Friday 25 December 2009

Magical Christmas Day Walk

I went for an early morning walk today on Christmas Day. We have had our first white Christmas and/or Solstice for many years.

Me and Cinderella went for a walk in a local park. It is all white snowcovered ground, and misty, and enchanted light and I feel this deep sense of magic as I enter the park because as I look into the enclosed field where there are usually horses, I just see all white and in its midst is a small spinney, or wood, which is like some mysterious wood from Narnia, or a picture from some wonderful fairytale book or film.

I am mesmerized, but Cinderella, looks at me looking and seems to telepathically tell me with her eyes to get a move on because she is cold and wants to get to her sniffs (she LOVES sniffing smells)...

So we then go through the fairy woods and it is very intimate and full of nature spirits, birds singing, and warning, and squirrels taking chances for fun.

As we come out of the enchanted wood into the more open scenery it is amazing, all white, misty, vast and noone in sight. It makes me start acting strange~~chanting and dancing like snow shaman, or warlock, and I even run in a circle round bemused Cindy who finds it difficult to walk in the crispy snow, which breaks surprising her walking rhythm.

I am just over awed at the scene I am moving within.

If you can imagine looking at a card with a picture of a seductive scene of winter, and enchanted woods/spinneys lost in the mists of time encapsulated within themselves as musty organic livingly spiritual earthy sphere auras, and you are actually moving in that scene, and can walk infinite white spaces and enter these strange islands of earth livings green browns....? That is how I am feeling as I explore this Mystery, my face alight with a deep real smiles of delight

Several times the mist-veiled sun appears through the Birch tree branches and lights up this unfamiliar scene in subtle ways that made it all...one of the most magical experiences of my life

Merry Christmas/Solstice ;)))

Monday 23 November 2009

Entheogens, NDEs, OBEs, Reincarnation, UFOs, and Etc: De-compart-mental-ization (to be continued, but maybe with different titles ;))




I want to Google, for example, 'Entheogens and NDEs' etc, (see title) and find inclusive explorations about how these supposedly different fields of inquiry inter~relate.
I think by synthesizing anomalies of human experience we may begin exploring deeper into the Mystery. 'Mystery' not as some static 'thing' but ongoing dancing of exploration, dynamic and alive...

I don't however disregard specialization, dedication to one field of inquiry. I am aware that I am reaping the fruits of such specialization or dedication when I review, for example, case histories of reincarnation, UFOs, and so on. People utterly devoted to their particular field. But there also really needs to be synthesis -"the combination of ideas into a complete whole"- too. A de-compart-mentali-zation between disciplines of research and exploration and feeling and experimentation.



I had a very powerful Out of the Body Experience (OBE) some years ago. I am not going to describe the whole experience, but try and communicate the sense of being 'out of the body'--what it feels like, as best I can. I am doing this, because when I have been reading sceptical arguments against the possibilities of NDEs, OBEs, etc etc, I sympathize, in a way, with people speaking from a place of not actually having had an experience I am about to describe.
Some sceptics, however, claim to have had a nonordinary experience and then later will question its validity. And so is the case with some psychedelic adventurers who will claim their trip was remarkable but after keep to the reductionist viewpoint that it was just a 'chemical ride', or 'distortion', 'delusion', and so on.
I often sense such an attitude to those who seem to cling, for dear life, to a mechanistic paradigm they find themselves in, and which--for many of them--they get funding from! They often are also not embracing of any synthesized approach, so as to see patterns that correlate into a dynamic whole, albeit they will usually use a wide brush to paint all non-ordinary experiences, and phenomena, as merely materialistic, and if not understood now, they assume their mechanistic brains will grasp it in the future when their measuring instruments are more advanced, and so on.


My OBE began after I had gone to sleep in bed. I got up to go to the toilet, and when I got there I couldn't urinate, or pee ;).
When I returned to my bedroom, I saw my sleeping body on the bed, and on either side of it were an adult male and female!

Now, when I originally got out of bed to go to the toilet, I remember the darkness being more tangible than usual. There were points of light, very similar to how darkness can be seen when observed on psychedelics; 'photons', many red, not bright but deep red. And there was a glidey feel to walking.
A strange feeling. A spongy sense where my feet met the ground..

Recently I saw a video made by a well-known author recalling his OBE, and he also gets up from bed to go to the toilet, and has trouble opening his bedroom door, then realizes why; looking close, his hand had gone through the door, he then looks back and sees his sleeping body in bed.

Now, interesting! For him his hand goes through his door. For me I opened my door! I never sleep with the bedroom door open, and 'I' did go to the toilet. Don't ask me to explain...

I felt the same as I do as a physical body but with more energy, and there was a sense of magic. Not as in the furniture morphing into strange shapes or anything, or scenes suddenly changing into another scene which often happens in 'ordinary' dreams. Things looked the same, but there was an air of anything could happen.

The male and female, who I saw on either side of my sleeping body, communicated to me telepathically. Later in the experience, I had contact with two mythical-looking beings, one of tthem intimately, who had been wearing masks of people close to me, and, when they took them off, underneath they looked like Satyrs!
The whole experience, I came to find years later, was also a powerful Divination which is still unfolding today!

At the end of the main drama of my OBE, I run to my bedroom, see my body still sleeping on my bed, and jump into my it, and then I merge body-length with my physical form, and as I do I see my OBE arm enter my physical arm, looking very pointillist, in comparison, finally merging with my sleeping arm.

There are other OBErs, and NDErs, who may report experiences involving feeling themselves feeling like orbs of light and energy with 360 degree awareness all around! Etc,...

People's experiences are unique and dynamic.
A great example of this is Mellen-Thomas Benedict's NDE which is rightly being called one of the most inspirational Near Death Experiences ever reported. I personally find this so!

The context within which Mellen was living before he 'died' was in a state of despair because of the disrespect he felt was being shown to nature by most people whom he considered a "cancer" of the Earth. He blames this worldview on the terminal cancer he contracted, and which became his 'killer', and he warns us about holding fast to similar negative worldviews.

Previously, to his NDE, Mellen had begun exploring different religions, and alternative healings, and had an openmind about the diversity of spiritual beliefs, and this attitude he took to his Near Death Experience.

Often NDErs report coming into contact with a loving intense, all encompassing light. Mellen was remarkable inquisitive with this light and his curiosity's found that the light was interactive, and telepathically informed him that people bring their own life experience to it. Christians will see Jesus, Buddhists, the Buddha, and so on, others may see relations, it really is how we interrelate with the Imaginal Realm, or Mystery, or whatever you choose to describe this experience.

He asked questions of the light and received deeply healing answers :

"Then the Light turned into the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen: a mandala of human souls on this planet. Now I came to this with my negative view of what was happening on the planet. So as I asked the Light to keep clarifying for me, I saw in this magnificent mandala how beautiful we all are in our essence, our core. We are the most beautiful creations.

The human soul, the human matrix that we all make together is absolutely fantastic, elegant, exotic, everything. I just cannot say enough about how it changed my opinion of human beings in that instant. I said, “Oh, God, I did not know how beautiful we are.” At any level, high or low, in whatever shape you are in, you are the most beautiful creation, you are.”

His vision dramatically, and deeply, resolved the negative assumption he had before about 'humanity' which he'd felt was cause of his disease. His cancer disappeared after his powerful NDE!


He also saw that all reality was alive, and that he, and everyone is immortal, but unlike may NDErs interpretations of their experiences as meaning the goal was to evolve away from reincarnation into physical bodies, Mellen understood that this process itself was sacred (which is the understanding of Goddess religion, symbolized by the Serpent that sloughs off its skin eternally to show new skin underneath). And when he asked the light what the "purpose" of all of this was, he was told there is no purpose.

I loved that answer, because it gells with the insights I remember enjoying many years back, reading Alan Watts, when he would compare life to a purposeless dance. You do not begin a dance with the 'purpose' to get to some 'end point'--the purpose is the dance itself which is purposeless; which is the meaning of the dance.

As soon as you demand a purpose you seek a goal, and then are caught in linear time. So it is not really I am meaning that we should just do what the hell we want and not give a damn, but rather have insight into the wisdom of purposelessness which is also a sense of nonlinear time, and ecstatic experiences of timelessness.


To explore NDEs, and how they relate to similar reported ways of naturally-occurring NDE-like states, and inducing of NDE-like states of consciousness, I suggest an exploration of what death may mean.

What do you feel when you hear the word 'death'? Just think before you move on reading ? What images do you get? What thoughts?


Did it connote a definite end of physical life as though it has nothing to do with 'life'? I am guessing that is what many people think. We usually get the image of physical death, and then....nothing? And there is a dread associated with the term because of fear of losing people we love, and our own death.

But can death also mean transition from one state of being to another?

When I think of life and death, I see, first of all, 'death' and 'life' as being two words. They are also nouns. So it is easy then to conceptualize these two terms as being static and non-related. We are schooled to think like this. To separate and fragment whole and dynamic reality into extremes and bits.

But I am rather understanding life and death to be utterly an interrelated nonlinear fractal process, where it is impossible to have 'one' without the 'other'. One implies other, as death implies life, and vice verse.

So transition isn't only from 'physical' to an 'after life', but also from an afterlife to here, and also in every moment; a moment 'dies' and is 'reborn' simultaneously! Eternity is not separate from time. What the warrior mindset, orthodox religious, and modern mechanistic outlook do is replace nonlinear sense of time with linear time, where an end is not a begining which is an end and so on. Rather they imagine an end that is FINAL.

Rather, time and eternity, are states of consciousness, and altered states of consciousness can bring you the same insights that NDEs can! However if you insist that time is mechanical and linear and that's it, then that is what you git!...unless.....


"The question is: Can we learn to manipulate brain-states to induce otherworldly experiences? Can we break down the perceptual barriers between this and the "next" world? The important thing to remember is that if there is an "afterworld", it must be very close, perhaps as close as our dreaming world is to our waking. Dying, in short, may best be conceptualized in terms of altered states of consciousness. If this is so, the solution to the mystery of death must lie somewhere in our own consciousness."

One of the most ancient ways of inducing altered states of consciousness are the sacred plants, fungi, potions, etc, that humankind has used in sacred rituals. With the experiences have come the descriptions of a death/rebirth experience, and insights such as the importance in life to "die before you die", and doing so you discover your eternal nature which expands your sense of being:

"Another metaphor from ancient mystery religion is spiritual death and rebirth. This terminology can be found in the New Testament. This was also a theme of the most ancient historical Middle Eastern religions, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, and in Greece, where a number of dead and resurrected gods were worshiped. This includes Dionysius in Greece, Osiris in Egypt, and Attis the consort of Cybele in the Middle East. In Tibetan Buddhism this approach to spiritual practice is found in the Bardo Thodol. Enlightenment is understood by the Sufis as “dying before you die”. Shamanic visits to the Other World, the Bardo, or the Spirit World, which are found in many tribal cultures from around the world, are simply journeys of awakening by another name." (my emphasis)

One of my earliest psychedelic experiences gave me the insight that time was extremely amusing in that it didn't--at the time--mean anything. My fellow Trippers, and I, found this certainty so amusing we wrote the time on a wall in the room we were in and fell about laughing looking at it, we wrote "It is 20 to 2!"

The important thing to grasp, I think is that timelessness in its fullest sense does not demand we await Near Death Experience, or actual physical death, but we can experience timelessness 'here'.

Stanislav Grof, other consciousness researchers, and psychonauts, know from psychedelic experiencers, and personal entheogenic experience,and/or such non-drug techniques like Holotropic Breathing, that timelessness, the eternal, is always 'here':



Friday 30 October 2009

Is 'Ordinary' Reality a 'Controlled' Psychedelic Experience?


I put this post up at The Icarus Project, and also want to share it here:

Lately I have been very interested exploring about the phenomena of UFOs, and their 'occupants', and also trying to understand psychedelics relation to this subject.
Apparently, as far as I know, very few researchers
--like Terrence McKenna-- have done this and the guy that has turned me on to my current phase of looking more into this is Ananda Bosman (checkout his video series at Youtube. His talk shown in a video -in 22 parts- has deeply inspired me. It is MINDBLOWINGLY interesting, and he has the most beautiful expressive voice, and way about him:



As Ananda points in in part 3 of his talk, it is very amusing how when you try and mention the subject of entheogens to many UFOlogists they think it is too far out, but also when you mention the subject of UFOs to many psychedelic researchers they too think that they are so far out already adding that 'high strangeness' is too much ;)... YET, I wholeheartedly agree with Ananda that is is VITAL to bring these two subjects together!

Funnily enough, I recently joined 'supposedly' radical forums about UFOs and the Paranormal, (and I even saw a thread featuring a McKenna video talk) the Paracast forums, started a thread about this--got a disinterested, then hostile response, and when I reacted (in a polite way) in disappointment, had the thread taken down! I have been on some fucked up forums but have never had a thread deleted before! But it just shows you the irony of this, amusingly illustrating Ananda's point.

Any way, in my research it takes you into looking into DMT. Apparently DMT is a chemical that some plants and fungi have, including sacred plants like Ayahuasca. In humans and animals DMT is said to be produced from the Pineal Gland, (though this is as yet still speculation) and in humans ( I am not sure about animals etc) DMT is activated in sleep, and NDEs, and most likely before actual physical death, and....

I found this really interesting article that is hypthesizing that 'reality' we take to be 'normal' and 'objective' may in fact be rather a controlled psychedelic experience!

"Medical Hypotheses
“Wallach's research on the effect of DMT on other endocrine compounds in the human body seemed to suggest that "...DMT and other endogenous hallucinogens mediate their neurological abilities by acting as neurotransmitters at a sub class of the trace amine receptors; a group of receptors found in the CNS where DMT and other hallucinogens have been shown to have activity."
Wallach proposes that in this way waking consciousness can be thought of as a controlled psychedelic experience. When the control of these normal systems of perception becomes loosened and their behavior no longer correlates with the external world, then altered states arise.
Translated, what this suggests is that consciousness, the waking state we take as a 'given' and that feeds us information about the physical world, is itself a kind of hallucination that is fed to us in a controlled way by the pineal gland. Changing the dosage and timing results in a completely different experience (the aliens, the tunnel of light), raising the question of, which experience is real?
Are either of these perceived realities really real? Are neither of them real? Is there more than one dimension of reality and if so, can we, like lamprey eels, perceive another dimension when the chemical lens is made available to us?
Are either of these perceived realities really real? Are neither of them real? Is there more than one dimension of reality and if so, can we, like lamprey eels, perceive another dimension when the chemical lens is made available to us?
I don't have any easy answers, and I do have a distaste for blind alleys when it comes to UFO stuff, since that's about all anything ever turns out to be--yet another blind alley. But I have to admit this line of research looks like it could come together in a very interesting way indeed, and that it definitely pushes us to the edge of some kind of envelope in terms of material reality versus psychological reality and arguments about consciousness and aliens. “

This is a very interesting hypothesis from a 'Madness' (as in Mad Pride, which is meaning that so-called 'mental illness' usually thought of as 'mad' may really be quite sane in an insane world) perspective especially, because it would explain how some people can be seen to have 'psychedelic experience' not acceptable to the 'controlled' psychedelic 'experiencees'/'normal' people. You know, the ones who believe war and people homless on the streets is the 'real world' one needs to errr ...trip with?

Thursday 22 October 2009

PLEASE share this amazing video!


" A Thousand Suns

A Thousand Suns tells the story of the Gamo Highlands of the African Rift Valley and the unique worldview held by the people of the region. This isolated area has remained remarkably intact both biologically and culturally. It is one of the most densely populated rural regions of Africa yet its people have been farming sustainably for 10,000 years. Shot in Ethiopia, New York and Kenya, the film explores the modern world's untenable sense of separation from and superiority over nature and how the interconnected worldview of the Gamo people is fundamental in achieving long-term sustainability, both in the region and beyond."

"I am sure 'A Thousand Suns' will spread the light of wisdom, will strengthen indigenous options and will show that it is biodiversity, not toxics which provides food security in Asia, Africa and the world." ~ Vendana Shiva


Friday 16 October 2009

Crop Circles, Mystery, and Love

This video is UNMISSABLE. It is a talk given by Colin Andrews and goes into great depth about the phenomenon known as 'Crop Circles'.

He shows how secret forces want to separate from the public's mind the phenomenon of'UFOs' from the phenomenon of 'Crop Circles', and also hide the fact that there is, and continues to be, deep official interest in the phenomena of both!

This utterly fascinating talk is so brimming with information, and integrity, that I really encourage everyone who finds it here to pay attention to what is being said and shown~~~

Colin Andrews - Die britische Regierung und Kornkreise from exopolitik.org on Vimeo.

Saturday 3 October 2009

Brainstorming: The State We're In





I have been talking with someone at the Shroomery , a site devoted to psychedelic knowledge and experience. etc. A member's thread asks the question: "Is Tripping Taken too Seriously?". I responded saying that psychedelic experience should be taken infinitely seriously.

When I mentioned the role of violent video games; hard core porn; abuse of drugs, and alcohol; psychiatric drugs, as causing so much violence in our societies, I was called a "fucking moron" to assume that only these times were more violent than times past, and he said that video games etc were not the cause of aggression and violence, so this inspired me to broaden my learning about the violent video game playing as one of the causes of aggression and violence.

There's things I don't know I would like to. For example, I'd like to know if they have lessons in schools, which analyze the dangers of watching and particpating in violent video games? Something tells me that is very not likely, and that is because there is so much money made from that industry!
The schools are part of this corrupt war-mongering corporate culture and thus will have pressure not to condemn what it holds dear, nor find authentic ways to resolve the real crises facing the young and people and animals and nature in general. But out of curiousity I would love to take a close look at the average school curriculum. See what is being 'programmed' currently.

I have been around a while. I can actually remember when music didn't contain swear words and offensive terms against women and gay people, and terms like "nigger" and promote guns, all forms of violence, gangsterism and materialism.

I can remember when there were not only no violent video games but no video tapes--at least for the general public. I remember clearly the excitement that came about when the new shiny TV video cassette recorders came to be released. Everyone wanted one. At last people could watch other stuff on the telly and tape shows. Later came the video game consoles.

Now we are here. Young kids playing...'MadWorld:

Parents horrified as most violent video game ever to launch on 'family friendly' Wii

"A new computer game tipped to be the most violent ever is being released exclusively on the so-called 'family friendly' Wii console. Nintendo will dramatically transform Wii's image with the release of ultra violent video game MadWorld which, 'revolves around the themes of brutality and exhilaration', according to its creators. Players in the 'hack and slash' game, which is due for a UK release in early 2009, can impale enemies on road signs, rip out hearts and execute them with weapons including chainsaws and daggers."

"MadWorld is a third person game where players control a character called Jack in a virtual world called Varrigan City which is under siege by a group of terrorists known as The Organizers.

The alternative world has been turned into a twisted game show called Death Watch where citizens must kill one another to survive - and win.

The action in MadWorld - developed by PlatinumGames and published by Sega exclusively for Nintendo - is entirely in black and white. The only other colour is red for all the blood.

Players use the Wii remote to control the violent on-screen actions as central character Jack executes his way through the game."

Have your mouths dropped open yet? Yes? If No, why not?



When I was a kid I wanted to get into what were then 'X films' which had age requirement of 16. These were 'Horror films' (or films which featured nudity) utterly tame as can be in comparison with that 'game' described above;

oh, and let's checkout the Top Ten Violent Video Games, shall we? Some examples from the list:

" Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas--"Player is a young man working with gangs to gain respect. His mission includes murder, theft, and destruction on every imaginable level. Player recovers his health by visiting prostitutes then recovers funds by beating them to death and taking their money. Player can wreak as much havoc as he likes without progressing through the game's storyline."

"Crime Life: Gang Wars--"Player is the leader of a ruthless street gang, spending time fighting, recruiting new gangsters, looting, and of course, more fighting. Player can roam the streets and fight or kill anyone in sight for no apparent reason."

"50 Cent: Bulletproof--"Game is loosely based on the gangster lifestyle of rapper Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson. Player engages in gangster shootouts and loots the bodies of victims to buy new 50 Cent recordings and music videos."


So, errrm. let me get this straight officer, teacher, judge, you mean the kids now don't just have to watch horror and depravity but can take part in it...? Can play it, as in a game.....? For fun.....?..........Can virtually DO it...........?!

(On our news today, a huge increase in dogs being brought into vetenary clinics with terrible injuries due to a massive increase in young people meeting in parks so as to fight their dogs with each other. They have dogs to suit the 'MTV' image of the 'hardest dog hardest man'. Sadism!)


A friend sent me this message when I told him what I was writing about on my blog. I love it so would like to post it here:


"Re: Re:how's it going
wow, ya, it's tough with kids and partying or video games.. So many friends have gone that way and they just don't talk to me much anymore. One refuses to go outside! I used to think I was too boring and that's why I couldn't snap them out of it but I think it turned out they're just so involved in the "drug" aspect of the games they can't feel without being totally overloaded by the screen. It's not even like normal drugs as them you can move around, even if just roll around on the floor hehe

I remember one kid when we were young who was worried about war and having to be in a war he told me once if he had to shoot someone life or death he wouldn't hesitate.. but that this other friend who wanted to join the military would just get shot in a situation like that, and that he should be the type of person to join the military not him. and he asked me "do you know why" and I said cause you desensitize your self to it. and he said ya... with a long pause... cause I desensitize my self to it.. He thought it was some amazing powerful thing of his inner power to be able to make that choice. But it's so little. he played lots of video games like the grand theft auto game..

This is where physical and mental do have a separation. Hate gives you physical power but compassion feeds the spirit to be strong which like you say is no separation from physical. What these kids don't realize is they're actually taking away their own power of choice. Like one of your vids talked about widening our vision around us to see the real options. It's like having fingers so solid you can't hold onto things! no feeling to make real connections.

Who would want to kill, no one does.. they just feel threatened.. if they could unlock them selves from these mind numbing violent games they could actually take an active roll in the world of change which is constant. Just being in nature and appreciating it is an active role.. They could effect positive change towards a balanced world. They could see all the little things around them that add up to the problems in the world..

Violence is very predictable.. only time it's not is when it's suppressed and when enacted that creates very predictable violence on the other side. it's just a crazy unproductive feedback loop..

..this is why biofeedback works very well for therapy both physical and mental. It's just like video games drug the mind, but biofeedback with your own body and intent of healing rather then violence is truly powerful. This is how I believe psychedelics probably work, as biofeedback. That's what I get from your blog posts=)

Anyways, sounds you've been good and busy.
Take care,
Josh"


The best explanation I have read up to now as to what is being done to young bodyminds jacked up to this stuff is here:

"Teaching Kids To Kill"

"This virus of violence is occurring worldwide, and the explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries (Grossman, 1999b). Like heart disease, there are many factors involved in the causation of violent crime, and we must never downplay any of them. But there is only one new variable that is present in each of these nations, bearing the same fruit in every case, and that is media violence being presented as “entertainment” for children."

"
CBS President Leslie Moonves was asked if he thought the school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, had anything to do with the media. His answer was: "Anyone who thinks the media has nothing to do with it, is an idiot." (Reuters. 2000, March 19). That is what the networks are selling, and we do not have to buy it. An educated and informed society can and must find its way home from the dark and lonely place to which it has traveled." Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold both played violent video games: "Harris and Klebold enjoyed playing a game called Doom, which is licensed to the US military to train soldiers in lethal combat."



Th author of Teaching Kids to Kill, shows how the same psychological behavioural techniques used in the military are being used via violence in TV programming and film, and violent videos, such as:

Brutalization ( Whereby the child from very young is saturated in violent images, and at a time when they cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality);

Classic Conditioning (Where children, youths, are trained to associate watching and taking part in violence as fun) " "After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high school teachers told them that someone had shot a bunch of their little brothers, sisters, and cousins in the middle school. "They laughed,"she told me with dismay, "they laughed." We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate human death and suffering with pleasure"" (Grossman &DeGaetano, 1999).

In this respect I am reminded when I was at art school , and there was a so-called 'fashionable' film released then that was truly horrific called Man Bites Dog. The 'hip' thing, especially with the post modern 'ironic' art crowd pose was to laugh at the really sickeningly violent scenes. I went with two art-school friends to see it, and they dutifully laughed where they were supposed to. I was appalled, and didn't laugh, and this exposed the falseness and they didn't like it. I just 'didn't get it'.
The same was so for the film Reservoir Dogs, et al, which also was of that ilk!

Evil also comes with conformity. People are more prepared to laugh at horror and accept it than stand out from the crowd. I am guessing it would have been like that at such blood-letting events such as the infamous ancient Roman Games. Some people may have been really shocked, but would deny that to themselves so as to be seen to fit in with the crowd, becoming more and more sadistic as they forget their initial disgust!

Continuing, then, with the manipulation of young peoples minds comes, thirdly:

Operant
Conditioning ( An example in the military is when they use human-shaped targets for shooting practice and have the solidiers trained constantly having to shoot at them when they appear. What this does is causes the soldiers to go into killing mode, in real life, if they see someone with a gun, or think they have a gun. Often anyone that suddenly appears, especially in paranoid situations will be in grave danger.)





So let me imagine, then, I have taken a psychedelic and am observing a youth playing his/her nasty video game. What do I see and feel?

I see them transfixed to the screen, and the frantic robotic hand movements manipulating their virtual reality. I see and feel a sadistic glint of power in their eyes and expression and body language as they immerse themselves in a sadistic and murderous and depraved virtual reality. I see this is some real heavy shit magic spell 'courtesy' of the major corps pushing this sadism. Teaching kids to kill directly says it how it is. I am very disturbed that this is happening!


Someone at the Shroomery claimed he loved video games, and said "how come then, if your right, more people aren't going out killing people?"

Well, violence is not just the extremities but is the soil from which they arise. The psyche or souls (interelated with all around), especially even more so of growing children, and youths, and their still forming brains, can be likened to soil, and the more we make it toxic with what is put into it or take out of it the more dead and toxic it becomes.

The practical thing is to make sure your child does not indulge in violent videos games, or even too much video gamery, and not allow them to cheat and play at their mates, or arcade, etc, but this means being strong, nonconformity, and showing discipline which is also part of love!

Friday 25 September 2009

Mobile Fixation-'mind inter-face'

At?

Why their precious mobiles of course!

Even in beautiful parks, on beautiful days you see girls all ages, mothers with kids, dogs, alone....older women, you see men with dogs, alone, children, looking down at mobile technological devices.

Sitting down on a bench, lying on the grass. Walking on pavements.

In the pouring rain (the classic was the other day. The rain was really coming down and their was a girl at a bus stop. She had a thin jacket on, no umbrella. In one hand she had a cigarette which she sheltered from the pouring rain with her fingers as she took drags, and the other she had her mobile which she was looking down at, and eventually put to her wet ear.

You see them at bus stops, waiting to cross the road. On BICYCLES! EVERYwhere! Totally fixated on their mobiles...






Everywhere I go now I see people looking down?

They also talk constantly into them too. Chitter chatter chitter chatter, looking down looking down chatter chitter ad nauseam

Would be cool they could read a book called Cracking the Cosmic Egg which says how constantly chattering to others, or in the head, ties you to 'consensual reality'. You have, in other...words, no space for seeing, feeling, touching things in other ways other than chitter chattering about your little world. Your little box of reality. No observing the wonder of the natural world. the language of other animals, of the birds, trees, the wind~~~

Would they care if you told them? Or would they say '...what?' as they had been rudely interupted from their beloved mobile fix?





I remember when I first had LSD trips and there were occasions I got to observe people walking about city streets, and in parks. Most of them looked very stiff. Not looking right or left, up or down or round. Like androids, and frantically going from a - b, in a rush to.........? Not looking and feeling this amazing world and sensing timeless time.

Now of course Mr techno got em good!

Saturday 5 September 2009

Tripping In Magical Wood Space





How do you Mean?


We are born from/out of/in/of mother nature. So partaking of her sacred fruits and going spiritually deep is commensurate with going spiritually deep into nature.

Now, Quantum Mechanics (QM) discovered that when they 'look' into sub-microscopic nature, things get very weird. It is a world of "uncertainty" and "probability". A world where a 'particle' can be a 'particle' @ one 'moment' and/or a 'wave' depending on the consciousness/observation of the observer~~~on measurement.

But what some interpreters of this QM world interpret is the idealistic (and reductionist) understanding ~ in modern garb ~ that 'reality' doesn't exist/is illusion, thus denying what is right in front of their eyes, and felt and touched by their senses in the macroscoping world, nature. Where there is macro there will be micro. Can you have one without the other?

((Wow))) when you think~~~~ Hubble Telescope/universe~~the unimaginable vastness of the universe. The a~maze~ing galaxies, spirals, etc, and they look like 'dots/points/particles' from distances in the universe depending how far away the observer is, never mind the planets!

So~~~ you zoom out ..out...out and see a dot, and then zoom in and in, closer and you see galaxy. Zoom in, more more, you see Earth, closer~~~~the wonderful blue sphere. It is spinning, but it seems serenely still...? Then...closer closer through the clouds and to the land in a wood~~a magic wood, you are tripping ;) ~@~()~

You are surrounded by life~~sounds, the whole woods and air is full of aliveness. You observe the ground and see all kinds of life going on ever so little insects going about with the most delicate wings, and patterned designed bodies, and legs. Everywhere you look is life. And even the wood itself, and the rocks and stones and plants are full of patterning and are breathing and flowing ( Currently, science is only beginning to take consciousness seriously. Jeremy Narby says that we see things with the mind but 'we' don't know how~~~especially when the experience is psychedelic!
My nature is alive, breathing, flowing and so is nature (got a reminder then of this psychedelic therapy session I read about where the recipient suffering alcoholism, and self-destructive self-image, sees a rose all wilted and dead~looking, but later in session~when feeling healed and glowing~the rose looks to him alive and blooming)





Events seems to happen with deep meaning, rhythm and synchronicity.
Anyhow, I zoom even deeper and 'go' into the subatomic realms/layers and some 'thing' is and isn't, some things are and are not. 'Things' go backward in time, and happen before they do. There is no cause and effect. What happens 'here' happens ages away @ the same time!

I shut my eyes and I see all kinds of patterns flowing and exploding and as I keep looking at these patterns soon they metamorphosize in landscapes, animals, and complex structures. I feel my shape changing and I become an animal, a bird, a tree, another person, a group of people, Earth, the universe. I lose all sense of anchorage of who I 'am'~~~my sense of identity, 'ego'. My nature is nature, changing flowing expanding fractalling spiraling, in ecstasy.

~~@(~~)~Gradually the ecstatic climax wanes and I 'come to myself' and I look around and observe the magic wood and how light interweaves in dark toned shapes of trees , flowers, leaves, stones etc. A pregnant darklight. I feel like dancing for the sheer joy of it all by the gurgling brook of clear flowing water full of life ~~ water for all wildlife and I laugh, giggling in playful rhythm with the gurgling~~~~~A bird flies suddenly out of the shrub twittering and startles me ~~ ~~

I am reading about Luciano Pietronero : "Fractals allow Pietronero to paint a very different sort of picture - one in which the irregular distribution of matter that we see around us never evens out into a smooth structure, but repeats itself at ever grander scales. Fractals are familiar enough: we see them in the branching of trees, the curves of coastlines, lungs turbulence and clouds. No matter what scale you look at them, fractal patterns look the same. Think of broccoli: a tiny branch looks much the same as the whole vegetable. Zoom in or zoom out, the structure looks the same ~ exquisitely detailed, never smooth. fractals can be beautiful to look at, but when it comes to galaxies it may be a subversive kind of beauty."
"The most profound question in physics today is how to unify the really small with the really big ~~and when it comes to matter's scale, fractals may turn out to be a key ingredient. According to Laurant Nottale, the distribution of matter in the universe is fractal because space~time itself is fractal."

I see tiny flies dancing flying in sun beams just for the joy of it. A worm's head protrudes from the underneath of the most delicately veined skeletal leaf, and a snail clothed with spiral shaped shell moves minutely amongst the earthy~rich decay.
Fractal galaxies, coastlines, trees, clouds~~~and fractals when I shut my eyes journeying in in in in and hear all the rhythmic sounds of nature.

There's really only one thing that matters, and that is to have a relationship with nature in deep ways so that you don't see it just as an object.
In order not to see 'it' just as an object~as for example you would see someone as a sex object~is if you feel it (pardon the pun).
To treat a person as a sex~object, is just being self~ish
To see a tree just as a commodity is not feeling, observing, tree.
When we take psychedelics, the sacred fruit of the Goddess, the feelings~~~the feelings are ecstatic~~~

Friday 24 July 2009

Part 2, Psychedelic, Mythology and Madness: The Patriarchal Expropriation of the Sacred Fruit of the Goddess

The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Life was one of the primary images of the goddess herself, in whose immanent presence all pairs of opposites are reconciled. Growing on the surface of the earth, with roots below and branches above, the tree was the great pillar that united earth with heaven and the underworld’ through which the energies of the cosmos poured continuously into earthly creation. The animating spirit that moved within it was the serpent, guardian also of the fruit or treasure of the tree, which was the epiphany of the goddess, that is, the experience of unity.”


I contacted Anne Baring, co-author of the book, The Myth of the Goddess; Evolution of an Image, asking her thoughts about this issue I was wondering about:

In my looking for research over a long period, I have been very surprised the rarity of feminists--or any women--focussing on psychedelics in relation with mythology, psychology etc, and their expropriation by the patriarchy. I have wondered about this. Nearly all the authors and speakers I know of are males. I find it odd, because I understand that going way back, it was always women who were the closest to the plants etc, and were the Wise Women.

So I am entertaining a theory, and wonder if you may agree with me? That this 'silence' is due to the traumatic reverberations from really just a few centuries ago--the Burning Times-- where many women who would have been connected with sacred plants were dreadfully persecuted, tortured, and killed in their thousands. That even though it has been mainly feminists who have boldly de-constructed the patriarchy that this as yet still remains taboo area?

I would really welcome your ideas about this matter.” (I added hyperlink later)




To which Anne Baring replied:



The reason women have not addressed this subject is probably as you say, because of an unconscious fear of persecution and also ridicule and shaming, that is still latent. Also men are still immensely powerful and for a woman to get through the barrier set up by the male ethos that controls so much of our culture is almost impossible. I think you need to go to women in the indigenous cultures - there are some remarkable women in the Indian tribes that still survive in America. There is one in the Lakota tribe whose name I have unfortunately forgotten - I think it is Apela whom I met at a conference a couple of years ago. Also, women, as you say, knew about the use of herbs for medicine but every attempt to bring through this different approach is blocked and attacked by very powerful groups in the medical profession, as well as by new rules about Alternative Medicines coming out of the European Union. So I think women have just given up.”



~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~


When the Sacred Fruit of the Goddess, psychedelic inspiration, is thought to be separated from nature, and is believed to inspire the celebrant to transcend nature, in the regard that nature and the body are believed to be negative, and/or in a more modern sense, when the potential deep psychedelic experiences that interconnect the celebrant with nature, on ever deeper levels of meaning, are dismissed in a reductionist and materialistic way, this is indicitive of a familiar patriarchal ongoing mindset needing to be exposed. Research into how the male-supremacist warriors and patriarchs understood and currently understand sacred vegetation, and experience, and how their mindset differs from earth-respecting indigenous, and Goddess ways, is vital to explore.



How the patriarchs thought of women – in their mythology and religion – and treated them in real life, would also project similar attitudes onto the whole aesthetic and meaning of their sacrament, the sacred mushroom!


The patriarchal minded ancients believed ‘God’s’ “semen", in the form of rain, came powerfully in thunder and lightening storms, spitting mightily from the ‘lips’ of God’s “penis” supernaturally generating forth sacred/psychedelic mushrooms , and the ‘active spiritual principle’ of the sacred mushroom was ‘his’ powerful spermatozoa.

The rain which collected underground was also the semen, and the earth was merely a ‘container’ for ‘God’s’ seed. The storm was the actual “Word of God”, and seeing that no microscopic technology existed to know about mushroom spores, these mushrooms were understood to be "virgin born", the 'Word of God' “made flesh”, the “Son of God”, the ‘Christos’! And eating the mushroom would bring the initiate into contact with 'God' (J.Allegro)


The 'Word of God' would mean the actual sound of the the storm, and the mushrooms, but also 'God's Word' speaking forth through the mouth of their prophets who after ingesting the psychedelic sacrament were believed to be 'channeling' God's 'Word' directly.


This is a familiar belief to the far more ancient shamanistic possession, where the curandero, shaman, etc., will 'speak as the mushroom' (or it could be a different psychedelic plant, or substance):



"I am he who speaks.

I am who speaks with the mountains.

I am he who speaks with the corners.

I am the doctor. I am the man of medicine.

I am. I am he who cures.

I am he who speaks with the Lord of the World.

I am happy. I speak with the Mountains.

I am he who speaks with the mountains of peaks.

I am he who speaks with the Bald Mountain.

I am the remedy and the medicine man.

I am the mushroom.

I am the fresh mushroom.

I am the large mushroom.

I am the fragrant mushroom.

I am the mushroom of the spirit."

--Mazatec Indian shaman --The Mushrooms of Language


and Mazatec Curandero, Maria Sabina:
"It is sung in a shamanic trance in which, as she recounted, the "little children" [the sacred mushrooms] speak through her:





Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin..."



Unlike the indigenous vision inspired with sacred vegetation, however, where spirit is understood as immanent in nature, patriarchal myths tend to separate spirit from nature, and in their prescribed rituals of the sacred mushroom, they believed they were rather being “born again in the spirit”, for this ’spirit-seed’ they were ingesting was thought of as being of God’s ‘spirit’, and not ‘of the earth’, for they had ‘divided’ spirit from nature. The Christian myth claims nature as ‘Fallen’, and cursed, because of the sin of Eve and Adam. Woman, and her devalued womb, was now thought to be mere container for the 'superior' male seed, and the earth, for the 'super superior' sky-god’s seed:


'Original Sin' adhered intrinsically to
Orgasmic Experience.

Love to be made pious and useful, had to be sanctioned by the Lord, blessed by a male priest and then it was to be practiced only for the purpose of procreation. Soberly, not ecstatically. Men should use women for the Lord: to be fruit­ful and multiply His followers. El Shaddai, God of the early Hebrews, was a relentless punisher of 'sexual deviation' and 'deviation' was any sexual activity not directed toward making children. Non-reproductive sex was a capitulation to 'bestiality' [another error, since 'beasts' copulate only to reproduce] and he who wasted his semen was a murderer, to be punished accordingly. Onan was slain for spilling his seed on the ground to prevent conception. This command of the Hebrew tribal god against waste of male seed is the source of all Western laws against: abortion, contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, oral sex, etc. To 'waste' the semen was to waste the life-seed, or life-blood, of the Father, diminishing His essence. [It was also to 'use' women as something other than seed-ovens.] Hindu religion is also obsessed with semen, seeing it as 'Atman', the Cosmic Seed.


It has been claimed that the knowledge that males had a part to play in conception came relatively late ( I don't know if this is true) and may have fueled the rise of patriarchal dominance. And with this came the belief that the male semen-seed was the main active principle of conception (which is untrue), and from there arose the idea of gods giving birth to goddesses, and the monotheistic God allowing his creation Adam to give birth to his female companion, Eve.

And in Christianity is the belief in the 'Immaculate Conception', which is allegorically referring to the real meaning of the myth explained above. The 'Goddess' Mary--who is 'demoted' to a mortal woman (as is Eve in the Old testament) is now the passive receiver of 'God's 'semen' who gives birth to the 'Christ', 'his' son. Jesus returns to the 'Father' not the Mother as is so in the Goddess mythos, of life, death and regeneration within the spiral of sacred nature. The Christian myth sees death as unnatural, and nature as cursed, and therefore inevitably omits the regeneration part of the cycle.


The living reality is that it's the male who only has to 'shoot' his seed, and walk away if he chooses to another 'conquest', but it is the woman within whom the amazing event of birth all happens, and tis she who will carry the developing life inside her usually for nine months, and then going through the momentous event of birthing the baby, and nurturing it!


Before the patriarchs de~graded the womb of the woman, and mythologically expropriated the Womb of the Goddess, the Womb was held sacred because all life, not just in earth, but also the cosmos (for all life was connected, as symbolized in the image of the World Tree) was thought to be birthed from the Womb of the Goddess. We came from her Womb; when we ‘died’ in life via sacred ritual inspired from eating her Sacred Fruit we deepened to the understanding of this Mystery, the Underworld, and were ‘reborn’, and when we physically died we returned to her Womb whereupon we rested and then regenerated and born into new forms of life.


Agrarian people who knew the more ancient religion of the Goddess understood that the earth as her body was sacred, hence all fruits, vegetation, and all life in general were sacred, especially the fruit which allowed the celebrants access to her deeper Mysteries.


There is not a so-called split between nature and spirit!


The Goddess is the sacred fruit, both nature and spirit, and so is her Son-Lover the Horned God of nature, symbolizing the fertilizing aspect of nature. And it is ‘he’ who is the seed who dies and is regenerated/born again:

So when the Celebrant eats the sacred fruit the god eat/sacrificed dies and is ‘born again’ as in possessing the Celebrant:



"Both Figures 1 and 2 show a female and a male figure, a central tree and a serpent, yet their meanings are completely different. In Figure 1 the seated female is the Bronze Age Sumerian Mother Goddess and the serpent who coils upright behind her is the image of her regenerative power. On the other side of the tree, in identical posture, sits her son-lover, called ‘Son of the Abyss: Lord of the Tree of Life’, whose role as fertilizing the source of life is given in the bull’s horns upon his head. Since the serpent and the bull, on opposite sides of the seal, are both images of the living and dying manifestation of the goddess, a true mirror-image is created of the unification of opposites in a single vision. Further, both goddess and son-lover gesture with outstretched hand towards the hanging fruits of the Tree of Life, offering the gifts of immortality and enlightenment together - she, immortality, and he, enlightenment. Here is the perennial story of the sacred marriage of zoe and bios, enacted under many guises - Inanna and Dumuzi, Ishtar and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Aphrodite and Adonis, Cybele and Attis - and all of them images of reconciliation and affirmation." Eve: The Mother of All Living



for the Celebrant’s previous sense of hirself has also ‘died’,


and has ‘become a god’ in the sense of experiencing the Garden of the Goddess,


Paradise.


S/he has become the very god/dess of nature, lover of the Goddess.


In this set&setting spirit is not divided from nature and so this experience is really a fuller, deeper, expanded


understanding and expression of this all-pervading spirit which regenerates one’s being in nature.


So…after such experience the ‘come down’ (a modern terminology referring to the coming down from psychedelic experience) isn’t a ‘return’ to ‘fallen nature’, or, in a modern sense, a return to a soulless mechanistic materialistic reality, but rather a continuum of sacred experience! For in this world of the Goddess, so-called ordinary life is not separated from sacred experience, but enriched by it. And as a result the community becomes enriched also, as does all of nature, it too is ‘born again’ as you are. Not in an idealistic way, but as your insight into the sacredness of nature deepens then you seek to care for nature, and encourage children and others to, and so on. It is a symbiosis, whereby our eating of sacred vegetation--when done with utmost respect and openess--allows you a deepening sensual spiritual interelationship with the natural world...


In the patriarchal monotheistic context, however, nature is cursed, fallen, ruled over by the 'Prince of Darkness', the ‘Devil’, and thus is a trap for the unwary soul. This life is thought to be a perilous slippery stepping stone to a 'future' spiritual pure state far from nature and earth (thus encapsulating the believer within the sense of linear time towards a goal), if one abides by the 'Faith'; and in the current mechanistic-materialist context, where ‘God is dead’, and the ‘Devil’ mere superstition from our Medieval past.




Nature it is now officially 'scientifically believed ‘ to be reduced to particles, chemicals, and genes, and is ‘dead’, having no deep meaningful mysterious sense. In this soulless ‘Wasteland’, instead of the dread of the ‘Devil’ we have the dread of ‘mental illness’ (Szasz/The Manufacture of Madness).


In this ‘brave new world’ there exists a great fear of visionary experiences, non-conformity, and not being accepted as ‘normal’ by this soul-lost culture, which is itself insane and intent on blindly and unfeelingly destroying the very Web of Life.


Similarly as with 'our' orthodox religious past with its Inquisitions against wild women, and men, with wild plants, modern ‘secular’ culture also forbids psychedelics and participation mystique with nature. Whereas in the past oppressive religious orthodoxy such experience and understanding would be demonized, now, with the 'evolution' of scientism, authentic spiritual experience is demeaned and/or pathologized—called "delusional", reduced to a mere meaningless chemical experience, or claimed to be pathological, especially if after psychedelic experiential 'come down' one confessed to experiencing reality in a wholly different way, and desired to have a lifestyle which refelected such insights, and seen to contradict and conflict with the mechanistic-materialistic-consumerist-meritocratic-pharmacratic worldview.

These are strange times, as surely modern physics has given a strong hint just how mysterious reality is, and yet this mechanistic view is still clung to by the predominant culture, but I do hear that consciousness is now being looked into!



There is the irony of the secret partaking of psychedelics, at the beginnings of the Judaic-Christian religion, amongst the initiates (which, strange as it may seem, may still continue: see Heretical Visionary Sacraments Amongst the Ecclesiastical Elite -) , the cryptic mention of psychedelic vegetation is secretly and cleverly hidden in their religious literary script, and yet allegorically condemned in the words, and in the imagery, as is shown in the Genesis creation myth, as all the symbols refer to the far more ancient Goddess religion and her Sacred Fruit which are condemned!


As Joseph Campbell has pointed out, a great discord exists between the images in the Genesis Garden of Eden myth, and the words, and story; a dissonance, and this is because of the primeval meaning of the images which the patriarchal elite then try and subvert from their original meaning and associations . For images have a far deeper meaning than words, but the Bible is based on the “Word”of God’ and God supposedly very against the image! 'Yahweh' is a very "jealous God".


His First Commandment is:


"I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me."


and the Second Commandment is:


"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." (Exodus 20:4)



Of course for the indigenous peoples this theocracy was imposed on them by force, as is evidenced in the Bible where we read how Goddess religion is attacked, and the slaughter of her people:


"Then ye shall drive out all of the inhabitants the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places." (Num. 35:52)


The victims of this monotheistic tyranny would have very well known about the subversion of their mythologies by the monotheists, and thus their despised Religion of the Earth would have had to go 'underground, which is a big reason for the later Inquisitions of the Christian church who would sadistically try, and once and for all, crush any competition which they saw as a threat to their powerful empire. And it also a ‘good’ way to make more money as the Church made sure it kept the possessions of the women, and others, they destroyed.

The biblical prophets had access to psychoactive substances, yet their messages conformed to the patriarchal demands.



Modern ‘prophets’ such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and James Hillman—all males as usual—have attempted to reveal the deeper meaning of religion, mythology, and the power of ‘archetypes’ and so on, and the whys and wherefores of our sense of desires, fears, struggles, and ‘psychopathologies’.


Freud who had no time for participation mystique with nature which he would pathologize as ‘oceanic consciousness’, a 'regression to mother’s womb'—quite ironical really--was friends with the younger Carl Jung, and there was a falling out between them regarding Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious, a theory much closer to the interrelated sense of the Goddess than is Freud's theory of the 'Unconscious' which he saw as mainly a dumping ground for repressed memories.


Jung however, had his own Feminist blindspots which are articulately explored by his daughter,

Carla J Emmatoni :



Anne: Tell me about the feminist critique of Jung's psychology.

Carla: Do you have a couple of weeks? (laughing) No, seriously... I'll try to summarize the main points for your readers, because it's vitally important that people learn to sort out Jung's useful ideas from those which reinforce stereotypes and ways of thinking that are actually damaging to women. This is crucial, because Jung's worldview is as much religion as psychology, and most western religious beliefs — with the exception of the re-emerging Goddess and pagan spiritualities — tend to reinforce the idea that women are inferior and should be subordinate to men.

Anne: Jungian psychology... a religion?

Carla: Oh, yes. In a letter to Freud written Feb. 11, 1910, Jung wrote: "Religion can only be replaced by religion. ... What sort of new myth does it [psychoanalysis] hand on for us to live by? ... 2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent..." 16 Freud wasn't interested in pursuing this line of thought, but Jung was very clear that he connected psychology and religion. He went on to write, in the same letter, that it would take time "to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in that way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were — a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal." 17

So, you see, Jung saw very clearly the religious nature of myths and symbols, which were the foundation of his analytic method. And the problem with this is that things which are seen as religious are also seen as natural — the way things are and ought to be. So if a religion's myths and symbols are interpreted in a way which reinforces gender stereotypes — which has been the case in western religious mythology ever since Genesis gave Eve and the serpent a bad rap — they tend to be extraordinarily hard to change. This is especially true since religious symbols and myths, which really represent beliefs, get internalized, and in the case of women, this means a great deal of internalized oppression." (PLEASE checkout her interpretation of Jung's famous 'Descent' into 'Hades'!)


In part 1 of this article, I wrote how I’d been trying to learn more about James Hillman who is known as post-Jungian. From what I had read from Hillman online, some things I clicked with, such as and his sense that we do not have Imagination, but live in Imagination, as do all other species, and nature, and some other ideas I didn’t, for example his promotion of patriarchal Greek Olympian polytheistic gods as main archetypes, etc. But I had been particularly interested in trying to find what he had written about psychedelics, and their relationship with mythology, (because like Jung, Hillman sets great stock in understanding the importance of mythic archetypes, and surely to go into that you must be aware of them being connected with psychedelic fungi, plants, etc) ,as well as his ideas about the new resurgence of psychedelic therapies, and so on.


Sincethen, I found a review of Hillman’s book, The Dream and the Underworld

Jung would not have known about psychedelics centrality in the formation of, and initiated ritual in, the Judaic-Christian religion as far as I'm aware.

It also seems strange the most notable post Jungian doesn't seem to either, nor see the significance of psychedelic experience!

..."Such dark rhetoric, like that of Norman O. Brown, often seems at odds with the rather cerebral and conservative personal style of Hillman himself. This tension in these radical thinkers whose teen years fell long before the eruptions of the 1960s I find fascinating. But it’s not just a case of tension between behavioural style and intellectual commitments; central to Hillman’s (and Brown’s) view is the fight against literalism. While their rejection of psychedelics and shamanic revelry is a little out of synch with contemporary culture, their stern reminders that literally, overtly wild behaviours can repress the subtleties of the unconscious as much as their prohibition, are interesting foils to common counter-culture wisdom.

Pagans will surely be as challenged as me in grappling with Hillman’s railing against the “materialism” of heathen symbolism. He rejects the use of nature-based metaphors for approaching the dream, insisting on the dream’s location in Hades: not the earthy, dark underground of fertility and regeneration, but the cold, airy, liminal underworld of insubstantial shadows."


Hillman seems to have a fixation with Classical Greece including its philosophers of which he thinks himself sharing this 'priveleged' lineage. On one hand he intellctualizes the importance of mythological archetypes--calling his post-Jungianism, 'Archetypal Psychology'--and chooses the patriarchal Classical Greek pantheon of Olympic gods as being the best archetypes for the 'western mindset', and will insist the 'Underworld' is the Classical Greek description of Hades. The same male god, Hades, who rapes Persephone (Goddess) -- "rape", of course, being a sure indicator the patriarchy is coopting and subverting the more ancient myth of the Goddess -- and abducts her to 'his' abode; the male god expropriating the Goddess' Womb, originally the source of connectiveness, and regeneration, (as he does her Fruit) but in his split-off soulless mindset conceives of it as 'cold', with 'insubstantial' shadows", just like his mindset. Cut off from his body and nature.

The Goddess was the 'Underworld', theWomb, and could come and go as she pleased, and would not be abused and abducted, and captured there!



Persephone and Demeter adore the Sacred Mushroom, from the temple wall at Eleusis, c. 450 BC


If one cares to research what the name, Persephone, means, you may find:

"Gender: Feminine

Usage: Greek Mythology

Other Scripts: Περσεφονη (Ancient Greek)

Pronounced: pər-SEF-ə-nee (English) [key]

Meaning unknown, perhaps related to Greek περθω (pertho) "to destroy" and φονη (phone) "murder". In Greek myth she was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus. She was abducted to the underworld by Hades, but was eventually allowed to return to the surface for part of the year. The result of her comings and goings is the changing of the seasons."

Notice the negative-sounding speculations,. "destroy" and "murder"!

A far more plausible meaning of Persophone's name was discovered by a Philologist, John Allegro, in his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross he reveals:

"The myth of the dying and rising god is variously treated within the mushroom cycle. One of the best-known stories is that of Persophone/Kore, her mother Demeter, and the wicked uncle Pluto. The beautiful virgin who is the heroine of the tale presents in her double name the equivalent of the effeminate male Hermaphodite. Her two names can now be seen as two aspects of the mushroom. Persophone being the volva (Sumerian *BAR-SIB-U-NI, "container of the penis of fecundity") and Kore the stem of "phallus" *GU-RI, as in the storm-god's name, *USh-GU-RI[ISKUR]).
Put in other fungus folk-lore term, Kore is the charmed and erect "serpent", thrusting open the egg of Persephone...." (Allegro ibid)

So Persophone/Kore is the actual sacred mushroom, as most of the goddess and gods in essence are!
The polytheist gods more closest to the Goddess, hence nature, are the ones that have animal and plant attributes, which mean they are inclusive of the whole of nature, interspecies, but the patriarchal polytheist gods of Classical Greece become 'superhuman' and distant and aloof on the pyramidial Mountain, and they assert only they are the 'immortals' and us 'peasants' below become the 'mortals', and the patriarchal writers behind this theocracy make it so there is a terrible 'sin' done when the mortal desires to cross the 'gulf' to immortality which is termed 'hubris'; with mono~theism we get the mono-god who warns of the same threat to Adam:

Genesis 3:22: And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.






But, knowing and hearing the deeper song, these Fruits bring the celebrant into contact with the gods, directly.

'You' are
possessed by the very god/dess of nature.

You
are nature!

Nature
loving its being in ecstasy~~~