"The more you focus on something — whether that's math or auto racing or football or God — the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain," Newberg says. He says he can't prove that McDermott or anyone else is communing with God, but he can look for circumstantial evidence. "What we need to do is study those moments where people feel that they're getting beyond their brain, and understanding what's happening in the brain from a scientific perspective, what's happening in the brain from their spiritual perspective."
~~~
Newberg compared the mystical feelings with the brain physiology of Michael Baime. Baime is a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Tibetan Buddhist who has meditated at least an hour a day for the past 40 years. During a peak meditative experience, Baime says, he feels oneness with the universe, and time slips away. "It's as if the present moment expands to fill all of eternity," he explains, "that there has never been anything but this eternal now."
When Baime meditated in Newberg's brain scanner, his brain mirrored those feelings. As expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen: Meditation is sheer concentration, after all. But what fascinated Newberg was that Baime's parietal lobes went dark. "This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world," he explains. "When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area."
Newberg found that result not only with Baime, but also with other monks he scanned. It was the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying and Sikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience.
"There is no Christian, there is no Jewish, there is no Muslim, it's just all one," Newberg says.
~~~
"You can sculpt your brain just as you'd sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym," he says. "Our brains are continuously being sculpted, whether you like it or not, wittingly or unwittingly."
It's called neuroplasticity. For years Davidson, who is at the University of Wisconsin, has scanned the brains of Buddhist monks who have logged years of meditation. When it comes to things like attention and compassion, their brains are as finely tuned as a late-model Porsche. Davidson wondered: Could ordinary people achieve the same kind of connection with the spiritual that the monks do — without so much effort?
"Just two months' practice among rank amateurs led to a systematic change in both the brain as well as the immune system in more positive directions," he said.
neat little RAW gem on the lack of difference between cults, religions and other "BS" (via amp23).
I have no commitment to materialism as a philosophy that explains everything, since no correlation of words can ever do that, and a philosophy is never more than a correlation of words. But restricting myself to the "materialistic"/scientific method of asking questions that have definite experiential answers, I observe no difference in operation between "cults" and "religions." Catholic nuns and priests vowing celibacy seem no more or less weird than Heaven's Gate members who also make that choice. Mormon extraterrestrial cosmology seems as goofy as Scientology, etc. Religions and cults all use the same techniques of brain damage, or "mind control," i.e. they all instill BS -- Belief Systems.
BS contradicts both science and ordinary "common sense." It contradicts science because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: After all, science can only say, "This model -- or theory, or interpretation of the data -- fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week.
But BS has an even more total incompatibility with what I loosely called "common sense." Except when we get dragged into a metaphysical, or ideological, argument, we all know damn well how fallible we are. We know that our sense impressions can mislead us, for instance. If we see somebody who looks like Joe across the street, we are aware that it may be Joe or it may be some ginkus who looks a lot like Joe. We examine him empirically lest we classify him too quickly as Joe or not-Joe. We have learned that slow, tentative judgements are safer than rapid certitudes.
The function of religions and cults, including the political or ideological ones, is to short-circuit the normal "common sense" process of doubt, investigation, further doubt, further investigation, further doubt, etc. The person with BS knows the "right answer" at all times and knows it immediately. This makes them very happy, and very annoying since most of their "right answers" don't make sense to the rest of us.
or what you might call a "monistic material-idealist".
Panexperientialism makes a distinction between external relations and internal relations. In the Newtonian universe of mechanism there are only external relation between entities. Entities either push or pull one another around. External relations are incidental to the entity. Their occurrence or non-occurrence does not affect the being or character of the entity. The Newtonian universe is made of substances which by definition have an independent existence. The idea of an internal relation is of a relation which is constitutive of the character and even the existence of something.
Internal relations involve a taking account of the environment internally. They are tied up with the idea of feelings. A pen lying on a table is thought to be unaffected by that location. It is thought to be the same unchanged pen when I pick it up. The relations to the table and my hand are changed but the pen is not. An internal relation is different. To see the pen is part of my experience. If I were not seeing the pen, the experience would be different. Hence my relation to the pen is internal to my experience. The idea of internal relations is that all individual entities from electrons to human beings have internal relations. It is because of this that the mechanistic reductionist programme is deficient. If complex things, such as living organisms, can be broken down into their component parts, how is it that the whole has properties that the components do not have? One response has been to say that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The tendency has been to interpret that in terms of the architectural arrangements of the parts. There is an element of truth in this idea but it does not go far enough.
It is not just that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is that parts become qualitatively different by being parts of a whole. Yet few there be who seem to understand this distinction. A carbon atom in diamond has different properties from a carbon atom in an enzyme. What could give them these different properties? The most fundamental answer to this question is in terms of the doctrine of internal relations. As Cobb has argued the most fundamental basis for rejecting reductionism as adequate to explain the physical world is the doctrine of internal relations. It is in the network of internal relations we have with the world that reality is most fully revealed.
plant polygraphs, paranormal plant emotion exploration, conscious cacti, soviet experiments with floral death empathy and advanced cybernetic plant communication, etc.
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. [+]
from a large and awesome interview with Rick Strassman regarding his work and latest book. It was obviously hard to come up with a model, at least in my mind, at least with what I knew at the time, to really be able to accept and hold and take the stories that people were telling me, and come up with a theory that I could live with scientifically and personally and ones that would make sense to the volunteers. I just started off with the most gross explanations and worked up from there when those got rejected. The grossest explanation is obviously that of the brain - this is your brain on drugs - you give people DMT their brain does this - this is why people where having these entity contact experiences.
But every explanation that I tried fell on fairly much deaf ears on the part of the volunteers. They either rejected the ideas about this being a brain on drugs, or the other approach that I was taking that was pretty much a psychological approach - these were unexpressed dreams or impulses or drives or motivations to be special or to belong or to have exciting experiences - kind of the Freudian approach. So when that didn't work, I tried to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, in terms of what Jung had said about UFOs and aliens, so I tried using those models or explanatory systems to kind of encompass people's experiences. That didn't work. I tried the more generic approach of interpreting what they were experiencing as dreams, but that didn't work either.
I tried and discarded various levels of interpretation until I finally just figured I'll just start to do an experiment assuming that what people are undergoing is real and that indeed they are experiencing or making contact with real, externally verifiable, discrete, freestanding sorts of beings. This is what they're saying and this is what they're doing and this is what is going on between them and the volunteer.
What happened as a result of that is that people became a lot more comfortable in sharing with me the full range of their experiences. I stopped fighting and trying to pigeonhole a round peg into a square hole - trying to fit their experiences with the theoretical constructs that I was stuck with. I think as a result of my change in attitude or approach that I was getting deeper and richer reports from people about what was going on. But still, as a scientist, I'm into mechanisms of action and when I started to write the book, I started to hunt around for scientific models that might encompass free-standing, sentient, independently existing, outside just one's mind, explanations for what people were undergoing.
So even though I'm no expert on quantum physics or any of the more far-out psychedelic views of cosmology, I did learn a little bit of this phenomena that is known as dark matter, which is non-visible matter that neither generates light nor reflects light, but still makes up 95% or more of the mass of the universe. It seemed to me that if it makes up that much mass of the universe, it could very well be inhabited, and it would just be a question of changing the receiving characteristics of consciousness through chemical changes that occurred with DMT to be able to perceive things that were normally not perceivable. And there are plenty of examples of that in everyday reality - I mean, with a microscope we can see tiny things we couldn't see normally - with a telescope we can see things very far away we can't see normally, with ultraviolet sensors we can see things that we can't normally see - so the only difference, maybe from a philosophical point of view, is that the change in our receiving powers are not tied in with a machine - they're more in our subjective/receptive consciousness rather than with a piece of metal and electricity and glass and things that can magnify or somehow change the things that we're capable of seeing.
So it's a bit of a stretch, but I don't think it's completely that crazy. The main thing that prevents further movement along the model that I'm talking about is just the verifiability between two people - like can two people see the same thing at the same time - like if you have two people looking through the same microscope at the same time, they can pretty much see and describe the same thing - but is it possible for two people to take DMT at the same time, or not even at the same time, and be able to see the exact same thing?
I don't think that we're going to come to the answers either through science or through religion. I think it's going to be some kind of hybrid. Science is a bit too constrained in the model building, and most religions are too constrained through the maintenance of their institution at the expense of the truth. As a rule, if you can establish the veracity of your findings through science, it's believed. It isn't excluded necessarily because someone disagrees with your findings. So I think it will require some kind of hybrid of scientific religion or spiritual science to be able to take into account the entire range of the phenomenon, the ethical implications that's available and also maintain the peer review and the cross-checking of your findings that occurs within the scientific model. Yeah - so it's pretty out there. It's kind of a large view and if I get one half of one percent done before I die, I'll feel pretty good about that.
Although it may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand at face value, LSD and other psychedelic compounds can have a profound life-altering affect on the user that, more often than not, serves to connect them (or reconnect, as the case may be) to the universal compassion and love for life that is inherent in our species. It invariably causes them to question the validity of the status quo, to examine their life and what surrounds them in terms of beliefs and values.
And in this epoch of industrial civilization, the last thing a corporate culture that survives on war, aggression and consumer spending needs is a consciously awakened population of people who inexorably choose to leave said culture in droves because they see it is killing the planet, themselves, and each other. This is precisely, to the letter, the meaning of "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out."
But even for those who would call this hyperbole, what was lost in all the derision and urban myths about LSD and other psychedelic compounds like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin and iboga -- plant medicines thousands of years old -- was the fact that they are miraculously powerful medicines, with the ability to effectively treat, and in some cases, cure some of the most debilitating illnesses and disorders plaguing humanity: addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and migraine and cluster headaches. They are also effective palliatives for the sick and dying.
Something with such legitimate potential to heal can only be kept in the bottle for so long. In fact, these transcendent therapies are now ebbing back into mainstream respectability. Doblin will be the first to tell you that times are changing, driven by too much government repression, too much scientific orthodoxy, and, perhaps more than any other factor, our culture's desperate need to learn how to handle what he calls our "collective emotional state."
this episode of the C-Realm features a lengthy interview with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. he talks about quite a bit: how climate change models have heretofore been entirely too conservative, how there are many alternative energy sources which haven't been considered (he mentions algae and a different kind of geothermal), and what he sees as an ongoing transformation of society by tele-work, tele-eduction, and tele-everything. but perhaps the most interesting part was his discussion about the consideration of the Lifeboat Foundation's other concerns for the immediate future:
The purpose of the Lifeboat Foundation is to try to anticipate the potential existential risks to humans going forward as we prosecute what is essentially something that we've never done and seen before which is a simultaneous IT, Bio, Nano, Quantum Energetics, double-exponential tech revolution. All of these tech revolutions are frontiers of the small but feed off one another synergistically and they're all changing things in massive ways. Currently, we have, since 1959, seen computer speeds increase 10 million times. We are currently at about a petaflop. The human brain speed is 20 petaflops. We will be at human brain speed by 2012. So the machines will be as smart as human brains.
Beyond that, as we leave silicon and go on to Bio, Optical, Quantum, Nano, and Molecular computing, we are looking at an additional speed increase beyond human brain speed of somewhere between 10 to the seventh and 10 to the 11th power by 2030 to 2040. That's some massive, massive, machine capability. So the speed will be there to produce an intelligence beyond human. Well, what about the software? The software comes from either the current self computing algorithms and (AGI) or are from biomimetics.
Then there is 'emergence'. As far as we can tell, there is no general intelligence wiring in the human brain. Each piece of our intelligence evolved in the usual billion year evolutionary context over which we developed as today's humans to handle specific problems within that evolutionary context, almost all of which was in the hunter-gatherer realm. Any general intelligence that we have is wholly emergent - i.e. make something complex enough and it wakes up.
So between emergence, biomimetics, and self computing, people are betting that by 2025 to 2030, we will begin to approach or exceed human level machine intelligence. If this happens it may become an existential threat - one of the existential threats that are being looked at by the Lifeboat people. Because once the machines get smarter than us, they can do things that could take us down even inadvertently. You don't even have to postulate an evil machine to do this. And so how do you work this going forward to make sure that in the brain stem of the machines, in the lizard part of the brain, that they understand, and it's built into them from the initial stages, not to harm humans in any way shape or form? So we have to define what "harm" is...
At least half the year belongs to Endarkenment. Enlightenment is only a special case of Endarkenment—and it has nights of its own.
Obfuscatory, reactionary and superstitious, Endarkenment offers jobs for trolls and sylphs, witches and warlocks. Perhaps only superstition can re-enchant Nature. People who fear and desire nymphs and fauns will think twice before polluting streams or clear-cutting forests.
Electricity banished shadows—but shadows are “shades,” souls, the souls of light itself. Even divine light, when it loses its organic and secret darkness, becomes a form of pollution. In prison cells electric lights are never doused; light becomes oppression and source of disease.
Superstitions may be untrue but based on deeper truth—that earth is a living being. Science may be true, i.e. effective, while based on a deeper untruth—that matter is dead.
For the poor Christian Moslem Jewish saps duped by fundamentalist nihilism the Last Day is both horrorshow and Rapture, just as for secular Yuppies global warming is a symbol of terror and meaninglessness and simultaneously a rapturous vision of post-Catastrophe Hobbit-like local-sustainable solar-powered gemutlichkeit. Thus the technopathocracy comes equipped with its own built-in escape-valve fantasy: the Ragnarok of technology itself and the sudden catastrophic restoration of meaning. In fact Capital can capitalize on its own huge unpopularity by commoditizing hope for its End. That’s what the smug shits call a win/win situation.
Endarkenment envisages a medicine advanced as it might have been if money and the State had never appeared, medicine for earth, animals and humans, based on Nature, not on promethean technology. Endarkenment is not impressed by medicine that prolongs “life span” by adding several years in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes and glued to daytime TV, all at the expense of every penny ever saved by the patient (lit. “sufferer”) plus huge debts for children and heirs. We’re not impressed by gene therapy and plastic surgery for obscene superrich post humans. We prefer an empirical extension of “medieval superstitions” of Old Wives and herbalists, a rectified Paracelsan peoples’ medicine as proposed by Ivan Illich in his book on demedicalization of society.
Politically Endarkenment proposes anarcho-monarchism, in effect somewhat like Scandinavian monarcho-socialism but more radical, with highly symbolic but powerless monarchs and lots of good ritual, combined with Proudhonian anarcho-federalism and Mutualism. Georges Sorel (author of Reflections on Violence) had some anarcho-monarchist disciples in the Cercle Proudhon (1910-1914) with whom we feel a certain affinity. Endarkenment favors most separatisms and secessions; many small states are better than a few big ones. We’re especially interested in the break-up of the American Empire.
Culturally Endarkenment aims at extreme neo-Romanticism and will therefore be accused of fascism by its enemies on the Left. The answer to this is that (1) we’re anarchists and federalists adamantly opposed to all authoritarian centralisms whether Left or Right. (2) We favor all races, we love both difference and solidarity, not sameness and separation. (3) We reject the myth of Progress and technology—all cultural Futurism—all plans no matter their ideological origin—all uniformity—all conformity whether to organized religion or secular rationalism with its market democracy and endless war.
Endarkenists “believe in magic” and so must wage their guerrilla through magic rather than compete with the State’s monopoly of techno-violence. Giordano Bruno’s Image Magic is our secret weapon. Projective hieroglyphic hermeneutics. Action at a distance through manipulation of symbols carried out dramaturgically via acts of Poetic Terrorism, surrealist sabotage, Bakunin’s “creative destruction”—but also destructive creativity, invention of hermetico-critical objects, heiroglyphic projections of word/image “spells”—by which more is meant (always) than mere “political art”—rather a magical art with actual dire or beneficial results. Our enemies on the Right might call this political pornography and they’d be (as usual) right. Porn has a measurable physiopsychological effect. We’re looking for something like it, definitely, only bigger, and more like Artaud than Brecht—but not to be mistaken for “Absolute Art” or any other platonic purism—rather an empirical strategic “situationist” art, outside all mass media, truly underground, as befits Endarkenment, like a loosely structured “rhizomatic” Tong or freemasonic conspiracy. [more]
i've been harping (along with plenty of others) along this general tack for years now, and am glad to see this viewpoint popularized and mainstreamed.
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment. Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real. This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.
First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.
a thesis on two of my favourite 20th century personalities. the paper compares and contrasts the lives and work of the "Great Beast 666" and the "Wizard of Zürich". both were sons of devout Christians who were at times into solitude, experienced "weirdness", produced "channeled" texts (The Book of the Law and Seven Sermons to the Dead), and generally advanced the cause of individualistic and (at least somewhat) scientific approaches toward spirituality. each man was a crucial modern link in the Western tradition (magic and alchemy). this paper points out the parallels between their systems (Magick and Analytical Psychology) in the light of how each can be seen as a Western continuation of the function of "shamanizing".
This thesis is a comparison of the works of two seemingly dichotomous individuals. The first work, Magick/Liber Aba, is by Western Esotericist (Occultist) Aleister Crowley [1875-1947]. Magick/Liber Aba sets out the major thrust of this prolific author's theories concerning Magick as a process towards spiritual attainment. The second work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, presents psychologist C.G. Jung's [1875-1961] interpretation of the alchemical tradition as a method toward individuation. These two men were individuals who were dissatisfied with the predominantly monophasic world-view of "Western" culture. Both Crowley and Jung can be seen as pioneers who attempted to foster a polyphasic world-view in which various states of consciousness such as dreams, fantasies, visions, and drug-induced experiences were not only valid but essential for the completion of the Great Work and the acquisition of ever deepening and widening gnosis in the quest to become fully human.
The "Cycle of Meaning" demonstrates how a symbol functions within a given world-view. At the top of the cycle we see the cosmology of the people or culture in question. That cosmology or ontological assumption is reflected in the culture's mythopoeia. The interpretation of the mythopoeia (such as art and ritual) is reinforced by a "shaman". That reenforcement influences the direct experience of the individual. The direct experience is then again interpreted by the shamanic agency. This interpretation then functions to reinforce the endemic cosmology. What results is a closed cycle which is perpetuated by the culture's shaman.
Not only was Jung writing from within the larger context of "Western" culture, he was also in a sense creating his own Cycle of Meaning. If a patient is being treated through the methods of Analytical Psychology then he or she can be as adopting that world-view. The analyst, as shaman,then reinforces the world-view and interprets any direct experience had by the patient, which in turn reconfirms the Analytical cosmology. In the case of Crowley and Jung we see that they both attempted to break the dominant Cycle (for Crowley it was the Western Esoteric Tradition and for Jung it was Freudian psychoanalysis) thereby creating their own Cycle of Meaning in which they themselves became the primary "initiator".
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Crowley and Jung is that they demonstrated that the human condition is far more complicated and deeper than we generally suspect. Both men encouraged every person to delve deeply into their depths and examine, at length and with courage, what rose from those depths. Each man also insisted that the true goal of human development was to become fully human, to transcend the limitations imposed by collective consciousness and its constrictive epistemologies toward a union with inner powers universal in their embrace. By attempting to become more human in this sense we begin to break down the boundaries which prevent us from gaining more insight, more gnosis not only about ourselves as individuals, but our relation to others and the universe at large.
a 1998 BBC documentary in 5 segments detailing the history and current state of psychedelic research. features interviews with several prominent scientists, including Kary Mullis (Nobel-prize winning discoverer of PCR), Stanislav Grof (who conducted successful research in using LSD to cure alcoholism in the 60s), Rick Strassman (who literally wrote the book on DMT research), Deborah Nash (who has used the Pygmy psychedelic iboga to successfully cure heroin and cocaine addictions), and Curtis Wright, who served at the FDA from 1989 to 1997 in its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. along the way the tales of Leary, Manson, the reaction of the government, the use of ayahuasca by middle class quasi-Christians in Brazil, and the accounts of other scientists are featured. while watching this i also came upon a lovely lady who does psychedelic YouTube podcasts (featuring one in which she related the anal administration of DMT. ouch.)
In the late 1960s, human experiments with psychedelic drugs were brought to a halt. Government reacted to the anarchy of the hippie counter-culture. The drug-crazed Charles Manson slayings came to symbolize public fear of the street use of LSD. Funding ceased, and the few researchers who battled on were ostracized. But lost in the blanket ban were remarkable research projects in the field of psychiatry that held out new hope for the treatment of schizophrenia and alcoholism. Bill Eagles' extraordinary film tells the story of a handful of dedicated scientists who have struggled to make psychedelic research respectable again.
Rogan (comedian, psychdelic explorer, and UFC comentator) tells all about his experience of regular use of a Lily flotation tank. for those not in the know, this is a tank filled with water and Epsom salts heated to the temperature of your skin, in which your ears are underwater and you're in complete darkness. apparently such a thing can amplify introspection in some awesome ways, which Joe attests to. on the way he tells about "the place" that the tank seems to be bringing him to, science, mysticism, and douchebaggery. of course this could all be a ruse to get you to sign up for his mailing list...for the chance to win his old tank (he's upgrading).
Because truly, that is the only way, and if you ask basically anyone in the world what he or she wants most in life, it’s to be happy. Happy and in love, that’s the best feelings life has to offer, and the only people that want anything other than that, are the kind of people that need happiness and love the most. The tank tries it’s hardest to steer you in that direction.
The real problem with that kind of thinking, of course, is that the world is infested with morons and douche bags. Chances are I don’t need to tell you that, because you’re reading this on the greatest platform for scientific study of the common douche bag that has ever existed- the Internet.
[...]
The really weird part of the tank experience comes once you get comfortable with the experience. Once laying in this weird, warm, salt-water box becomes a regular thing, it becomes easier and easier to relax and go deeper and deeper.
To me, it feels as if there are layers of bullshit I have to peel away before I can get to what “me” really is. I always feel as if I’m following a series of machines on a network; each with their own specific job of making life move along, and that I have to recognize and understand how each one works in order to pass it and eventually get to the “source.”
The human systems go in a pretty predictable pattern that starts with my personality, and then connects to the various people I come into contact with in my life, and as I pass over that, I eventually branch out to an overview of people in general; egos, relationships, self discipline, then it starts to drift away from individuals, and go to examining cultures, human motivation, symbiotic life, universal consciousness, then slowly but surely it gets to “the place.”
“The place” is the ultimate goal - a state of consciousness at the center of it all where your “mind” doesn’t exist. It’s a place where the ego is temporarily forgotten, and where in the complete absence of sensory input you converge into “everything.” The more I get in the tank and go through the process, the deeper I can go, and the freaky thing is, it doesn’t seem like this experience has an end point. Every single time I get into the tank I get a little bit further, and a little bit closer to the source.
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Mystical visions have been a part of the growth of humans forever, but a lot of so-called “no nonsense” people may tell you that the pursuit of such visions are just a self indulgent waste of time. They will tell you that serious men and women of science have no use for seeing things that aren’t really there.
What’s hilarious about that, is that a visionary experience was the motivation behind the work of the man who invented modern analytical thinking, René Descartes. He had a series of dreams in 1619 where the angel of truth came to him and explained to him how he was going to measure and define the laws of thought with mathematics. It’s one of the main foundations of modern scientific thinking, and it came to him from an angel in a dream.
Pretty trippy shit, huh? And especially ironic considering that a lot of people who consider themselves to be scientific thinkers won’t put any thought into considering the influence or power of things that they can’t actually measure.
I think we may have to learn to accept the idea that there may very well be something that we’re all a part of that we’re not completely aware of - that we really are just a part of this huge, gigantic oneness of everything that we can’t really detect under normal circumstances because of our ego and our physical limitations.
this is the latest lecture from dear departed altered statesman Terrence McKenna podcast from the Psychedelic Salon. i listened to it last night. after the obligatory clowning around he started to set out his problems with scientific philosophy. i started to transcribe the most applicable passages, but stopped about a quarter of the way through, when i realized the entire initial section of the lecture addresses the shortcomings of the scientific paradigm, as well as his suggestions for the outline of a new paradigm, and why it's necessary.
then he goes on to to make one of the most interesting philosophical cases for novelty theory i've yet heard. so instead, here are my lecture notes. they are divided into fairly arbitrary categories and littered with quotes and my own thoughts.
My method, my style, has always been to be open-minded, to be critical, to be rational, but to seek the weird. And to seek it seriously. Now if you seek the weird without a critical intelligence, it will find you faster than you can lock your apartment behind you! The number of squirrelly ideas on the market these days is truly alarming. I coined a phrase (I hope), "the balkanization of epistemology". This is what we're dealing with now. You understand what I mean? It means people can't tell shit from shinola, but they wanna talk about it, a lot! This is a place where you have to bring to bear what are called razors, logical razors. One is: hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. Another is: equations should not be multiplied without necessity. Razors always seek what is called the principle of parsimony. In other words, keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is always to be preferred first. If it's found inadequate then wratch it up. One notch. Not twenty notches, one notch. Then we see if that works. You may think this is some kind of down-prescription for reducing the world to a fairly predictable and mundane place. It isn't at all. It's a way to rapidly filter out a lot of nonsense. But the truly weird -- and the truly true -- can survive this process. It doesn't do any damage to them, and you will then find them intact.
Nobody knows what life is -- don't let anybody kid you. And nobody knows its limits or its constraints. And to the degree that you assume these things are known, you marginalize yourself. You become a spectator, and a consumer, and a dupe, and a placeholder in this great opera. That's not what any of us want, I think. I think what we want to do is seize this moment, between birth and God knows what, to make a difference.
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