"It doesn’t actually matter what people say about their trips: How many glamorous deities or entities they meet, how much healing they say they have done, and so on. What matters is how people act, over the long term, after their experiences. Are they kinder, more responsible, more generous, more caring? Do they make wiser decisions for the sake of their community and the Earth as a whole?" As simple as this realization is, yet is is also absolutely essential, absolutely important to remember. And in its simplicity, it offers a perfect standard for measuring "success" on either the personal or the collective level. Thank you for another wonderful and timely exploration of an important topic!
1980. First and last LSD trip ever. Purple micro dot from Sandoz on little sheets of wax paper. Two hits. Tripped for 2 days. I touched the sky, talked to my cats telepathically, hallucinated, heard the grass in the park grow. Heard every sound in the universe. Laughed my ass off. Made love to my boyfriend. Walked home in the summer rain and watched the sidewalks melt into the sewers. Came home at the crack of dawn and wrote backward in my journal in French. It was the most amazing and terrifying experience ever. I was able to stop the trip by chanting "normal" as if it were a command. I learned so much about the "powers of perception" and how much we do as humans to fully limit our senses. I became more sensitive to color and sound. My sense of aesthetics increased. I became more curious about the world and wanted to see and experience as much as I could.
I remember watching a rerun of Woodstock shortly thereafter at a 1920s style movie house with a gigantic screen and watching the scene where some yoga practitioner was telling some hung over hippies that if they learned the proper use of pranayama that they would be able to get high without the drugs. I vowed to learn about and practice yoga and did so on my own throughout my 20s. The Reagan era of the 1980s was not the best time to practice yoga in the midwest. Far too many people were making it some sort of fitness fad, like aerobics, completely divorcing it from the spiritual dimension. The only guru I could find was the yoga teacher at the Y who told me to read Iyengar. Also I could not eat meat for years after that. I more of a flexitarian now, because I had anemia in my 30s, but I really detest cooking meat to this day. I became so much more sensitive to the environment. And I swear, as God as my witness that I still have flashes of insight aka flashbacks, every now and then, especially after regular meditating.
But. I will never, ever, ever do that again in this lifetime. I am grateful for the experience because later that year a Christmas party the host had served brownies that were laced with MDA (when I told it was just pot) and when I got on the train heading home it hit me. But because I had already tripped before, so I was able to navigate MDA's grip on my reality, and so when I got off at my stop and started walking home I started chanting "normal, normal, normal." I got home safely and slept it off. But after this 2nd experience, I vowed to myself that I would never ever ever take a drug that would control my mind like that intentionally for fun or even awakening. Even now, I am reluctant to take drugs for psychic pain. I allow the pain to teach me what I need to know, and will only allow myself the drug if it promotes healing.
And that's my point. I don't think drugs this powerful should be used in a recreational fashion. I've seen people abuse hallucingens back then, and they've never returned from their trips, or worse (in my opinion, at least) they turned to other drugs like heroin and cocaine. All of those friends died before they age of 40. Not one from an overdose mind you, but from the behaviors that their addictions drew them into. One friend took up prostitution to fund her crack cocaine addition, and ended up dying at 36 from Hep C. Several others got HIV. I knew at least five people in my social circle who died of HIV before they turned 30. I would argue that a lot of my male friends, who were tentatively out of the closet, who contracted HIV did so because they had to lose their inhibitions in order to freely experience their gay and bisexuality in an era, when it was not okay to be gay.
In a casual social circle of about 40 people, only a handful of us made it to our 50s and beyond. Everyone else is dead, or battling serious mental illness.
So maybe it's because of this lived experience that I am truly concerned about the potential for psychedelics to be abused because so often (at least in my experience) I've seen it mask unhidden and unhealed trauma and other psychic wounding. I have seen so much damage done when this happens.
Still, all that being said, I don't want to ever deny people the possibility of the transformation and expansion of consciousness using psychedelics. I do not regret my experience at all. But as I vaguely recall from reading Aldous Huxley's book Through the Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, I came to a similar conclusion: that while my trip was wild, life altering, I really got all that I needed from it and had no desire to travel that way again. In short, one trip was enough for me.
My concern is that we take these experiences too casually, and without reverence and intention, one more thing to abuse and commercialize. And of course, that's exactly what seems to be happening.
This was a fantastic perspective and recounts an experience I can in part relate to also. My curiousity into the natural world especially has sparked in new ways since my psychedelic adventures but also drawn me now more to paths like Steiner's (as Daniel talks often about!) The patient paths of preparation -- sparked by the knowledge of what is possible. Mystical experiences have felt accessible to me since about the age of 14 however and I have to be careful that I don't start equating moments of awakening with substances, remembering they are portals to our potential -- but gifts to be stewarded responsibly (not in the dull sense of the word -- but in the magical sense, faculties that reflect the Divine and are worthy of our reverence as you say). Enjoyed your insight!
Good point. I believe that a culture - perhaps particularly men - needs the concept of a distant frontier, a revelation or vision of potential that goes beyond the basics of having a decent life, being a good parent/caregiver/gardener. There are also different subsets of a society - different kinds of people, some who are content with a more basic good life but some who need to push to the edge.
So for those who need to push to the edge, where are they pushing? Are they rewarded for exploiting and amassing huge fortunes as is the case now? Or for something else, like attaining deep levels of psychic ability and courage / nobility / generosity?
It is boring to go back to basics, but seems to be lost since it’s not a part of public education or common sense. Can build on a study foundation without getting stuck there
Until we come down to earth to root healthfully in embodiment, living fully in our bodies, listening to the feedback there, we can’t build scaffolds in the clouds.
We are often overly focused on the self-improvement game, at the expense of pursuing other worthy paths, such as completing 'what is mine to do.' Psychedelics can help us tune into this deeper calling, but only if we find proper ways to integrate the insights gained from such experiences. Thank you again, Daniel, for highlighting this important point.
Commenting on comments feature is still broken. This is a response to Robert Forte: "Hi Robert, I feel it is best with you to avoid discussing many of your "ideas", but i really do not like this attack on Rick Doblin. I have spent a good deal of time with Rick over the years and I know his goal was never personal enrichment. I have rarely seen anyone as self-sacrificing and focused on a larger cause and mission. I find it sad that when someone steps up into that kind of leadership role in the alternative community, they often receive intense attacks and attempts to take them down, which come from a deviant place in people's (anti-authoritarian / rebel) psychology. I experienced the same thing when I was literally giving myself with painful selflessness to build Evolver, not even continuing my successful literary career or promoting myself because I felt we needed a movement, and kept getting attacked and undermined even so. This is really "Why we can't have nice things" and a big reason the Right Wing continues to triumph because they don't self-cannibilize their own movements by taking down their leaders. This is not to say Doblin is perfect, like everyone (you for instance) he has flaws, but I do not like the way you smear him and I know you are just wrong. "
I just watched the Salvia video I think you reference... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlC3DrT6TLk ... It is sweet at the end when he reads a letter of apology to the "Salvia gods." I didn't find this entirely ironic. I find it fascinating that Hamilton can have such transcendent experiences yet maintain entirely a reductive scientific worldview. I know him a bit and will discuss this with him.
Thank you for this, Daniel. I really don’t want to assume the worst intentions about anyone, and I’m operating on memory. I did rewatch the “apology to the gods” segment and it does seem clear to me that it was done with the best of intentions but just became what it was due to the probability that the comedian in question isn’t accustomed to doing psychedelics as spiritual ceremony. I confess I do feel a considerable degree of discomfort seeing Hamilton receiving a ceremony like he did from a traditional healer who is contacting spirit and ancestors for him. I remember her saying “show him, show him” during the ceremony. We are in a strange conundrum!
I believe Shane Mauss is also holding fast to the materialist mode even with his extensive psychonautic experiences. It’s hard for me to imagine too. But I will say that my shift from materialism to spiritualism was unbelievably harrowing and you could say I was dragged kicking and screaming. Materialism is a comfort zone I simply can’t be in anymore. So I have a ton of compassion and sympathy for anyone who sticks around the old haunt (Eat at Sagan’s!).
Shane’s show was still quite entertaining- he may have managed to piss off a little bit of everyone in the broad psychedelic community attending his show and still be funny. But I think I am still looking for the psychedelic comedian who comes at it from the spiritual side.
I realize you are being provocative and probably know this, but many do not, that there exists a fairly significant network of guides (true, a minority) who take seriously the existence of spirit beings and hold strong intentions to dedicate the work to the well being of the whole web of life.
I think a lot of us have fallen into that trap somewhere along the way, of thinking, “this will awaken us, reveal we are one, this can solve the deepest wrongs in our world.”
And then we learn that a conscience-free psychopath, given psilocybin, only expands the possibilities of their mind to conjure novel means to manipulate and use people for their own selfish gain.
It feels to me like our falling civilization is an absolute feast for whatever demons and spiritual scavengers are swarming like sharks and circling like vultures. Imagine all the sated crows in the back alley dumpster cornucopia we have made.
I recall a woman mazateca healer in a vice documentary being told that people in our society were smoking salvia extract and sharing the videos online for laughs. Her response was grave, and she responded by explaining (paraphrased from memory) that when the creator gave this plant to the world, the foundations of the cosmos rattled. And then (perhaps as the main cheeseburger and fries course) the host Hamilton, a materialist psychonaut, seemed to really get off during a traditional salvia ceremony she facilitated for him (I hope I am wrong but it sure appeared he was in it for a tasty trip). As a little ice cream cone dessert with a mini apple pie, the episode featured a comedian, who had gone viral with his funny salvia trip videos, apologizing to the salvia gods by just doing another one of his funny salvia trip videos.
This is where we have arrived. I don’t know if the pillars of creation are rattling at the moment; but I do know the crows are gorging on all we are throwing away.
I think there are hopeful tipping points happening too though. I listened to this podcast called “The Telepathy Tapes” and learned that recent advances in communication methods for non-verbal autistic savants have been revealing that among their varied savant abilities is telepathy: in a remarkably consistent, easily testable, and endlessly repeatable way. Experience on a nonlocal astral plane seems to be their default relaxed mode. Might they be our teachers soon? It is interesting - Just as democracies are falling and earth systems are converging on collapse, new doors are also being flung open to the non-material conscious realm.
Can a psychedelic movement arise without gurus, with care and respect, without overindulgence, as a mechanism to learn and work together to re-synchronize with the earth and the spirits of the “good road”? This will have to happen in parallel with (or perpendicular to?) the enormous for-profit psychedelic industry, whose guilded doors are also swinging open, and whose dumpsters will be noisy with overfed crows.
Thank you, this is a crucial point to make as we head deep into this territory. I can’t see the making of psychedelics mainstream a positive thing at this point. “Beware of unearned wisdom”
again i want to thank you for a provocative essay. not sure i have the patience to get into all the specifics that race through my mind as i read it. it is an error, i believe, to call it 'the psychedelic movement,' as i have said in many recent podcasts. yes, there is one group of drugs that we can mostly agree are 'psychedelics,' but these drugs are used by wildly different groups of people with completely different agendas. the psychedelic movement that i tried to revive in the early 1980s is very different from the psychedelic movement the CIA started in the 1950s. What Doblin set out to do (get richer) is vastly different from what Terence tried to lead. Earlier leaders, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert, though often lumped together, were vastly different personalities with completely different reasons for using psychedelics. Tim, anti authoritarian, from a economically poor family wanted to fundamentally change society. Obedient Richard, from a very wealthy family, just wanted everyone to get along. Hell, Leary, the most well known activist, is impossible to categorize. He went from government asset to government antagonist in the space of ten years. So really it is better to paint this picture with a finer brush. we should say 'psychedelic movementS. because psychedelics are like religion, or like sex. some people use them for (pitiful, pathetic) egotistical, political, or economic reasons. some use them to privately commune with the most joyful, profound mysteries of existence....
Eastern Orthodox monks reach these levels of attainment using only fasting and prayer/meditation as well, and still alive today. Many uncorrupt bodies and other science defying occurrences. There are many churches in your area if you wanted to check it out. Esoteric and exoteric
I worked with a fellow that had a fondness for 'Norwegian Black Heavy Metal Music' He told me there were right wing fascist cults in Norway that regularly used LSD in ceremonial rituals.
It was my good luck to find myself in Dodge City Laguna Beach with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love shortly after my 18th birthday in 1967 where I learned how to 'high-dose' (minimum 500 mic) practice Hatha Yoga, and eat according to macrobiotic principles. On Easter Sunday, 1968, I ingested a couple of SPOFA doses at a love-in at Tapia Park in Malibu, resulting in a Kundalini Awakening (bordering on a Kundalin Emergency). I split Laguna and moved into an artists' commune in Pasadena. ... with mixed results.
re: Steiner ... A fellow named Mak Stahlman put forth the proposition that Steiner and Albert Hoffman were in cahoots to produce a substance quite like LSD ...
from a long and rather disjointed article ...
"Recordings of the 1976 radio interview are available in the National Library of Australia, under the title "Culture and Counterculture". Presumably anyone with access to the National Library of Australia can find it here -- http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/17557015?selectedversion=NBD6834818
Excerpts of the interview were published in 1977 in a book titled "Beyond the Mechanical Mind: An investigation by Peter Fry and Malcolm Long based on the ABC radio series '. . . And Something Else is Happening Here.'"
On page 101-102 Harman is quoted as saying, "The story really starts way back in 1935 with a group of followers of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner who lived in a village in Southern Germany. In 1935 a dark cloud was over Europe so the members of this group set out very deliberately to synthesize chemicals which were like the natural vegetable substances which they were well aware had been used in all the world's major religious traditions down through the centuries. By 1938 they had synthesized psilocybin, LSD and about thirty other drugs. Then they stopped to think about the consequences of letting all of this loose, and decided against it. They decided that they were not sure what the negative effects of the drugs would be and that it just wasn't a very wise thing to do. Five years later, in 1943, when Europe was really in bad shape, they decided apparently that the possible negative consequences were nothing compared to the consequences of not doing this. Now, two members of this group, which lived in a very tight religious community, were in the Sandoz chemical company -- that's partly how this project came to be. One of them was the chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann. He cooked up the newspaper story, that everyone has heard by now, about the accidental ingestion of the LSD and the realization of what its properties were after an amazing bicycle ride home and the visions and so on . . . "
Steiner passed away in 1925 so I doubt he was in cahoots with Albert Hoffman. The tapes / transcripts sound interesting, perhaps a bit tangential. As I noted, Steiner would have been against psychedelic use, I suspect.
I remembered it incorrectly. Shortly following the comment I scrolled through the article and notice it was written "... ... The story really starts way back in 1935 with a group of followers of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner who lived in a village in Southern Germany. ... ..." followers. It is in the quote from Willis Harman.
"At SRI, Harman recruited Alfred Matthew Hubbard to the Alternative Futures Project, one of the goals of which was to introduce business and thought leaders to LSD.[9][13] " wikipedia
These two excerpts from “The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer” may be relevant. The essay grew from the notes I took during a discussion at a 2011 Evolver Boston meeting about the challenge of defining a “psychedelic ethics.” Unlike many members of the group, I expected things to get darker, and I didn’t have much faith that consciousness would be transformed on a global scale, at least not in terms of any literalized leap into the noosphere. I viewed the possibilities of transformation through the lens of my experiences with Kundalini Yoga, which led me to see things more in terms of a “descent” than a “transcendence.” Whatever transformation might be possible had already occurred, not once but many times, in previous cultures and on other levels. However pressing the need for practical action, we couldn’t move too directly into some idealized vision of the future, not without first remembering the twists and turns of where we’d been. This would demand that we reach down and back to a vaster state of awareness at the same time that we cultivate a sense of the complex forces massed against us—in relation to which we are not mere innocent observers.
Two excerpts:
The emptiness that is space shows no sign of disturbance. Space is, for there is no way for it not to be, yet no line divides what is from the depths of the nonexistent. In this next to nothing, there is resonance; there is the hum of every incantation from past worlds. Each terror is an egg in the hand of a blind magician. Each neurotransmitter is a key that fits the lock of a missing door. Once, the Kundalini hid its teachings inside forms, as a test of whose skill in camouflage they served and from whose potency they had been created. We must later on help to free these teachings from their forms. We must break the Sumerian seal turns us back from the catastrophic depths of our own breathing.
Having once been set in motion, the Kundalini stirs up and expels a volcanic flux of images, as it burns through every obstacle in its path. It rips continents like sheets of paper. It dismantles the prosthetic bodies of the gods. It unravels all of the complexes that defend us from our fears, leaving no means by which blessing can be sorted from disaster. It expunges every trace of the antediluvian records, all arts and sciences, yet without even a small detail being lost. “But why is this necessary?” you might justifiably ask. It is possible that it does things just to show us that it can. It is possible that the Kundalini simply likes to play. Or, alternately, it is possible that our childhood is over, and that, finding ourselves cold and naked on the coast of a dead ocean, we must figure out how to grow up.
Tertullian writes, “I believe in the Resurrection because it is impossible.” So too, at the tail-end of the Kali Yuga, if access to our first mode of vision would now seem to us impossible, it is for this reason that we must treat our abandonment as a test. Good vision may depend on our having nothing to lose, no cause to advance, no belief whose planks have not been shattered by a storm. At some point, cooling down, upon finding that there are no laws left to violate, the Kundalini may become much nicer than it was. Then, as smoothly as a bell tone through the zodiac or as the arcing of a current through the ocean, it will move on to its predetermined end. Each atom will have 108 eyes.
We do not always have to be picked up and transported to view one dimension through the wide eyes of another. A state of clarity will sometimes to the trick. To be present may be to calmly view the day we died, a day that has not yet occurred. To be present may be to sense how our shadows too cast shadows, city upon city, length upon darkening length. To be present may be to grasp the pregnant weight of the unspoken, to internalize the demands of those who do not yet exist, to recall the thousands of perfect poems that no human will ever write. To be present may be to be present in all the places we have breathed, to remove our metaphysical chastity belts, to breathe according to the rhythm of our tasks, no faster and no slower.
To cross from what we know to what we do not know we know, we may not, in fact, have to move from where we are. A state of clarity will sometimes do the trick. Then again, to directly perceive the shifting structure of the cosmos may be to taste the most potent of entheogens. One’s vantage point becomes mercurial, no more solid than the drip of Soma on one’s tongue.
__
In the end, it is predictable that any prophesy will fail, for the omniverse is far more contradictory than a clock. And, though we can envision this omniverse as a being with two hands, it is in no way obligated to use just the hands that we can see. Then too, of necessity, some chaos must always be added to the mix. In order to get from where we are to the sphere we once inhabited, we must set foot on a path that does not exist, in those bodies that we threw so carelessly about. What we once saw, we must see. We must excavate our ears. We must learn to pronounce the words we spoke and dare to follow the instructions that we left. We must harness the explosive power of the zero. With our small flutes, we must challenge the bone orchestras of the Empire.
Wow. Mind kinda momentarily blown open with all this right here. Also sounds like a book I need to pick up! And the descent over transcendence (or descent as a kind of transcendence) feels very profound and maybe not explored enough with all the emphasis around being "high" and awakening and moving upward into higher realms. This same idea feels perhaps relevant to the Christ teaching/symbolism too — the journey downward. I liked the parts about inherent resonance in silence (I write a lot about this and how I experience it as a musician) and this part too: "Harnessing the explosive power of the zero too." Thank you for sharing all this!
"It doesn’t actually matter what people say about their trips: How many glamorous deities or entities they meet, how much healing they say they have done, and so on. What matters is how people act, over the long term, after their experiences. Are they kinder, more responsible, more generous, more caring? Do they make wiser decisions for the sake of their community and the Earth as a whole?" As simple as this realization is, yet is is also absolutely essential, absolutely important to remember. And in its simplicity, it offers a perfect standard for measuring "success" on either the personal or the collective level. Thank you for another wonderful and timely exploration of an important topic!
Thank you Lee! You are most welcome.
1980. First and last LSD trip ever. Purple micro dot from Sandoz on little sheets of wax paper. Two hits. Tripped for 2 days. I touched the sky, talked to my cats telepathically, hallucinated, heard the grass in the park grow. Heard every sound in the universe. Laughed my ass off. Made love to my boyfriend. Walked home in the summer rain and watched the sidewalks melt into the sewers. Came home at the crack of dawn and wrote backward in my journal in French. It was the most amazing and terrifying experience ever. I was able to stop the trip by chanting "normal" as if it were a command. I learned so much about the "powers of perception" and how much we do as humans to fully limit our senses. I became more sensitive to color and sound. My sense of aesthetics increased. I became more curious about the world and wanted to see and experience as much as I could.
I remember watching a rerun of Woodstock shortly thereafter at a 1920s style movie house with a gigantic screen and watching the scene where some yoga practitioner was telling some hung over hippies that if they learned the proper use of pranayama that they would be able to get high without the drugs. I vowed to learn about and practice yoga and did so on my own throughout my 20s. The Reagan era of the 1980s was not the best time to practice yoga in the midwest. Far too many people were making it some sort of fitness fad, like aerobics, completely divorcing it from the spiritual dimension. The only guru I could find was the yoga teacher at the Y who told me to read Iyengar. Also I could not eat meat for years after that. I more of a flexitarian now, because I had anemia in my 30s, but I really detest cooking meat to this day. I became so much more sensitive to the environment. And I swear, as God as my witness that I still have flashes of insight aka flashbacks, every now and then, especially after regular meditating.
But. I will never, ever, ever do that again in this lifetime. I am grateful for the experience because later that year a Christmas party the host had served brownies that were laced with MDA (when I told it was just pot) and when I got on the train heading home it hit me. But because I had already tripped before, so I was able to navigate MDA's grip on my reality, and so when I got off at my stop and started walking home I started chanting "normal, normal, normal." I got home safely and slept it off. But after this 2nd experience, I vowed to myself that I would never ever ever take a drug that would control my mind like that intentionally for fun or even awakening. Even now, I am reluctant to take drugs for psychic pain. I allow the pain to teach me what I need to know, and will only allow myself the drug if it promotes healing.
And that's my point. I don't think drugs this powerful should be used in a recreational fashion. I've seen people abuse hallucingens back then, and they've never returned from their trips, or worse (in my opinion, at least) they turned to other drugs like heroin and cocaine. All of those friends died before they age of 40. Not one from an overdose mind you, but from the behaviors that their addictions drew them into. One friend took up prostitution to fund her crack cocaine addition, and ended up dying at 36 from Hep C. Several others got HIV. I knew at least five people in my social circle who died of HIV before they turned 30. I would argue that a lot of my male friends, who were tentatively out of the closet, who contracted HIV did so because they had to lose their inhibitions in order to freely experience their gay and bisexuality in an era, when it was not okay to be gay.
In a casual social circle of about 40 people, only a handful of us made it to our 50s and beyond. Everyone else is dead, or battling serious mental illness.
So maybe it's because of this lived experience that I am truly concerned about the potential for psychedelics to be abused because so often (at least in my experience) I've seen it mask unhidden and unhealed trauma and other psychic wounding. I have seen so much damage done when this happens.
Still, all that being said, I don't want to ever deny people the possibility of the transformation and expansion of consciousness using psychedelics. I do not regret my experience at all. But as I vaguely recall from reading Aldous Huxley's book Through the Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, I came to a similar conclusion: that while my trip was wild, life altering, I really got all that I needed from it and had no desire to travel that way again. In short, one trip was enough for me.
My concern is that we take these experiences too casually, and without reverence and intention, one more thing to abuse and commercialize. And of course, that's exactly what seems to be happening.
Deja vu all over again.
This was a fantastic perspective and recounts an experience I can in part relate to also. My curiousity into the natural world especially has sparked in new ways since my psychedelic adventures but also drawn me now more to paths like Steiner's (as Daniel talks often about!) The patient paths of preparation -- sparked by the knowledge of what is possible. Mystical experiences have felt accessible to me since about the age of 14 however and I have to be careful that I don't start equating moments of awakening with substances, remembering they are portals to our potential -- but gifts to be stewarded responsibly (not in the dull sense of the word -- but in the magical sense, faculties that reflect the Divine and are worthy of our reverence as you say). Enjoyed your insight!
Why shoot for Tukdam when we could maybe just get people to clean up after their damn selves? (Micro to macro) as the body, the mind, the earth.
Good point. I believe that a culture - perhaps particularly men - needs the concept of a distant frontier, a revelation or vision of potential that goes beyond the basics of having a decent life, being a good parent/caregiver/gardener. There are also different subsets of a society - different kinds of people, some who are content with a more basic good life but some who need to push to the edge.
So for those who need to push to the edge, where are they pushing? Are they rewarded for exploiting and amassing huge fortunes as is the case now? Or for something else, like attaining deep levels of psychic ability and courage / nobility / generosity?
Feel like Steiner presents a path that marries these two things so profoundly and practically...!
It is boring to go back to basics, but seems to be lost since it’s not a part of public education or common sense. Can build on a study foundation without getting stuck there
Spoken like a true mother! 😉 Let's have both transcendence and groundedness, because we can.
Until we come down to earth to root healthfully in embodiment, living fully in our bodies, listening to the feedback there, we can’t build scaffolds in the clouds.
Poor food and drink as a habit bring weakness, invite madness, enter(con)tainment locks it in place
We are often overly focused on the self-improvement game, at the expense of pursuing other worthy paths, such as completing 'what is mine to do.' Psychedelics can help us tune into this deeper calling, but only if we find proper ways to integrate the insights gained from such experiences. Thank you again, Daniel, for highlighting this important point.
Commenting on comments feature is still broken. This is a response to Robert Forte: "Hi Robert, I feel it is best with you to avoid discussing many of your "ideas", but i really do not like this attack on Rick Doblin. I have spent a good deal of time with Rick over the years and I know his goal was never personal enrichment. I have rarely seen anyone as self-sacrificing and focused on a larger cause and mission. I find it sad that when someone steps up into that kind of leadership role in the alternative community, they often receive intense attacks and attempts to take them down, which come from a deviant place in people's (anti-authoritarian / rebel) psychology. I experienced the same thing when I was literally giving myself with painful selflessness to build Evolver, not even continuing my successful literary career or promoting myself because I felt we needed a movement, and kept getting attacked and undermined even so. This is really "Why we can't have nice things" and a big reason the Right Wing continues to triumph because they don't self-cannibilize their own movements by taking down their leaders. This is not to say Doblin is perfect, like everyone (you for instance) he has flaws, but I do not like the way you smear him and I know you are just wrong. "
Reply to Thom Stitt: Great comment, thank you!
I just watched the Salvia video I think you reference... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlC3DrT6TLk ... It is sweet at the end when he reads a letter of apology to the "Salvia gods." I didn't find this entirely ironic. I find it fascinating that Hamilton can have such transcendent experiences yet maintain entirely a reductive scientific worldview. I know him a bit and will discuss this with him.
Thank you for this, Daniel. I really don’t want to assume the worst intentions about anyone, and I’m operating on memory. I did rewatch the “apology to the gods” segment and it does seem clear to me that it was done with the best of intentions but just became what it was due to the probability that the comedian in question isn’t accustomed to doing psychedelics as spiritual ceremony. I confess I do feel a considerable degree of discomfort seeing Hamilton receiving a ceremony like he did from a traditional healer who is contacting spirit and ancestors for him. I remember her saying “show him, show him” during the ceremony. We are in a strange conundrum!
I believe Shane Mauss is also holding fast to the materialist mode even with his extensive psychonautic experiences. It’s hard for me to imagine too. But I will say that my shift from materialism to spiritualism was unbelievably harrowing and you could say I was dragged kicking and screaming. Materialism is a comfort zone I simply can’t be in anymore. So I have a ton of compassion and sympathy for anyone who sticks around the old haunt (Eat at Sagan’s!).
Shane’s show was still quite entertaining- he may have managed to piss off a little bit of everyone in the broad psychedelic community attending his show and still be funny. But I think I am still looking for the psychedelic comedian who comes at it from the spiritual side.
I realize you are being provocative and probably know this, but many do not, that there exists a fairly significant network of guides (true, a minority) who take seriously the existence of spirit beings and hold strong intentions to dedicate the work to the well being of the whole web of life.
there are some, yes.
I think a lot of us have fallen into that trap somewhere along the way, of thinking, “this will awaken us, reveal we are one, this can solve the deepest wrongs in our world.”
And then we learn that a conscience-free psychopath, given psilocybin, only expands the possibilities of their mind to conjure novel means to manipulate and use people for their own selfish gain.
It feels to me like our falling civilization is an absolute feast for whatever demons and spiritual scavengers are swarming like sharks and circling like vultures. Imagine all the sated crows in the back alley dumpster cornucopia we have made.
I recall a woman mazateca healer in a vice documentary being told that people in our society were smoking salvia extract and sharing the videos online for laughs. Her response was grave, and she responded by explaining (paraphrased from memory) that when the creator gave this plant to the world, the foundations of the cosmos rattled. And then (perhaps as the main cheeseburger and fries course) the host Hamilton, a materialist psychonaut, seemed to really get off during a traditional salvia ceremony she facilitated for him (I hope I am wrong but it sure appeared he was in it for a tasty trip). As a little ice cream cone dessert with a mini apple pie, the episode featured a comedian, who had gone viral with his funny salvia trip videos, apologizing to the salvia gods by just doing another one of his funny salvia trip videos.
This is where we have arrived. I don’t know if the pillars of creation are rattling at the moment; but I do know the crows are gorging on all we are throwing away.
I think there are hopeful tipping points happening too though. I listened to this podcast called “The Telepathy Tapes” and learned that recent advances in communication methods for non-verbal autistic savants have been revealing that among their varied savant abilities is telepathy: in a remarkably consistent, easily testable, and endlessly repeatable way. Experience on a nonlocal astral plane seems to be their default relaxed mode. Might they be our teachers soon? It is interesting - Just as democracies are falling and earth systems are converging on collapse, new doors are also being flung open to the non-material conscious realm.
Can a psychedelic movement arise without gurus, with care and respect, without overindulgence, as a mechanism to learn and work together to re-synchronize with the earth and the spirits of the “good road”? This will have to happen in parallel with (or perpendicular to?) the enormous for-profit psychedelic industry, whose guilded doors are also swinging open, and whose dumpsters will be noisy with overfed crows.
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*gilded
Thank you, this is a crucial point to make as we head deep into this territory. I can’t see the making of psychedelics mainstream a positive thing at this point. “Beware of unearned wisdom”
again i want to thank you for a provocative essay. not sure i have the patience to get into all the specifics that race through my mind as i read it. it is an error, i believe, to call it 'the psychedelic movement,' as i have said in many recent podcasts. yes, there is one group of drugs that we can mostly agree are 'psychedelics,' but these drugs are used by wildly different groups of people with completely different agendas. the psychedelic movement that i tried to revive in the early 1980s is very different from the psychedelic movement the CIA started in the 1950s. What Doblin set out to do (get richer) is vastly different from what Terence tried to lead. Earlier leaders, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert, though often lumped together, were vastly different personalities with completely different reasons for using psychedelics. Tim, anti authoritarian, from a economically poor family wanted to fundamentally change society. Obedient Richard, from a very wealthy family, just wanted everyone to get along. Hell, Leary, the most well known activist, is impossible to categorize. He went from government asset to government antagonist in the space of ten years. So really it is better to paint this picture with a finer brush. we should say 'psychedelic movementS. because psychedelics are like religion, or like sex. some people use them for (pitiful, pathetic) egotistical, political, or economic reasons. some use them to privately commune with the most joyful, profound mysteries of existence....
Responded up top as "comment on comment" feature is still broken
Eastern Orthodox monks reach these levels of attainment using only fasting and prayer/meditation as well, and still alive today. Many uncorrupt bodies and other science defying occurrences. There are many churches in your area if you wanted to check it out. Esoteric and exoteric
links to any evidence of anything like Tukdam?
Here are a few, take from it what you will:
https://orthodox-europe.org/content/st-john-relics/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF0MITog3yw
https://orthochristian.com/91288.html
https://orthodoxyforkids.blogspot.com/2016/06/st-lazar-prince-of-serbia.html
https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2009/08/questions-regarding-postmortem-smile-of.html
A few books on Saints of our age who work miracles:
https://www.amazon.com/Saint-Paisios-Mount-Athos-Hieromonk/dp/9608976456
https://www.amazon.com/Porphyrios-Testimonies-Experiences-Klitos-Joannidis/dp/9606890236/ref=pd_sim_p4?pd_rd_w=YdlzT&content-id=amzn1.sym.8731cf14-a5af-469f-9ca4-1f4799dd0e7c&pf_rd_p=8731cf14-a5af-469f-9ca4-1f4799dd0e7c&pf_rd_r=2W1T42AP91D146ECX40V&pd_rd_wg=XzfPM&pd_rd_r=6af9ac54-1ae2-4f31-8d67-63a71345d467&pd_rd_i=9606890236&psc=1
I worked with a fellow that had a fondness for 'Norwegian Black Heavy Metal Music' He told me there were right wing fascist cults in Norway that regularly used LSD in ceremonial rituals.
It was my good luck to find myself in Dodge City Laguna Beach with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love shortly after my 18th birthday in 1967 where I learned how to 'high-dose' (minimum 500 mic) practice Hatha Yoga, and eat according to macrobiotic principles. On Easter Sunday, 1968, I ingested a couple of SPOFA doses at a love-in at Tapia Park in Malibu, resulting in a Kundalini Awakening (bordering on a Kundalin Emergency). I split Laguna and moved into an artists' commune in Pasadena. ... with mixed results.
re: Steiner ... A fellow named Mak Stahlman put forth the proposition that Steiner and Albert Hoffman were in cahoots to produce a substance quite like LSD ...
from a long and rather disjointed article ...
"Recordings of the 1976 radio interview are available in the National Library of Australia, under the title "Culture and Counterculture". Presumably anyone with access to the National Library of Australia can find it here -- http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/17557015?selectedversion=NBD6834818
Excerpts of the interview were published in 1977 in a book titled "Beyond the Mechanical Mind: An investigation by Peter Fry and Malcolm Long based on the ABC radio series '. . . And Something Else is Happening Here.'"
On page 101-102 Harman is quoted as saying, "The story really starts way back in 1935 with a group of followers of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner who lived in a village in Southern Germany. In 1935 a dark cloud was over Europe so the members of this group set out very deliberately to synthesize chemicals which were like the natural vegetable substances which they were well aware had been used in all the world's major religious traditions down through the centuries. By 1938 they had synthesized psilocybin, LSD and about thirty other drugs. Then they stopped to think about the consequences of letting all of this loose, and decided against it. They decided that they were not sure what the negative effects of the drugs would be and that it just wasn't a very wise thing to do. Five years later, in 1943, when Europe was really in bad shape, they decided apparently that the possible negative consequences were nothing compared to the consequences of not doing this. Now, two members of this group, which lived in a very tight religious community, were in the Sandoz chemical company -- that's partly how this project came to be. One of them was the chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann. He cooked up the newspaper story, that everyone has heard by now, about the accidental ingestion of the LSD and the realization of what its properties were after an amazing bicycle ride home and the visions and so on . . . "
Steiner passed away in 1925 so I doubt he was in cahoots with Albert Hoffman. The tapes / transcripts sound interesting, perhaps a bit tangential. As I noted, Steiner would have been against psychedelic use, I suspect.
I remembered it incorrectly. Shortly following the comment I scrolled through the article and notice it was written "... ... The story really starts way back in 1935 with a group of followers of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner who lived in a village in Southern Germany. ... ..." followers. It is in the quote from Willis Harman.
"At SRI, Harman recruited Alfred Matthew Hubbard to the Alternative Futures Project, one of the goals of which was to introduce business and thought leaders to LSD.[9][13] " wikipedia
These two excerpts from “The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer” may be relevant. The essay grew from the notes I took during a discussion at a 2011 Evolver Boston meeting about the challenge of defining a “psychedelic ethics.” Unlike many members of the group, I expected things to get darker, and I didn’t have much faith that consciousness would be transformed on a global scale, at least not in terms of any literalized leap into the noosphere. I viewed the possibilities of transformation through the lens of my experiences with Kundalini Yoga, which led me to see things more in terms of a “descent” than a “transcendence.” Whatever transformation might be possible had already occurred, not once but many times, in previous cultures and on other levels. However pressing the need for practical action, we couldn’t move too directly into some idealized vision of the future, not without first remembering the twists and turns of where we’d been. This would demand that we reach down and back to a vaster state of awareness at the same time that we cultivate a sense of the complex forces massed against us—in relation to which we are not mere innocent observers.
Two excerpts:
The emptiness that is space shows no sign of disturbance. Space is, for there is no way for it not to be, yet no line divides what is from the depths of the nonexistent. In this next to nothing, there is resonance; there is the hum of every incantation from past worlds. Each terror is an egg in the hand of a blind magician. Each neurotransmitter is a key that fits the lock of a missing door. Once, the Kundalini hid its teachings inside forms, as a test of whose skill in camouflage they served and from whose potency they had been created. We must later on help to free these teachings from their forms. We must break the Sumerian seal turns us back from the catastrophic depths of our own breathing.
Having once been set in motion, the Kundalini stirs up and expels a volcanic flux of images, as it burns through every obstacle in its path. It rips continents like sheets of paper. It dismantles the prosthetic bodies of the gods. It unravels all of the complexes that defend us from our fears, leaving no means by which blessing can be sorted from disaster. It expunges every trace of the antediluvian records, all arts and sciences, yet without even a small detail being lost. “But why is this necessary?” you might justifiably ask. It is possible that it does things just to show us that it can. It is possible that the Kundalini simply likes to play. Or, alternately, it is possible that our childhood is over, and that, finding ourselves cold and naked on the coast of a dead ocean, we must figure out how to grow up.
Tertullian writes, “I believe in the Resurrection because it is impossible.” So too, at the tail-end of the Kali Yuga, if access to our first mode of vision would now seem to us impossible, it is for this reason that we must treat our abandonment as a test. Good vision may depend on our having nothing to lose, no cause to advance, no belief whose planks have not been shattered by a storm. At some point, cooling down, upon finding that there are no laws left to violate, the Kundalini may become much nicer than it was. Then, as smoothly as a bell tone through the zodiac or as the arcing of a current through the ocean, it will move on to its predetermined end. Each atom will have 108 eyes.
We do not always have to be picked up and transported to view one dimension through the wide eyes of another. A state of clarity will sometimes to the trick. To be present may be to calmly view the day we died, a day that has not yet occurred. To be present may be to sense how our shadows too cast shadows, city upon city, length upon darkening length. To be present may be to grasp the pregnant weight of the unspoken, to internalize the demands of those who do not yet exist, to recall the thousands of perfect poems that no human will ever write. To be present may be to be present in all the places we have breathed, to remove our metaphysical chastity belts, to breathe according to the rhythm of our tasks, no faster and no slower.
To cross from what we know to what we do not know we know, we may not, in fact, have to move from where we are. A state of clarity will sometimes do the trick. Then again, to directly perceive the shifting structure of the cosmos may be to taste the most potent of entheogens. One’s vantage point becomes mercurial, no more solid than the drip of Soma on one’s tongue.
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In the end, it is predictable that any prophesy will fail, for the omniverse is far more contradictory than a clock. And, though we can envision this omniverse as a being with two hands, it is in no way obligated to use just the hands that we can see. Then too, of necessity, some chaos must always be added to the mix. In order to get from where we are to the sphere we once inhabited, we must set foot on a path that does not exist, in those bodies that we threw so carelessly about. What we once saw, we must see. We must excavate our ears. We must learn to pronounce the words we spoke and dare to follow the instructions that we left. We must harness the explosive power of the zero. With our small flutes, we must challenge the bone orchestras of the Empire.
Wow. Mind kinda momentarily blown open with all this right here. Also sounds like a book I need to pick up! And the descent over transcendence (or descent as a kind of transcendence) feels very profound and maybe not explored enough with all the emphasis around being "high" and awakening and moving upward into higher realms. This same idea feels perhaps relevant to the Christ teaching/symbolism too — the journey downward. I liked the parts about inherent resonance in silence (I write a lot about this and how I experience it as a musician) and this part too: "Harnessing the explosive power of the zero too." Thank you for sharing all this!