Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

“You own your own creation!”




In 1966 Tim Scully hooked me up to his Bio-Feedback machine while I was on a dose of his LSD. In a couple of months I would meet the man behind Owsley and Scully. He procured the raw materials for making LSD. He was a child genius. He became my art patron. He bought me all the art supplies I wanted. His brother delivered LSD to hippies in England, including the Beatles.

When I was living with Nancy and Carol on Pine Street, I met Stanley Augustus Owsley. He became Nancy’s lover. We tried conversing, but he was very into himself. He sensed I might be as powerful as himself. When he took a kick at Tadger, Nancy’s little dog, I almost clocked him.

“You’re a little shit, aren’t you! What is your problem?”

“I hate dogs! I’m a cat person.”

I watched him go into Nancy’s bedroom to get some pussy. Sometimes he would stay the night. I recall Carol and I sniggering as we lie in bed listening to their loud love-making, we understanding this was, historic.

This morning I looked at photographs of the Jefferson Airplane to see if I could identify the two members we used to party with on Pine street. There were two Swedish Airline Stewardesses down the hall they were fucking. We traded drugs. We had the best LSD.

One evening I see these Airplane guys hanging out Nancy’s bedroom window. I asked them what is going on. They turn their faces to me, and their eyes are black saucers!

“Look! We just caused an accident with our minds!” says one.

“We wondered if we could move matter while on LSD!” says the other.

After taking them in, and looking at the chaos and pain down below, I said;

“You two are crazy!”

I believe one was Paul Kantner, and the other Bob Harvey, who might have been let go by the band, because he was into black magic with LSD. He was not alone. There were some very magical people, then, there were those who would do anything to own personal power. Last night I read once more the account of Owsley’s freak-out.

Jon Presco

Running out a side door during his freakout, Owsley leaped into his car, gunned the engine and promptly ran into a ditch. When he finally returned to his physical body and found it mostly intact, Owsley was horrified by the way Kesey and the Pranksters were messing with people’s minds. “Kesey was playing with something he did not understand,” Owsley says. “I said to him, ‘You guys are fucking around with something that people have known about forever. It’s sometimes called witchcraft, and it’s extremely dangerous. You’re dealing with part of the unconscious mind that they used to define as angels and devils. You have to be very careful, because there are all these warnings. All the occult literature about ceremonial magic warns about being very careful when you start exploring these areas in the mind.’ And they laughed at me.”…

http://madamepickwickartblog.com/2011/0 ... dark-star/

During the years when I was making LSD, I was very concerned with the likelihood that the authorities would make raw materials completely impossible to obtain at some point. I felt that we were in a race with time to garner enough raw material to make enough acid to turn on the world before it became impossible. I think others shared this view and labs scaled up as rapidly as raw materials and resources permitted.

— At the time, we fantasized about various free distribution methods. One unrealized fantasy was to buy one of those postcard advertising inserts for a mass-market magazine such as LIFE and, after publication, tell everyone that there was a dose of LSD hidden on each postcard. But we never had the wherewithall to make that happen.

Out of curiosity, I’d also like to know how long you stayed on The Merry Pranksters’ Bus ? According to Acid Dreams you helped them install the sound equipment, is this right?
— I designed and built sound equipment for the Dead, lived with them and worked as a roadie for about the first 6 or 7 months of 1966. Then when the Point Richmond lab started up, the Dead wanted Bear and I to move out, so we did.

https://vimeo.com/75282865

More at: https://rosamondpress.com/2015/09/11/yo ... reation-2/

[American Dream]

https://vimeo.com/77289125#at=1

reactionary psychedelia - 07.16.15

A talk with cultural historian Alan Piper about LSD, fascist modernism, and Albert Hoffman's friendship with the enigmatic right-winger Ernst Jünger.



http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Drugs-Mak ... 1514152517



Listen at: http://expandingmind.podbean.com/e/reac ... ia-071615/

[American Dream]

This year, I joined the uptight British on the long weekend when they garland their normcore sensibilities in flowers and head for the hills surrounding Glastonbury Tor, a picture-postcard landscape some believe to be the Avalon of Arthurian myth. Here, on the family farm, Michael Eavis began the festival in September 1970 with a few hippies and a firkin or 40 of cider. Presumably when one or other of them got full up, he or she staggered off a few paces and took a leak.

But so swollen and dropsical has the Brobdingnagian beano become that these days new arrivals are greeted by a "piss crew": young men and women who receive subsidized entry in return for several shifts of dancing about in colorful costumes, waving their own placards blazoned with the pissy facts, the most significant of which is that from the urethras of approximately 250,000 festival-goers some 2.8 million liters of urine will spit and sputter. It's an arresting thought, and when I took a leak and made the mistake of peering into the Dantean hellhole of the chemical toilet, I nearly heaved––and that was only on day two!

It is not my intention to piss all over Glastonbury in what follows. As a food critic of long service, I know I have a responsibility to discount the "dyspepsia factor" when I review an establishment where I just happened to have arrived already over-inflated. But when it comes to mass gatherings of any sort, I'm heaving from the get-go––you see, I'm more or less phobic when it comes to any of the following phenomena: crowds, loud music, and traffic jams. So, I have to concede that at least 80 percent of my negative reaction to this inspiring and deeply humanistic people-gathering was a function of my own psychopathology, rather than the presence in one place of so many astrologers.

I managed an afternoon at Glasto, and I was sweating profusely by the time I made it out of that terminal moraine of the counter-culture ––because really, puh-lease, that's what it is: In this greeny-brown and not entirely unpleasant ground, the spirit of rebellion and experimentation that the 1960s unleashed, finally curled up on its air-mattress and carried on glamping. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson wrote that the Circus Circus in Las Vegas was "what the whole hip world would be doing if the Nazis had won the war"; to extend the analogy, the Glastonbury Festival is what all of vaguely hip Britain (with certain key exceptions I'll come to later) actually is doing, because Chicago School economists won the ideological war. On the morning of Friday, June 24, Britain woke up to the cold wet fish of a Major Change smashing into their collective mush––but not, I warrant, in the Valley of Eavis, for here there were more important matters afoot than the destinies of millions; namely, the kicks of a couple of hundred thousand revelers.

"Keep Calm You're at Glastonbury" read a predictable T-shirt slogan with a British bulldog's chest bulging behind it––but this really was just about the lamest costume I saw (besides my own). To wander the muddy sloughs and rutted holloways of the Eavises' farm is to find yourself psychotropically transported to a wonderless land, in which a quarter of a million largely middle-class and white Britons have gone berserk raiding the dressing-up box. Superheroes and cartoon characters, novelty beer cans and belly dancers––true, lots of folk make a real effort, and I was surprised by how many of the younger women were in full nightclubbing maquillage. (Although—why? I've known for years that entire precincts of London's tonier western 'burbs decant here for the duration.)

But that being noted, the overwhelming impression is of a dreadful mess: so much tie-dye, Indian-printing, modern primitive tattooing, face-metaling, hair-spritzing––and all of it irrespective of age. Mutton dressed as lamb and lamb dressed as veal: This is a farm on which the human stock has been subjected to a sort of sartorial-genetic engineering. Jean-Paul Sartre said hell was other people, but really it's other people's stretchy shorts slipping down to expose billows of white flesh cinched by the waistband of their designer underpants.

The alternative and politically radical aspects of Glasto appeared, on the basis of my brief immersion, to have been reduced to the aforementioned piss gang, antediluvian hippy nomenclature––Avalon, et al––and an enormous placard made up of a tapestry of right-on sentiments that the festival-goers slushed right past in their wellies. When it comes to saving the world, Glasto is firmly part of the Geldof-Bono Axis of Bleeding Hearts; the philosopher Thomas Hobbes averred that charity exists to relieve the rich man of the burden of his conscience, but the consciences I encountered already seemed pretty unburdened. The festival isn't cheap, and the tickets sell out in hours––if not minutes. Everyone wants to be a part of... Well, of what's effectively a synecdoche of contemporary, socially liberal Britain.

And what's contemporary, socially liberal Britain like? Well, it's pro-environment and very keen on fairness, but less keen on altogether abandoning a vertiginous economic order, which means that tickets to gigs like this are super expensive. Somewhere on the massive site, glampers were raising glasses of Krug to their lips in centrally heated tepees, but you can be sure those lips were unlikely to belong to someone with ethnic minority heritage.




As I wandered hither and thither, I thought of the chapter of Melville's Moby Dick entitled "The Whiteness of the Whale," in which he descants on all the multifarious shades of the color: beige-white, liver-spotted white, appallingly tattooed white, red sun-burned white, pale-freckled white. Some black and brown people come to Glasto––but not that many. I suppose I wouldn't have noticed the whiteness of the Glastonbury whale quite so much if it hadn't been Referendum Day, at the end of a campaign that had been typified by the dog-whistling racism of those determined on leaving the EU. Paradoxically, I would think the Glasto crowd were, probably, largely Remainers––but they need to consider, now that Michael and Boris and Nigel have whistled the dogs out, how far their advertising-catalogue racially mixed image of contemporary Britain really reflects its reality.

Everyone I spoke to seemed gripped by the Glasto spirit, which is really only a febrile, possibly MDMA-enhanced version of traditional British politeness. My daughter, who was along to take the snaps, is a seasoned festival-goer; she said it was the same at many of the other massed loud-music gatherings that nowadays bedizen the British summer months. "I've been lost and wet and cold and in pain," she told me, "and other people have gathered me up and fed me and bathed me and treated me like their own." Which is what plenty of socially liberal Britons want the wider society to do––but rather than massing at the barricades, they're all monged out of their collective brain in a muddy field, under gray skies and fluttering pseudo-Tibetan prayer flags, eating––among much other excellent provender––the famous "square pies" that are otherwise to be found on sale at London's hipster cynosure, Spitalfields Market. Well, that was then––and those square pies have long since been composted, while the indigestible political reality of Brexit remains sticking in our collective craw.

http://www.vice.com/read/we-sent-will-s ... ritain-657

[American Dream]

Like the sociologists who thought that the ghetto riots were an unfortunate consequence of the blacks’ attitude toward existing conditions, the hippie thinks that alienation is merely a matter of perception (“it’s all in your head”). He believes that the fetters on social life are ultimately the prevailing ideas and attitudes, that it is consciousness — abstracted from social practice — that needs to be transformed. Thus, in effect, he reinterprets reality so as to accept it by means of his interpretation. He “mellows out,” pacifies himself so as to be “in tune” with the (capitalist-dominated) environment. All negative feelings are a head problem solved by turning on the “good vibes.” Frustration and misery are attributed to “bad karma.” “Bum trips” are a consequence of not “flowing with things.” Psycho-moralizing about “ego trips” and “power trips,” he holds them responsible for the present social poverty and harbors millenarian expectations based on the abstract determination of everybody to “love one another.” Everything continues as it is factually while, by a dialectical deceit, he supplies a secret interpretation: that existing conditions will go away as soon as everyone acts as if they didn’t exist. This quasi-Christian elevation above the world exactly measures how far the hippie is beneath life and “destined” to be kept there by virtue of this interpretation. He accepts his fate in the spirit of holiness, of confident superiority (“don’t let things bring you down”). Like adolescents at a junior prom, everyone is encouraged to dance and have a good time. “Be free! Be natural!” A sneak preview of the psycho-humanist police force of the new order.

— On the poverty of hip life - Contradiction (1972)

[PufPuf93]

AD

I want to admit I have greatly enjoyed this thread over the years but for probably mostly for the wrong reasons than your intent.

I lived the late 60s and 70s and part of the 80s at a ground zero of San Francisco and Berkeley and was whole heartedly into the political and music and culture in general scenes and have lived most of my life retaining that ethic amid cultural and peopled backwaters of those times; my living space is full of references even now, a fetish.

So your posts in Tantra-Induced have sent me on many a musing internet stroll of memories and revelations and re-thinking but maybe not all in the intended spirit of the thread.

Thanks.

[American Dream]

This thread would be misunderstood as an anti Hippie or New Age thread- that doesn't really express who I am, where I am, much at all.

As much or more than anything, all of that deep, wild, radical, mystic star dust is inside me- and always will be.

If I'm against anything, it's the excesses, imbalances and blind alleys- which each of us must figure out for ourselves...

[American Dream]

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





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3WE8i95oFs

[American Dream]

The A-Z of Acid

It's all about aciiiiiiiid



What is acid? Is it a drug? A sound? A fashion? Or simply a state of mind?

The answer is that it's a happy and coincidental coming together of all those things. In the blink of an eye in the late 80s they coalesced into a musical movement and cultural revolution of the kind not seen in the UK since the Summer of Love in 1967.

While many of the records that first defined the acid sound were made by Chicago musicians using a Japanese bass synthesiser, acid house was very much a British scene. It was people on these shores who embraced the sound and turned it into a culture with its own fashions, drugs and even its own logo. It was here that we had the second Summer of Love, here that the scene grew so strong that a very public backlash ensued and here that the government was moved into passing new laws that stamped down on raving.

But the establishment didn't win and decades later acid is still everywhere you look. Far more than just an alien squelch, acid was, and is, a lifestyle choice. As such, we present to you an A to Z history that touches on all the things that made it so….

http://www.mixmag.net/feature/the-a-z-of-acid/

[PufPuf93]

This thread would be misunderstood as an anti Hippie or New Age thread- that doesn't really express who I am, where I am, much at all.

As much or more than anything, all of that deep, wild, radical, mystic star dust is inside me- and always will be.

If I'm against anything, it's the excesses, imbalances and blind alleys- which each of us must figure out for ourselves...

I realize that and we are like minded in the regard you specifically mention.

[American Dream]

Also, quite honestly, I am wrestling with the legacy of that Cosmic Trigger which sent me chasing after Masonic and Theosophic propaganda, made the OTO seem cooler than it actually is, propped up far right conspiracy narratives, promoted "Ancient Astronaut" theories with racist leanings, etc. etc.

[PufPuf93]

Also, quite honestly, I am wrestling with the legacy of that Cosmic Trigger which sent me chasing after Masonic and Theosophic propaganda, made the OTO seem cooler than it actually is, propped up far right conspiracy narratives, promoted "Ancient Astronaut" theories with racist leanings, etc. etc.

Philip K Dick was my path to RAW and RAW lead to Crowley, Reich, Doris Lessing, Ezra Pound, Anthony West, Baigent among others.

But I was near San Francisco at boarding schools Fall 1966 to early 1971 and greatly partook of the politics, music and culture to the degree my parents took me out of the last school and I graduated from the Indian Reservation near home. Several years later I went back to Cal Berkeley.

I will always identify with those times to the point of fetish to be honest. I haven't taken an ethnogen type drug since 1986 but in the whole view the drug class as positive but best be wary.

There is definitely a strong smell of fascism in Crowley and as such some in RAW. Pound? Reich? Yep. My exposure to OTO was initially purely on the track of books and documents but I found myself liking and finding interesting some of the individuals and history itself. For example the book The Unknown God - WT Smith and the Thelemites (Starr) is essentially well written early California OTO gossip. Who cares? I do in a sense as greatly enjoyed the read. I oft enjoy the books about the books and the personalities more so than their actual writings. Many crave the books for their collections. I have books that I bought purely because of the open space (figuratively, there is no open space and many boxes) on the book shelves regards a collection. I think you know the chase as evidenced here at RI. I have bought only two occult books since 2008 or so, Churton's Crowley in Berlin and Aleister Crowley Secret Agent.

I have Blavatsky, Fortune, Regardie, Grant, Spare, Reich, Dee, Crowley (plus biographies) and so on plus all sorts of pseudo science about the ancients on my book shelves and on shared shelves with much natural science and anthropology. I have a shelf with bios of serious mathematicians too. In some manner there is a strict divide in my mind, not so important now as old, retired, tired, and decrepit.

Edit to add: I have always had an interest in the colonial world of Britain (see add Dee above), the British Empire, and maybe that is part of the attraction of British occultism. Many of these personalities are the last gasp of Empire and all it meant regards to class, war, commerce, and treatment of fellow humans however repugnant to personal values.

[norton ash]

Hey, I'm still part-hippie and dedicated to getting ourselves back to the garden. This thread is more about the snakes in the garden, or the cultivation of les fleurs du mal ... the infiltration and exploitation of counterculture and mind expansion... hazards. Thanks to AD for this thread.

[PufPuf93]

Hey, I'm still part-hippie and dedicated to getting ourselves back to the garden. This thread is more about the snakes in the garden, or the cultivation of les fleurs du mal ... the infiltration and exploitation of counterculture and mind expansion... hazards. Thanks to AD for this thread.

I agree with this and what I meant above by for the "wrong reason" was I was ignoring snakes and reveling in the past and present and entertaining myself with the links.

In more recent time and lots because of RI I have spent some time thinking about the agendas perhaps behind some of the history of the counterculture. This was not new to me as I bought Acid Dreams and Storming Heaven when first published, followed Leary throughout his career, knew of Dave McGowan before RI, knew about Morrison's Dad before reading McGowan, and so on. I have a hard time thinking of Zappa as an agent and take Frank at his word that he was a dedicated musician.

I for one have never and never will leave the 60s behind.

[American Dream]

I really don't mean to dismiss RAW in some kind of totalizing way, nor say that he was essentially this or that- he was a complex person, for sure. Equally so, I don't agree with McGowan on his thesis that most of the movers and shakers of 60's counterculture were spooky. If I have a beef with anyone, it is with myself for being too credulous.

It was a psychedelic templar who recommended RAW and for me the book was always tied to those sorts of Learyite evangelists. The years after though brought such a mixed legacy: jail terms, crack addiction, murder, and many other problems in that crew. I see things differently now but do believe I witnessed a process that included the structuralization of Spirituality and Resistance, for better and for worse.

I would love to return to some of that literature now.

[PufPuf93]

Hey, I'm still part-hippie and dedicated to getting ourselves back to the garden. This thread is more about the snakes in the garden, or the cultivation of les fleurs du mal ... the infiltration and exploitation of counterculture and mind expansion... hazards. Thanks to AD for this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byg1G88mXE8