explores the apocalypse as a collective event. At various points in history, the established structures of communities have been rapidly broken down, leaving space for new growth. This can be because of external events, such as conquest or disaster, or through the accumulation of individual insights that stress the existing order to breaking-point.

One catharsis in first century Jerusalem devastated the homeland and altered forever the self-image of the Jewish people, while launching a Jewish tale along Roman roads into the pagan world. Sublime truth or pack of lies, tool of meditation or weapon of control, something to live for, to die for, and to kill for, The Bible is a lean, mean, fighting meme that has self-replicated prodigiously through the centuries. It is also thoroughly embedded in the fabric of our culture, and there is much to be learned by unraveling some of its threads.

‘The end of the world’, for example, is a terrible translation of scripture. What ends is not the world but the aeon (or aion in Greek), meaning epoch or era. An apocalypse can be local, and is fundamentally individual; but upheavals can spark the same in neighbouring communities, and spread over continents. A wave of apocalypses brought the medieval age to a close, beginning with the Italian Renaissance and spreading, to the north with the Reformation, and to the west with the voyages of discovery and the birth of science. Today’s international age makes for novelty on a global scale, and the pace of environmental, social and technological upheavals we face is unprecedented.

Finally, after the history, we will turn to my story, my own personal continuing apocalypse, through over a decade of ritual ayahuasca use, life-threatening illness in the Amazon, and a 6-year stint on the very mind-expanding islands of Japan.

A serpent undulates through Nemu’s End, periodically raising his head to remove bricks from a tower of folly that has been thousands of years in the making. His case is also translated with prejudice in scripture, but the adversary (Satan in Hebrew) is God’s left-hand man. Lucifer illuminates, as his Latin name suggests: lucem ferre, to bring light. Duality is a veil of illusion, and this much-maligned dark angel of light tears it down, though his lessons may be excruciating.

Another vilified agent of illumination featuring in this book is the psychedelic. While I avoid processed food and doctor’s pills, and preferred the ADHD that nature gave me to the Ritalin teachers offered me, I do enjoy psychedelics, both recreational and inspirational. Used respectfully with experienced guides, as any power tool should be, they can reveal hidden things. Psilocybin, for example, makes subjects more perceptive of changes in the visual field.2 It also induced ‘full mystical experiences’ in 60% of subjects in one famous experiment, leaving them measurably happier and more compassionate than controls when tested 25 years later.3 Insights catalysed by psychedelics have given us the protocols of virtual reality, opened up whole new fields of science, sparked artistic and therapeutic modalities, and reoriented countless lives for the better. As we shall see, poets such as William Shakespeare,4 inventors and evolutionary theorists, founders of the United States and British monarchs have all enjoyed drugs that would land them in a cell today.

Though I have had the pleasure of being given psilocybin while strapped into an magnetoencephalography machine in the name of science, my favourite tipple is ayahuasca, and my relationship with it is more rustic. This visionary tea cured my potentially fatal leishmaniasis infection during an 8-month ordeal in the Amazon, and radically changed my perspective in the process. It helped two of my friends defy terminal cancer sentences, cleared up recurrent migraines in two others, and has inspired invention, academic research and art; but it does more. Ayahuasca reveals the essence behind the mundane, a harmony that is staggering, and a world far more responsive than one might imagine. Ayahuasca, the rope (waskha) of the spirits (aya), winds its way between the worlds, and does what it says on the label. In the alchemy of plant teachers, this wonderful brew is a key to a very personal apocalypse.

Welcome to my Nemusalem Syndrome. With over 1000 citations from scientific journals and ancient texts, and with buckets of ayahuasca, we take on the dualism that has carved black-and-white categories from our richly toned universe: true and false, good and evil, sense and nonsense, illness and health, and lawful and illegal. With metaphors mixed, whipped, folded and stretched, this work is roundabout and back again, silly and sublime, spot on and plain wrong. There are oblique tangents, impassioned rants, endless digressions, bigoted conclusions and thinly veiled provocations. There are also strange cults, venerable sages, wild women, robotic policemen, and eccentrics of various stripes – like my poor messianic friend, whose epiphany at 15,000 feet was snatched up and hurled mercilessly onto the page as a counterpoint. Like him, what I offer is enthusiastic to the point of excess, unabashedly apocalyptic, and ultimately indecent; but my flight of fancy should return you safely and cleanly to the ground.

This book is the story of the apocalypse – how it unfolds in our world, in our history and in our brains. It is written in the faith that revelation is open to everyone, and in the hope that we will embrace it before… but no, this is not that type of apocalyptic book. The Messiah, the Mahdi, the Maitreya is here already, one of 330,000,003 personalities in our schizophrenic heads, serene amongst the bickering. He won’t fly in on a cloud, bearded and iridescent and holding a sickle; nor on a plane, bearded and smelly, holding his knob. Science recognises him as a schizophrenic delusion, and even my old rabbi preferred not to talk about him; but he is there, in the mysteries of nature and the depths of our brains. He is there in our scriptures, for those who read between the lines. He is beyond the boundaries of polite conversation, and beyond the range of normal perception; but he is with us all the same.

You may say I’m a dreamer … ooh ooh ooh.

[American Dream]

Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then "knew," had an affinity for each other. Thus, "Ships of Fools" crisscrossed the seas and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.

--Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

[American Dream]

The Birth of Venus, Alexandre Cabanel

[American Dream]

http://priceonomics.com/how-dominos-piz ... ts-mascot/

How Domino's Pizza Lost Its Mascot
Jul 8, 2014



In 1960, Tom and James Monaghan borrowed $900 and bought a small, ailing pizza shop on the fringes of the Eastern Michigan State campus. Early on, business was horrible and James sold his half of the company to his brother for a used Volkswagen Beetle. Tom persisted and, by 1978, had expanded Domino’s Pizza into a 200-store enterprise worth $500 million.

During this period of rapid growth, Domino's Pizza set an industry precedent that would prove critical to their success: they guaranteed that if a customer didn’t receive his pizza within 30 minutes of placing the order, it’d be free. Domino’s executives hired an external marketing firm, Group 243, to promote this new promise. The result? The “Noid.”

A troll-like creature, the Noid was outfitted in a skin-tight red onesie with rabbit-like ears and buck-teeth. Will Vinton, whose studio animated the creature, described it as a “physical manifestation of all the challenges inherent in getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.” Its name, a play on “annoyed,” was an indication of its nature: many considered the Noid to be one of the most obnoxious mascots of all time. Throughout the late 80s, Domino’s ran a series of commercials in which the Noid set about attempting to make life an utter hell for pizza consumers:



The spots soon employed the slogan “Avoid the Noid,” and reminded customers that their company’s pizzas were “Noid-proof.” The campaign was a smash success. In 1989, a computer game, “Avoid the Noid,” was released to commemorate the red antagonist (the goal was to deliver a pizza with a half-hour whilst avoiding a lumbering swarm of Noids), plush toys were abound, and the character was a household name.

Then, right at the height of his popularity, the Noid endured perhaps the worst mascot PR in history.

On January 30, 1989, a man wielding a .357 magnum revolver stormed into a Domino’s in Atlanta, Georgia and took two employees hostage. For five hours, he engaged in a standoff with police, all the while ordering his hostages to make him pizzas. Before the police could negotiate with his demands ($100,000, a getaway car, and a copy of The Widow’s Son -- a novel about Freemasons), the two employees escaped. In the ensuing chaos, the captor fired two gunshots into the establishment’s ceiling, was forcefully apprehended, and received charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and theft by extortion.

The assailant, a 22-year-old named Kenneth Lamar Noid, was apparently upset about the chain’s new mascot. A police officer on the scene later revealed that Noid had “an ongoing feud in his mind with the owner of Domino’s Pizza about the Noid commercials,” and thought the advertisements had specifically made fun of him. A headline the following morning in the Boca Raton News sparked a talk show frenzy: “Domino’s Hostages Couldn’t Avoid the Noid This Time.”



A subsequent court hearing found Noid innocent by reason of insanity; a paranoid schizophrenic, he was found to have “acute psychological problems,” was turned over to the Department of Human Resources, and ended up in Georgia’s Mental Health Institute, where he spent three months. Years later, in 1995, unable to shake the idea that the Domino’s ad campaign had intentionally targeted him, Noid committed suicide in his Florida apartment.

Following the ordeal, Domino’s swiftly terminated the Noid campaign. For nearly twenty years, the annoying character lay in glorious respite, before briefly returning in 2011 (his 25th anniversary). This time though, he was merely part of a short-lived promotional marketing campaign: in Domino’s Facebook game, “The Noid’s Super Pizza Shootout.” As quickly as he came, the Noid returned to the void.

[zangtang]

if its the same 'the widow's son', the 'novel about freemasons' is Robert Anton Wilson's 2nd (?) part of his 'historical Illuminatus trilogy'

[American Dream]

It may be possible for me to dig deeper into RAW as an RI subject at a later time, but yes- that is the connection:


Robert Anton Wilson Interview

JW: To get back for a moment to the nuts and happenings that seem to surround you, two things focused my attention quite recently. The first thing was that someone held up a fast-food restaurant demanding $100,000, a helicopter and a copy of The Widow's Son.

RAW: That was in Atlanta, Georgia. The character's name was "Noid". I wrote a little story about it in my news letter, I said that "Noid got annoid and perhaps a little paranoid too."

JW: Did he get the copy of The Widow's Son?

RAW: No, no, he surrendered finally, he let all the hostages go and surrendered. He was protesting a pizza commercial which he thought was insulting him.

http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/raw.html

[American Dream]

Hum Allah Hum Allah Hum Allah

[American Dream]

The Sequoia Seminars - A History

http://www.mygen.com/users/ufo/The_Sequ ... story.html

http://www.escholarship.org/editions/vi ... view=print

Psychology in Sequoia Seminar

Psychology was the most poorly defined of all the elements that made up Sequoia Seminar's philosophy, yet it was one of the most important and, even more than the ideas of Buchman or Heard, it set Sequoia Seminar apart from the tradition of Henry B. Sharman. Since Harry always argued that psychology would eventually prove what religion already knew, why bother with psychology at all? Because, among the three appropriate objects of love—God, self, and other—love of self or integrity required that people come to understand their subconscious needs and fears so that they could be free to carry out the will of God. The movement believed psychology could help people toward religion, and religion could help them psychologically.

A physician participating in a 1953 seminar wrote that he had learned that psychiatry taught, "To be happy you must be properly oriented to your environment and totally integrated, so that every action is a productive one leading to full potentiality." The seminar taught him that Jesus had said the same thing two thousand years ago and, he concluded, "a well-adjusted person is, by definition, religious."[81]

Psychology was, nevertheless, also perceived as potentially dangerous; when wrongly used it could either undermine the religious message or become the primary purpose of the group, relegating the teachings of Jesus to a secondary role. Freudian psychology, which defined religious belief as neurotic, was an example of the first danger. Harry believed that "Freudian psychology leads to a mechanistic view of the universe and to a philosophy of meaninglessness."[82] There is some indication that the Rathbuns felt, not without reason, that Boyden and her followers fell into the second danger when they split off from the main Sharman group in 1941 and began their own work.[83] The Rathbuns referred to them as "the psychologizers."

The exact role that psychology played in Sequoia Seminar meetings prior to 1955 is not clear, although its flavor is suggested by a list of recommended readings from 1950 that included works by Rollo May and Erich Fromm in addition to books by Kunkel, Jung, and Heard.[84] Much of the psychological activity that did occur took place under the direction of Emilia [Rathbun] with the assistance of Betty Eisner. Eisner had been a student of Harry's in the business law course. She had attended a Records study group at the Rathbuns' home in 1936 and was at the first Sequoia Seminar in 1946. She had gone on to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and came up from her home in southern California to help lead some special seminars in the mid-1950s.[85]

A set of very complete notes from a 1952 continuation seminar gives some insight into the kind of psychological activity that took place in the sessions. A parenthetical comment near the beginning of the notes indicate that there were "several sessions during which Seminar participants verbalized their 'seventh veil' matter, their inmost blocks to further growth and progress on the Way."[86] These group confessions may have owed something to Emilia's years of experience hearing confessions in her Oxford Group work. When she told the participants, "nothing that has been said is a surprise, at least to me," she was repeating language she had used to describe her Buchmanite experience. Emilia assured the group that they became more lovable when they opened up and admitted their "inmost natures and problems," and explained that it was all part of the process of discovering what they could be so that they could see where they were and how they could move toward what God intended them to be.[87]

As the decade progressed the role of psychology in the group's activities increased. In 1956 Emilia and Betty Eisner were coleaders of a group that wrote spontaneously on themes suggested by Emilia, "trying to express their own feelings rather than intellectual concepts."[88] In addition to spontaneous writing, they also did Jungian dream interpretation in groups and used art to express their feelings.[89] The 1958 annual report explained, "painting and other art work is becoming an increasingly important part of our program, particularly at the Continuation seminars. We are learning how such activities can contribute to the process of individual change with which we are concerned."[90]

So pervasive was the psychological approach by 1958 and 1959 that almost all of the continuation seminars given in those summers were psychologically focused and many included art. The most explicit was a seminar entitled "Group Therapy" led by Betty Eisner. It was described as "an intensive group therapy situation and will be conducted on a very personal level aimed at removing barriers within the individual which obstruct his growth in creative living. . . . The use of art materials will play an important role."[91]

Two comments made in 1959 indicate that the heavy emphasis on psychology may have gotten out of hand. The announcement letter for the 1959 seminar season cautioned potential participants that the leaders were "neither qualified nor intended to perform the function of psychotherapy," and they would not accept anybody who seemed more interested in that than in pursuing a religious life. About the same time, a handwritten memo from Emilia asked if people should not be "well grounded in the teachings of Jesus and have made the decision to follow the 'way' before they are enrolled in any group which has as its objective the process of introspection (therapy)." And, conversely, she asked if people who started work in psychotherapy should be "told that the process in the seminar structure leads to a choice of 'the way' of life commended by Jesus (commitment)?"[92]

Emilia's [Rathbun] fear that the psychotherapeutic aspects of the work might have begun to take precedence over the religious purpose seems particularly apt in retrospect. Although nobody knew it at the time, Sequoia Seminar was one of a stream of sources for what would become the "human potential" movement of the 1960s. Their stress of religious values kept them from total involvement, but for several years in the late 1950s they were the place where some of the California activists in the human potential movement got their start.

One was Del Carlson. Carlson was a Marine Corps veteran who had been attracted to a Records study group at San Jose State College in 1947 and who had participated actively in Students Concerned. He stayed with the movement after the demise of Students Concerned and was, for a dozen years, one of the mainstays of the group. A high school art teacher, he had his summers free and devoted them to Sequoia Seminar. He was the group's registrar, business manager, and leader of art therapy sessions until 1962.[93]
...
Carlson was also a friend of Michael Murphy, the man who founded Esalen. In fact, Carlson was a coleader of the first formal seminar ever held at Esalen in 1962, when it was still called Slate's Hot Springs.[94]
...
Even more important, both to Sequoia Seminar and the human potential movement, was Willis Harman.

An engineering professor at Stanford, Harman had attended a study group led by Harry [Rathbun] and then had gone to a Sequoia Seminar in 1954. He had not expected the heavy emphasis on meditation, introspection, and self-exposure, but he found that his engineer's rational world view was "permanently destroyed" as a result of his experience there. He embarked on an extended period of self-education in mysticism and psychic phenomena and moved into the inner circle of Sequoia Seminar.[95]

Harman had been very impressed by Gerald Heard's lectures on his experience with mescaline; he also made contact with Myron Stolaroff, one of the original American experimenters with LSD, who was also briefly involved with Sequoia Seminar.

On November 16, 1956, eight of the Sequoia Seminar leadership group accompanied Harman to the home of a physician member of the movement, where Harman took LSD for the first time [Interesting Harman in another interview says 1954] . In subsequent years almost every member of the Sequoia Seminar inner leadership group experimented with LSD on a number of occasions.

Many of the drug sessions were led by Betty Eisner who was very interested in the psychotherapeutic possibilities of low doses of the then legal hallucinogen. She and Harman disagreed strongly, however, on how the drug should be used since he [Harman] preferred larger doses that would provide the user with mystical experiences, rather than the milder effects that Eisner sought.[96]

Even though LSD was still a noncontrolled substance and, therefore, legal to use, Sequoia Seminar employed it very cautiously. It was never distributed to anyone other than group leaders, and their sessions were carefully planned and supervised, usually with the presence of one of the planning group members who was a medical doctor. There appear to have been few if any "bad trips," and the drug-induced mystical experiences and psychotherapeutic sessions are usually remembered positively by those who partook of them.

Experimentation with LSD stopped after 1959 because most of those involved felt there was nothing more to be gained from continued use and perhaps also because of a difficult confrontation between Emilia Rathbun and Betty Eisner that may have involved the use of the drug. Those, like Harman, who wished to pursue further interests in the drug left Sequoia Seminar and became active in other
groups such as Esalen and the International Foundation for Internal Freedom.[97]

Just how far the Rathbuns had moved from the tradition of Henry B. Sharman by the end of the decade is illustrated by the controversy that surrounded the last meeting of the trustees of the Sharman will in 1959. Harry was not only one of the trustees of the self-liquidating foundation set up by the will; he was also its executor.

In 1958 plans were made to dispose of the last twenty-five thousand dollars of the funds from Sharman's estate, and Harry apparently hoped that the bulk of the money could go to Sequoia Seminar. To convince the others that his group met the intention of the will, Harry invited them out to California for a seminar.[98] Opposition from the other trustees to the kind of program that the Rathbuns were running killed both the visit and any hope Harry had of getting Sharman funds, although Harry did lead a seminar for the trustees the next year at Springfield College in Massachusetts.

Word of the psychological emphasis had spread, and those who toed the orthodox Sharman line were not pleased with what they had heard. One trustee reported that a number of students of his had gone to Stanford and had reported back unfavorably on the Rathbuns' work. Another summed up his objections by telling Harry that he believed Sequoia Seminar was "quite different from those led by Dr. Sharman. Very little serious study of the Records themselves seems to be attempted and much time is devoted to the personal problems of the individual members. Training and skill in psychology and psychiatry seem to be very important."[99] And finally, a third pointed out that Sharman had wanted efforts directed at students and faculty, but Harry and Emilia were working mainly with nonacademic adults.[100]

The alienation of the trustees and the experimentation with LSD were both aspects of the way psychology had come to dominate the work of the group. This domination could have made the group an ongoing force within the new human potential movement in California. That course was not followed, however, because in the period between 1959 and 1962 Emilia underwent a number of severe personal strains that eventually climaxed in a religious revelation. This revelation was the basis for a reclarification of the whole meaning and purpose of the movement.

The psychologizing that Emilia had first questioned back in the early 1940s when it was led by Elizabeth Boyden had slowly worked its way into her own group, and by the end of the decade it threatened to eclipse the religious work completely. The philosophy that had evolved was based in part on the validity of psychology as a means for personal insight, but it also used the evolutionary and mystical theories of Gerald Heard, and always the objective study of the life of Jesus in the Sharman tradition. Emilia's personal crisis of the period after 1959 would have the effect of redressing the balance and putting psychology back into a secondary role. Psychology would be exchanged for a new interpretation of the religious message that would finally move Sequoia Seminar from proto-sect to a fully self-conscious religious movement.

The increasing stress on psychology toward the end of the 1950s, and the growing formalization of ideology, were both indications that the group was moving away from the churches (both literally and theoretically) and toward the sect end of the church-sect continuum. The codification of the movement's ideology decreased the likelihood that they would change to go along with trends in the larger society. The focus on psychology was perceived by members as a "service," exactly the kind of service predicted by the economic model as compensation for the increased cost of sect membership. The transition was not yet complete. The most obvious component of a sect is its divergence from standard church values. It is that divergence that makes membership so costly. At the end of the 1950s, Sequoia Seminar was still primarily a gospel study group that could operate from within the churches. There were signs of uniqueness beginning to appear, but they would not be fully embraced until after Emilia had her vision of a New Religion for the Third Age.

| ------------------

http://www.erowid.org/culture/character ... etty.shtml


Sep 29, 1915 - Jul 1, 2004

Summary
Betty Grover Eisner, Ph.D. was a clinical psychologist who was part of the group of LSD researchers active in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s.

According to Oscar Janiger, she participated in discussions about potential socially acceptable uses of LSD with a group including Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, Anais Nin, and Sidney Cohen.

Dr. Eisner worked with LSD, mescaline, amphetamine, ketamine, Ritalin, and carbogen with her patients, both in individual and group settings. Some of the sessions she facilitated in group settings included "encounter group"-style expression, experimental combinations of psychoactive drugs and body work. She conducted important early research into the the use of LSD to treat alcoholism, notably with colleague Sidney Cohen.

In 1959, Dr. Eisner participated in the 10th Josiah Macy Conference on LSD. She also served on the Board of Advisors for the Albert Hofmann Foundation before her death in 2004. Her publications and personal correspondence are archived at Stanford University.

http://www.erowid.org/culture/character ... herapy.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Eisner

Eisner was a therapist for Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, when he tried LSD. In addition to using hallucinogens like LSD and mescaline in psychedelic therapy, Eisner also gave stimulants such as methylphenidate and the inhaled gas mixture carbogen to her patients.

http://www.psychedelic-library.org/hoffer.htm

Treatment of Alcoholism with Psychedelic Therapy
Abram Hoffer
From: PSYCHEDELICS, The Uses and Implications of Psychedelic Drugs
edited by Bernard Aaronson and Humphry Osmond Doubleday & Company, 1970.
©Aaronson & Osmond.

Introduction

Alcoholics Anonymous, the great self-help group-therapy movement, is the only established treatment for alcoholics. Until much more is known about the personal (biochemical and psychological), familial, and social factors that contribute to alcoholism, so it will remain. Most new therapies are merely adjunctive to AA and will continue to be so until it is shown that they have therapeutic value when used alone. In my view, psychedelic therapy is best used as a preparation for AA.

When Bill W. and Dr. Bob founded AA, alcoholism had not been accepted as a disease, either by society at large or by the medical profession. Society considered it a moral problem, but found itself confronted with an interesting dilemma, for only a small proportion of the total drinking society drank excessively. No moral sanctions were required for the majority, who eventually made social drinking an integral part of the culture.

The majority who remained moral drinkers could not understand why a minority became intemperate or alcoholic. Moral sanctions were applied on the premise that excessive drinking arose from defects of character, defects of will, and defects in society. These sanctions included education, persuasion, incarceration, and banishment. Unfortunately, the most stringent measures had little permanent effect, and the proportion of the drinking society (a concept developed by Dr. H. Osmond) remained the same or increased. Medicine also considered alcoholism a non-disease.

The founders of AA introduced the medical model first to alcoholics, later to society, and finally to the medical profession. This concept was very appealing to alcoholics because it gave them a satisfactory explanation for their misfortunes. If they were sick and not evil, then they might expect the same sort of treatment they would receive if they developed pneumonia or diabetes. Bill W. and Dr. Bob also introduced the concept of allergy, which thirty-five years ago was incorporated into medicine as a new group of diseases. (1)

But AA insisted that alcoholism was more than a physical illness. It also carried strong personal responsibility. An alcoholic could not be censured for being an alcoholic, but he could be for doing nothing about it.

Society resisted the idea that alcoholics are sick, since it got no guidance from a reluctant medical profession. Doctors expect diseases to be more or less definable, to have treatment that may be ineffective but must be in common use, and to have a predictable prognosis. When they became convinced that AA did help large numbers of alcoholics remain sober, they gradually accepted alcoholics as patients. Even now, the majority of hospitals are extremely reluctant to admit alcoholics who are drunk, and many doctors dread seeing them in their offices. Eventually AA forced the profession to accept the fact that alcoholism, which has been estimated to afflict 5 per cent of the population, is a disease. This marked the beginning of the final solution to the problem. For, having accepted the disease concept, doctors were challenged by the enormous problems, and, in a matter of a few years, several major therapeutic discoveries were made.

The newer adjunctive therapies developed for alcoholism may be divided into the psychological and the biochemical. Psychotherapy, deconditioning therapy, and psychedelic therapy are examples of purely psychological therapy, while sugar-free diets for relative hypoglycemia, mega vitamin B3, megascorbic acid, and adrenocortical extracts (or extracts of licorice) are examples of pure chemotherapies.

Psychedelic therapy is the only therapy that has prepared alcoholics to become responsible members of AA, when previously they had been unable to do so.

Psychedelic Therapy

We must distinguish sharply between psychedelic reactions and the means for inducing them. Failure to understand this distinction has led to several futile researches, best exemplified by the study of Smart and Storm (1964), which was widely circulated in an extreme form before publication of the watered-down version.

Psychedelic therapy refers to a form of psychotherapy in which hallucinogenic drugs are used in a particular way to facilitate the final goal, which for alcoholics is sobriety. The drugs may be mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, and many others, as well as combinations. It is therefore trivial to test the effect of LSD or other hallucinogens on alcoholics in such a way that there is no psychedelic reaction. In fact, these trivial experiences have led to trivial data, as reported by Smart et al. (1966), who claimed that a group of ten alcoholics given LSD did not differ in outcome from a group of ten given another psychoactive drug. Close examination of their report shows that no therapy was given, nor was there any encouragement of discussion of problems. The experience was not psychedelic, but was more in the nature of an inquisition, with the subject strapped to the bed, pretreated with dilantin, and ill from 800 mcg of LSD.

Since no investigator has ever claimed that LSD used in this way does have any therapeutic effect, this experiment suggests that LSD used with no therapeutic intent or skill is not apt to help. One of the subjects given LSD by Smart et al. described his experience in comparison with a psychedelic reaction he received from smaller quantities of LSD in Saskatchewan. The experiences and the outcome were quite different.

Psychedelic therapy aims to create a set and a setting that will allow proper psychotherapy. The psychedelic therapist works with material that the patient experiences and discusses, and helps him resynthesize a new model of life or a new personal philosophy. During the experience, the patient draws upon information flooding in from the altered environment and from his own past, and uses it to eliminate false ideas and false memories. With the aid of the therapist, he evaluates himself more objectively and becomes more acutely aware of his own responsibility for his situation and, even more important, for doing something about it. He also becomes aware of inner strengths or qualities that help him in his long and difficult struggle toward sobriety.

The book The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, edited by H. A. Abramson (1967), contains the best collection of scientific papers on psychedelic therapy.

Around 1952, Osmond and I had become familiar with psychotomimetic reactions induced by LSD. There was a marked similarity between these reactions and schizophrenia and the toxic psychoses. Delirium tremens is one of the common toxic states. It occurred to us that LSD might be used to produce models of dt's. Many alcoholics ascribed the beginning of their recovery to "hitting bottom," and often "hitting bottom" meant having had a particularly memorable attack of dt's. We thought that LSD could be used this way with no risk to the patient.

We treated our first two alcoholics at the Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and one recovered.

Other early pilot studies were encouraging, and we increased the tempo of our research until at one time six of our major psychiatric centers in Saskatchewan were using it. As of now, we must have treated close to one thousand alcoholics.

Within a few years after our first patients were treated, we became aware that a large proportion of our alcoholics did not have psychotomimetic reactions. Their experiences were exciting and pleasant, and yielded insight into their drinking problems. It became evident that a new phenomenon had been recognized in psychiatry. Osmond created the word psychedelic to define these experiences, and announced this at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957.

Following this, our researches were aimed at improving the quality and quantity of psychedelic reactions. Within the past ten years, major studies, under the direction of Dr. Ross MacLean, Hollywood Hospital, New Westminster, British Columbia, and under the direction of Dr. S. Unger at Spring Grove State Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, have added materially to our knowledge of the effect of psychedelic therapy on alcoholism.

I will not review the results of psychedelic therapy in detail. This has been done in the books edited by H. A. Abramson and in The Hallucinogens by A. Hoffer and H. Osmond (1967). The one striking conclusion is that every scientist using psychedelic therapy with alcoholics found the same proportion of recoveries. Whether the experiments were considered controlled or not, about 50 per cent were able to remain sober or to drink much less. This seems to be a universal statistic for LSD therapy.

(1). Dr. Walter Alvarez recently told me that when he wrote a paper on food allergies at the Mayo Clinic about fifty years ago, he was severely criticized by his colleagues. Only strong support from one of the Mayos, who discovered that he himself had a food allergy, protected Alvarez from even-more-powerful assault. Medicine seems very reluctant to take unto itself new diseases. (back)

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml

LSD comes in several different forms. The most common is paper blotter. Other forms include gell caps, liquid, and gelatin. Each form will contain different quantities and purities of lysergic acid diethylamide. The chart below shows dosages for pure LSD measured in micrograms (ug). Micrograms are 1/1,000,000 of a gram.

Oral LSD Dosages

Threshold 20 ug
Light 25 - 75 ug
Common 50 - 150 ug
Strong 150 - 400 ug
Heavy 400 + ug
LD50 (Lethal Dose*) 12,000 ug

Excerpts from John Markoff - What the Dormouse Said

http://fileshare200.depositfiles.com/au ... dustry.pdf

...
Myron Stolaroff had grown up in a Jewish household in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. His father was a local merchant, and the family was prominent locally. Myron graduated first in his class both from his high school and from the local military junior college. At Stanford University, he received a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Tau Beta Pi key in recognition of his scholarship. He was a student at Stanford when David Packard and Bill Hewlett came back to campus to show off their first commercial oscillator. Near the end of the Second World War, he received an engineering degree and took a job working as the first employee of Alexander M. Poni-atoff at a small electric-motor company in Belmont, California.

He began as a design engineer and later helped Poniatoff prototype the first magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorder, which launched the company that took its name from Poniatoff's initials plus "ex" for excellence. Ampex Electric and Manufacturing had been founded in San Carlos after Poniatoff had begun looking for new applications for his high-quality
motors. Ampex is no longer a factor in Silicon Valley and today is remembered largely because its corporate logo is still prominently visible on Highway 101, the freeway that slices through the heart of the Valley. However, Ampex was as significant as Hewlett-Packard in the Valley's lineage, and many pioneering engineers still remember the company fondly.
...

Of course, none of that was apparent from what was nothing more than an invitation to attend a lecture being given by Harry Rathbun, a professor of business law at Stanford. Rathbun was a charismatic teacher who was tremendously popular on campus, where he lectured to overflow classes on subjects that included discussions of personal ethics and values.

Rathbun's presentation was given in a small library in South Palo Alto, and it struck Stolaroff "between the eyes."14 The themes the law professor addressed that evening included "Who are we?" and "Where are we going?" They were Big Questions About Life. Stolaroff was transported, realizing that his life had been hollow and that the questions Rathbun
was asking and answering mesmerized him.
...

As it turned out, Rathbun's own life had been transformed when he and his wife, Emilia, attended a 1935 wilderness retreat led by Henry B. Sharman, a wealthy retired Canadian. Sharman had written a book entitled Jesus as Teacher, which probed the historical records surrounding the New Testament.

After returning to Stanford, the Rathbuns began conducting study groups for Stanford students in their home on the teachings of Christ. The sessions were later expanded to include a two-week retreat at a center that was established in the mountains about forty miles southwest of campus near the sleepy beach town of Santa Cruz.

They became known as the Sequoia Seminars and ultimately, in the 1970s, spun off a series of cultlike groups (including the Creative Initiative Foundation, Beyond War, and Women to Women Building the Earth for the Children's Sake) that attracted a broad, largely upper-middle-class following.

In many cases, people who joined them sold their homes and personal belongings and dedicated their lives completely to these groups. However, long before the 1970s, the Sequoia Seminars had a less well known but more dramatic and far-reaching consequence, in their immediate impact on Myron Stolaroff. Although he had been angered by Harry Rathbun's sneaky trick of guiding him to the phi-losophy of Jesus, Stolaroff remained intrigued by Rathbun's ideas.

The following year, he decided to set aside his anti-Jesus bias and his concern about what was happening to Jews around the world in the name of Jesus and attend a longer set of discussion groups led by the Rathbuns. At the seminar, Stolaroff became a convert. By the time it was over, he felt that he had experienced true love for others for the first time in his life and become a believer in "the power of the message" of Jesus.15

He decided that the most important thing that he could do with his life was to commit himself to the will of God.
....
It was during one of his visits in 1956 that Heard spoke enthusiastically to Stolaroff about a new drug called LSD. The very idea shocked the young engineer, who couldn't figure out why a world-famous mystic would need to take a drug. Nevertheless, Heard was fervent and told Stolaroff about an unusual man who would occasionally come from Canada and administer the substance to both him and Aldous Huxley.

With two passports and with a murky history of connections to both law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Al Hubbard was without question one of the most curious characters in America during the 1950s and 1960s. There are conflicting accounts of Hubbard's life, but the best summary of his early years appears in Jay Stevens's Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream.

Born in Kentucky, Hubbard surfaced publicly in Seattle in 1919 with the invention of a perpetual-motion machine.17 Later, there were tales of his running war materials by boat up the West Coast, where they were then shipped by land through Canada to Great Britain. And there was an intimation that he had had some loose affiliation with the Manhattan Project as a black-market supplier of uranium. Even after Stolaroff had come to know Hubbard well, he wasn't certain where the truth lay. But he soon fell under Hubbard's spell, viewing him as an especially powerful and articulate individual.

Hubbard is intriguing in part because while most popular accounts of the introduction of LSD in America focus on the roles played by author Ken Kesey and psychologist Timothy Leary, Hubbard was an earlier proponent, and an important influence in the use of psychedelics by a number of Silicon Valley's pioneering engineers.

Hubbard, while he was the president of a Canadian uranium mine, had discovered psychedelics in the early 1950s when he participated in mescaline experiments at the University of Vancouver.

He found LSD in 1955, and in addition to Huxley, Heard, and perhaps more than one thousand others during the 1950s, he introduced the drug to Stolaroff and indirectly to a small group of engineers who formed a splinter group from the Rathbuns' Sequoia Seminar.
...


Myron Stolaroff

He [Stolaroff] returned to California a zealot, a convert to the new LSD faith. He had decided that experiences like the one he had had in Canada were the answer to the world's problems.

LSD would give society a new set of powerful tools to advance human development. Like Engelbart, Stolaroff set off on his own grand quest to augment the human mind.

His first stop was his closest friends at the Sequoia Seminar, where he had become a member of the group's planning committee. He introduced them to LSD in turn and created an informal research group composed of five fellow engineers and their wives.

The group included a young Ampex engineer, Don Allen; Stanford electrical engineering professor Willis Harman; and several others from both Hewlett-Packard and SRI.

Stolaroff's study group set in motion an unheralded but significant train of events, plunging a small group of technologists into the world of psychedelics almost a decade before LSD became a standard recreational drug on American college campuses.

...

Fadiman had gone to Harvard and studied social relations. He soon came to consider the field as psychology without rats, and he had instead focused his energy on being an actor. After graduating in 1960, he spent a year in Paris, and while he was there Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert along with Aldous Huxley passed through on their way to deliver an academic paper on psychedelics in Copenhagen.

In Paris, Alpert, who had been Fadiman's professor at Harvard, told him, "The greatest thing in the world has happened to me, and I want to share it with you." He proceeded to pull a small bottle out of his pocket, introducing his former student to LSD.

Forced back to America by the threat of the draft, Fadiman moved to California a year later and arrived at Stanford as a distinctly unhappy graduate student in 1961. He was feeling that school was a waste of his life, which he would have rather spent in more cultured
Augmentation Europe.

Moreover, having recently been introduced to psychedelic drugs, the world suddenly seemed like a much different place. Full of self-pity, he began leafing through the Stanford class catalog looking for something that might be interesting to study. He found a small section of crossdisciplinary classes, including one being taught by an electrical engineering professor, Willis Harman, called "The Human Potential." The class was to be a discussion of what was the highest and the best to which human beings could aspire.

In his new, more highly attuned state, Fadiman thought to himself, There's something here. That morning, he walked across campus to visit Harman. The man to whom he introduced himself looked like a totally straight and conservative engineering professor, and when Fadiman asked if he could take the interdisciplinary course, Harman replied that it was already full for the quarter, and perhaps he should think about it for the next quarter.

"I've taken psilocybin three times," Fadiman said quietly. The professor walked across the room, shut his office door, and said, "We'd better talk."

In the end, Fadiman became Harman's teaching assistant. He was able to talk to the students about things that Harman felt he couldn't. He also soon became the youngest researcher at the newly founded International Foundation for Advanced Study, Myron Sto-laroff's project for continuing his research on the uses of LSD.

When Stolaroff and Harman set up shop in Menlo Park in March 1961, they weren't the only ones on the Midpeninsula exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD. Experiments were already being conducted at the Veterans' Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had also begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists, and even writers such as Allen Ginsberg, to psychedelic drugs.15

But the foundation was something new. Engineers rather than medical professionals led the project, and the clinic was intent on charging a five-hundred-dollar fee for each experience. An early local newspaper report described the foundation's goals as being "partly medical, partly scientific, partly philosophical, partly mystical."16

Stolaroff, with the help of Willis Harman, largely funded the foundation, the real purpose of which was to conduct the research needed to make LSD credible in the medical profession. They worked with several psychologists, including Fadiman, as well as the mysterious Al Hubbard, who was a mentor to both Harman and Stolaroff and who became a member of the board of directors.

Fadiman, who soon was teaching at San Francisco State, finished his Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford, and his research at the foundation focused on the changes in beliefs, attitude, and behavior that resulted from taking LSD.
...
The foundation was not far from Roy Kepler's bookstore and a short walk from the hole-in-the-wall store where the Midpeninsula Free University store and print shop were to locate in the mid-sixties. In another building a block away, Brand later established the Whole Earth Truck Store and the Whole Earth Catalog. About a mile away from the truck store, the original People's Computer Company settled and in turn was the catalyst for the Homebrew Computer Club in the mid-1970s. The club itself served to ignite the personal-computer industry.
...
Most of the Bay Area was comfortably oblivious. Beginning in 1961, for a period of more than four years, the International Foundation for Advanced Study led more than 350 people through LSD experiences.
...Among the participants were Dr. Charles Savage, a physician who had conducted medical experiments for the U.S. Navy in the early 1950s, exploring the use of psychedelics as a truth serum,
...
In his hunt for subjects for the foundation's creativity studies, Fadiman called George Leonard, a California-based editor for Look. The magazine was at work on a special issue entitled "California: A New Game with New Rules." Leonard and a colleague came to the foundation and took part in an LSD session in an attempt to help them think through the design of the issue.

In the end, Leonard, who wrote about his trip in his autobiography, Walking on the Edge of the World, wasn't sure if the experience made a difference. However, the June 28,1966, edition of Look introduced the rest of the world to the social and cultural changes that were ripping through California. On the cover was a photo of Jim and Dorothy Fadiman, locked in a deep embrace amid a field of California poppies.

A backlash was inevitable. Fadiman continued to oversee the LSD creativity research with scientists and engineers, until one day, while he was at the office with a group of four scientists lying on the floor listening to music in preparation for work on their technical problems while under a low dose of LSD, he opened an official-looking letter from the Food and Drug Administration. He knew what was coming.

It was July 1966, and the government was looking for ways to show that it was acting to stop teenage drug use. The letter was an order to immediately stop the foundation's research. Fadiman turned to his colleagues and said, "I think we opened this letter tomorrow."

The formal experiments ended, but the secret was out. In 1966 and 1967, LSD was seeping out of an isolated bohemian niche and into the mainstream of America. It would even permeate SRI, the largely military funded research center that sat just blocks away from offices of the foundation and the Whole Earth Truck Store.

[American Dream]

http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... ble-truth/

Ouch! Systemic Suffering and The Third Noble Truth

Posted by: Zenju Earthlyn Manuel



“Great is the matter of birth and death, quickly passing, passing, gone. Awake, awake, each one, awake. Don’t waste this life.” This is the message written on the Han, a wooden instrument used in Japanese styled Soto Zen centers around the world, to call practitioners to the zendo (meditation hall). So when I hear the Han sounding out I don’t hesitate. I don’t waste time. I stop my mental and physical activity. Listen. Then walk to the sound of this piece of wood being tapped with a wooden mallet, sounding out, “Wake Up! Life is passing, right now! Right now, you are passing.”

Everything that comes into fruition will pass away including our suffering. This is one interpretation of the third Noble Truth: There is the cessation of suffering. In other words, suffering may be inevitable but it is not permanent. This is the good news. It means that healing and wellness is possible. However, often times on the spiritual path we jump to the good news before we acknowledge the presence of suffering. We want to transform our suffering into enchantment without being aware of how we suffer. In our society we use things outside of ourselves to surpass suffering. We attempt a kind of joy that requires others to please us or it requires the accumulation of money, job, status, etc. And we all know too well that whatever we were suffering before reaching out for external gratification, the suffering returns the moment these things in life grow stale. We may then distrust the Third Noble Truth that there can be a cessation of suffering.

Once a student asked a teacher at a retreat for people of color, “Can racism and other forms of oppression cease to exist?” The teacher nearly shouted, “Yes, racism will one day cease to exist.” My mouth flew open. Not at what the teacher said but at my own inner feelings. Despite possessing the knowledge that every thing and every one changes and is changing, I felt racism would last forever. I saw no end to it and this is how I suffer. I have worked hard politically and spiritually against racism without trusting there was an end to it all. Why would I fight a losing battle? What motivated my actions? Through the exchange between the teacher and the student at the retreat, I realized for the first time that the suffering within systemic oppression was an evolving experience. More importantly, the cessation of systemic suffering depends completely on such evolution. Although there is still racism, it “appears” different than the racism experienced by my parents. Is the change in the appearance of racism mean that racism is ending? I would not go that far. But it does mean that changes in causes and conditions affects how racism looks. It means that there are different causes of racism creating different effects. It means that those who are marginalized and oppressed systemically because of their race are interdependent with those who dominate the resources of our society. This interdependence is what gets overlooked in systemic oppression. When those who dominate resources acknowledge and understand suffering as caused by collective karmic (actions) then the nature of racism will cease to exist, eventually–emphasis on the word eventually. If we don’t understand the origination of systemic suffering or acknowledge that it even exists then we won’t fully experience the complete cessation of racism. Origination and cessation are interwoven aspects of suffering. If we are too afraid of facing suffering we miss the path out of it.

When I was thirteen, I remember one evening our family sitting at the dinner table at our home in southern California. My older and younger sisters were in their places and me somewhere in the middle, and my parents each at one end of the table. Something was especially strange with the taste and texture of the meat we were eating. Not being big on meat as a child, I remember frowning and asking what kind of meat was it. My father proudly said in his thick Creole accent, “Possum. I caught it in the backyard.” I didn’t know what a possum was, but I stopped eating the meat because it was caught and killed in the yard I played in daily. Yet, I could see my father’s pride at bringing something to our bare table. Life was hitting us hard at the time, as my parents were aging with three teens, my mother being fifty-five years old then and my father seventy-three. It wouldn’t be long before we received our first bag of food for Thanksgiving from a welfare office. It would be our last bag because we could not stand the humiliation. We would never speak of those hard times again, because it was frightening to talk about being black and being without – not having anything.

Immediately upon accepting the path of Buddha I began to see the depth of suffering within and around me. It was almost unbearable, causing me to doubt the teachings, meaning I had taken on something that might get the best of me. But with the help of many teachers I began to see that the suffering would be the place in which I practiced the teachings. That my life would serve as the ground in which Buddha’s teachings would come alive. I wrote:

She walks through the gate,
Gazing out from the darkness of skin,
Seeing no church pews,
She sits barefoot on cushions chanting,
Heavy footed,
Why have I come without knowing whose house I have entered?

I came to face the ways in which I suffered. I came looking for that way out of feeling almost as enslaved as my ancestors. The cessation of suffering requires that we acknowledge suffering. We say that it is so. We say that we know what causes it? Then we can honestly look at ending it. Can we end systemic suffering or oppression with such a path of acknowledgement? I say yes, as loudly as the teacher did that day in retreat. Cessation counts on us saying yes. Yes, to the existence of systemic suffering and yes to the evolution of it. We cannot run from our collective illness and at the same time claim we are well. Suffering and well being exist together within the ever-evolving dynamics between us. This is the nature of living beings. Hence, the spiritual path between sentient beings relies on our attention to social conditions that are often based on race, sexuality, gender, etc. It is required for our survival to acknowledge the ways in which we suffer. There is no way around it.

Top image by Jack Moebes.





Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is a Soto Zen Buddhist priest and guiding teacher of Still Breathing Meditation Center in Oakland, CA.

Zenju is the author of Tell Me Something About Buddhism, with a foreword by Thich Nhat Hanh. She is the contributing author to Dharma, Color, and Culture: an anthology of essays by western Buddhist teachers and practitioners of color (Parallax); and The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-five Centuries of Awakened Women (Wisdom Publications).

[American Dream]

the Pentagon

The pentagram's association with ceremonial magic is interesting. The Pentagon itself was deeply engaged in the engineering of reality by this stage with extensive PSYOPs activities. Naturally the CIA was also up to its heels in these activities and frequently in league with their military counterparts --activities that bore striking similarities to the age old objectives of magicians everywhere.

"All of these techniques --hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, acts of terrorism, disinformation --share an ontological purpose: to manipulate perceptions, to recreate reality. As we noted above, the German word for psychological warfare translates as 'worldview warfare': a battle of perceptions, of consensus realities... As the men of the OSS, CIA, and military intelligence developed from the armchair scholars and academics that most of them were before the war years into soldiers fighting the Cold War on fronts all over the world, they became --in a very real sense --magicians. As we will see, the CIA mind control projects themselves represented an assault on consciousness and reality that has not been seen in history since the age of the philosopher-kings and their court alchemists."
(Sinister Forces -Book One: The Nine, Peter Levenda, pg. 144)

http://visupview.blogspot.com/2014/07/d ... le_19.html

[American Dream]

By. Gene Guynn. California based photographer

[American Dream]

http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/cri ... nd/2137007

Mental illness, right-wing conspiracies seen as volatile mix for Joshua and Sharyn Hakken

Peter Jamison, Times Staff Writer
Saturday, August 17, 2013


{Video on original page]


TAMPA — In April, Joshua and Sharyn Hakken, college-educated engineers who were hiding with two boys and an elderly rat terrier on a sailboat moored west of Havana, ventured ashore looking for help.

Sunburned from a 300-mile sea voyage, the couple had shed most of the trappings of their former middle-class life on Sterling Avenue in South Tampa. Joshua Hakken, 35, had grown a tangled, auburn beard that looked like an accessory from a costume shop.

"We cannot safely return to the United States and are seeking political asylum in your country," the Hakkens wrote in a letter explaining their predicament to the Cuban government. They claimed to have uncovered a shocking fact through their engineering jobs: U.S. officials were secretly trying to control Americans' minds with chemicals spread from airplanes.

"After these discoveries … we were subjected to multiple attacks from our own government," the Hakkens wrote. "These attacks included surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), hacking of our personal computers, microwave radiation weapons attacks, drugging of our food, false imprisonments and the kidnapping of our two small children."

The three-page letter was part of a cache of documents the Tampa Bay Times obtained last week after a judge ordered the disclosure of prosecutors' evidence — what attorneys call discovery material — in the Hakkens' criminal case.

The documents chart in unprecedented detail the world view that took the Hakkens from a quiet neighborhood north of MacDill Air Force Base to a cramped boat rocking off the coast of an island autocracy.

Joshua and Sharyn Hakken are now charged in Hillsborough Circuit Court with kidnapping their sons and sailing with them to Cuba after a court stripped their parental rights.

The Hakkens claim to have met with a Cuban attorney, but it is unclear whether they delivered their asylum letter to any foreign officials. Within days of their arrival at Hemingway Marina outside Havana, Cuban authorities gave the United States permission to apprehend the family and extradite them to Florida.

The boys, 5-year-old Cole and 3-year-old Chase, are living in Tampa with their maternal grandparents. The grandparents also gained custody of Nati, the 15-year-old dog who had gamely endured a week before the mast.

The newly released evidence could transform the Hakkens' legal terrain, perhaps most significantly with indications both parents suffered mental illness.

Federal, state and local law enforcement records depict them losing their hold on reality — ranting about mind control and secret government plots to poison them — in a downward slide that was likely accelerated by heavy marijuana use.

The documents also shed further light on the vexing topic of the Hakkens' personal politics. Described as "antigovernment" by authorities, the couple have assumed a status close to that of folk heroes among some conservative commentators.

Investigative reports and the Hakkens' own writings suggest the couple did subscribe to several conspiracy theories popular among right-wing extremists. But experts say the extent of what FBI records describe as the Hakkens' "paranoid ideation" suggests that psychiatric problems, not political convictions, drove their journey across the Gulf of Mexico.

"These are people who are mentally unbalanced, who are attracted, perhaps because of their personal paranoia, to conspiracy theories," said Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture.

Roots on the right

While the Hakkens' beliefs sound outlandish to the unpracticed ear, some of their ideas have a recognizable lineage among political extremists.

Once confined to fringe ideologues in the John Birch Society and 1990s militia movements, such concepts have experienced a renaissance among tea party activists leery of government.

In a July 2012 Facebook message to an acquaintance, for example, Joshua Hakken made ominous reference to a U.S. atmospheric research station in Alaska — called the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program — that conspiracy theorists believe secretly controls the planet's weather.

"If all hope is lost, head to the four corners in the Hopi reservations but stay the hell away from Denver International Airport," Hakken wrote, according to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement report. "They're using HAARP to detonate underground ICBMs throughout the Midwest."

Fears of HAARP and "chemtrails" — the airplane exhaust patterns the Hakkens highlighted in their Cuban asylum letter — are common discussion topics on some tea party Web forums. Both made the Southern Poverty Law Center's 2010 list of the radical right's 10 most popular conspiracy theories.

The FBI assessment notes that Joshua Hakken also thought he "was destined to be a member of the Illuminati" and that he and his family "had to disappear so that they could not be found by the Illuminati."

The Illuminati were an 18th century society of Bavarian freethinkers, believed by conspiracy theorists to endure and clandestinely steer world politics. They are often associated on the radical right with a "New World Order" working behind the scenes to establish global, totalitarian government.

Despite such influences, experts say it could be a mistake to overemphasize the Hakkens' political convictions in light of the prominent role psychiatric problems played in their saga.

"We often see mentally ill people who have absorbed one or another shard of conspiracy theories from the extreme right," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "But the governing rule is their mental illness."

Fenster noted that the logic of the Hakkens' antigovernment views appeared to break down in their decision to seek refuge in a communist country.

"Some of the things that they seem to be afraid of are the same things the tea party (activists) are afraid of," he said. "But then they go to Cuba. What?"

Insanity defense?

The documents released in the Hakken case leave little doubt that mental illness, along with a combustible view of government, was a major factor in their saga.

While at the U.S. Air Force Academy, the FBI assessment states, Joshua Hakken "felt the Air Force was trying to 'poison' the minds of cadets." A similar theme emerged from 34-year-old Sharyn Hakken during a June 2012 encounter with police in Louisiana. She was found ranting about her brain being "reprogrammed," according to records.

Dr. Francisco Fernandez, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine, said recurring worries about mind manipulation are a symptom of psychotic disorders.

Heavy marijuana use, Fernandez said, can "unmask and aggravate" such conditions. For the Hakkens, regular drug use may have been a catalyst in their break from society, according to the newly released records.

Joshua Hakken lost his engineering job last year because of "erratic behavior and continually coming to work smelling of marijuana," according to the FBI assessment. "While the reported marijuana use may serve as a sedative to Josh and Sharyn, it is also possible that it could exacerbate any mental illness," the assessment states.

Since the disclosure of evidence in the case, the Hakkens' attorneys have been guarded about defense strategies, which could also be complicated by another revelation.

Joshua Hakken told police officers last year he beat and choked his wife to remove "spirits" that "would take over her body and talk through her," the records show. If Sharyn Hakken asserts her husband coerced her into criminal acts, such abuse could lead to a split in what has been a joint defense.

The psychiatric problems on display in the newly released documents could also be invoked by the Hakkens to help their cases.

Defendants with mental illness can tack in two directions to avoid prosecution: arguing they are incompetent to stand trial or presenting an insanity defense.

In the first circumstance, a judge must rule the defendant is so severely impaired that he cannot understand court proceedings or communicate effectively with a lawyer. The accused is then typically sent to an institution for treatment with the goal of restoring competency.

Under the second scenario, defendants assert that mental illness blinded them to the consequences of their crimes or prevented them from realizing what they did was wrong. This is the argument more likely to arise in the Hakken case, Tarpon Springs criminal defense attorney Jerry Theophilopoulos said.

"It definitely looks like it's going to go through an insanity type of defense, based on the history of the individuals," Theophilopoulos said. "If they knew what they were doing, did they actually know that it was wrong? I think that's what's going to come into play in this case."


{Slideshow on original page]

[American Dream]

Prometheus and god by Jovanovic Dejano

[American Dream]

"Vuolgge mu mielde Bassivárrái" (Come With Me To The Sacred Mountain) is a dream of freedom from Western civilization's oppression of minorities. Mari Boine portrays a woman who tries to escape from the darkness, the bleak conditions of the Sami people after the Norwegian colonization.