http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/103379/sacred_intentions%3A_inside_the_johns_hopkins_psilocybin_studies/

a detailed piece about the Johns Hopkins psilocybin studies.

"First, it's sensory and aesthetic," he says. "People experience colors, patterns, intriguing bodily sensations -- what most people think of when they think of the effects of a psychedelic drug. It's not life-transforming, by any means. Beyond that stage, they start dealing with psychodynamic issues -- the sense of self, obstacles, fears. It's very personal." In that stage, people often regress to their childhood and relive emotional episodes with parents, sibling, spouses, and children.

"And then ... we enter the archetypal realm. Visions of Christ, or Buddha, or Greek gods ... imagery from the Book of Revelation, that sort of thing. What's fascinating is that they often experience things far outside of their life histories, Christians seeing the Buddha, or someone seeing Egyptian or Hindu or other unfamiliar iconography. Certainly not the stuff they learned in Sunday school. It's fascinating -- almost as if there's a universal cache of knowledge they're tapping into."

Richards describes the final, and as far as his work is concerned, most important, stage. "After the archetypal realm comes the mystical state," he says. "There's a dimension of awesomeness, of profound humility, of the self being stripped bare. In the psychology of religion, mystical experience is well-described -- unity, transcendence of time and space, noetic knowledge, sacredness, ineffability ... .It's the sacred dimension of revelation, but it can be what Kierkegaard called 'fear and trembling' -- incredibly profound and powerful terrain to travel.

For the Eschaton, positioned in eternity, all things are somehow coexistent in time or outside of time. All events have already happened. Shamanism is a formal technique for viewing this hyperdimensional object outside of time in a three-dimensional way, by transecting it many, many times until an entire picture of it emerges. The mushroom evokes a profound planetary consciousness that shows one that history is a froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years and spread across the planet very quickly. But mind in human beings precedes the history of technology and goes back into the archaic darkness.

We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such;" to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, myth-making: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.

All these images - the starship, the space colony, the lapis - are precursory images. They follow naturally from the idea that history is the shock wave of eschatology. As close distance with the eschatological object, the reflections it is throwing off resemble more and more the thing itself. In the final moment the Unspeakable stands revealed. There are no more reflections of the Mystery. The Mystery in all its nakedness is seen, and nothing else exists. But what it is, decency can safely scarcely hint; nevertheless, it is the crowning joy of futurism to seek anticipation of it.

The Greek word eschatos refers to the last things, the final things. The Eschaton is a neutral way of naming what some call the Buddha Matraiya, some people call it the UFO intervention at the end of history, and some call it the second coming. It's the last thing; the Eschaton. What I think is happening is that all boundaries are dissolving; between men and women, between society and nature, and ultimately the boundaries between life and death. We are going truly beyond ambiguity, beyond syntax, We've been trapped in a kind of demonic simulacrum for 25,000 years, created out of language. Now the accelerating process of involuted connectedness characterizing this Whiteheadian progression of epochs toward the concrescence, is in fact being fufilled.

Science looks down its nose at the apocalyptic fantasies of religion, thinking that the final time can only mean an entropic time of no change. The view of science is that all processes ultimately run down, but entropy is maximized only in some far, far away future. The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum are infinitely and linearly extendable into the future. In the spiral time scheme of the timewave this assumption is not made. Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws that are conditioning existence and into another radically different set of laws. The universe is seen as a series of compartmentalized eras or epochs whose laws are quite different from one another, with transitions from one epoch to another occurring with unexpected suddenness. [+]

http://www.mythinglinks.org/magic~granrose.html

a paper on magicians as illusionists, shamans, psychoanalysists. archetypes, tricksters, fools, tarot, Hermes, Merlin, Jung, magic words, symbols, circles and rituals, etc.

We all know informally and roughly what a magician is. A magician is, of course, a person who does "magic". That is, a magician is a person who can make things happen that wouldn't happen under the normal or familiar laws of nature. Something is transformed in a mysterious way, or disappears, or appears. We know also, if we reflect on our use of the word, that a "magician" could be an entertainer (a "conjuror" or "prestidigitator") or a "real" magician (something like a "witch doctor," "medicine man," or, perhaps, "sorcerer"). Still, both conjurors and "real" magicians are assumed to have the power to transform things and make them appear or disappear, whether playing cards and silk scarves or illnesses and spirits. And such transformations take place in a way which is, literally, extra-ordinary. This thesis intends to deal with both types or senses of "magician" and to explore the possible relationships between them.

Archetypes thus can be understood and described in many ways, and much of the history of Western thought has evolved and revolved around this very issue. For our present purposes, we can define an archetype as a universal principle or force that affects -- impels, structures, permeates -- the human psyche and the world of human experience on many levels. One can think of them in mythic terms as gods and goddesses (or what Blake called "the Immortals"), in Platonic terms as transcendent first principles and numinous Ideas, or in Aristotelian terms as immanent universals and dynamic indwelling forms. One can approach them in a Kantian mode as a priori categories of perception and cognition, in Schopenhauerian terms as the universal essences of life embodied in great works of art, or in the Nietzschean manner as primordial principles symbolizing basic cultural tendencies and modes of being. In the twentieth-century context, one can conceive of them in Husserlian terms as essential structures of human experience, in Wittgensteinian terms as linguistic family resemblances linking disparate but overlapping particulars, in Whiteheadian terms as eternal objects and pure potentialities whose ingression informs the unfolding process of reality, or in Kuhnian terms as underlying paradigmatic structures that shape scientific understanding and research. Finally, with depth psychology, one can approach them in the Freudian mode as primordial instincts impelling and structuring biological and psychological processes, or in the Jungian manner as fundamental formal principles of the human psyche, universal expressions of a collective unconcscious and, ultimately, of the unus mundus.

--Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche
(via daoistraver et fannishly)

i knew i would be waiting for the UPS man after work today, so i brought a project. (i'm glad i did as it took him till an hour after close to get here). last week i rediscovered the collage tarot deck i'd done a couple years ago. i was pleased, excited as i had thought it pretty much gone. so i scanned it.

it's modeled after the traditional 21 trumps of the major arcana, but with some personal twists thrown in. it was created mostly from Rolling Stone magazines i salvaged from the recycling center...so there are some familiar faces. to me, they get the archetypical job done (hell, i don't even know who some of them are). in any case, ( here they are. )