Thursday, June 25, 2009

Crop Circles created by Junkie Wallabies

“High as a kite” wallabies blamed for crop circles
Australian marsupials wreak havoc after munching on opium poppies

From: Associated Press / MSNBC
June 25, 2009

stoned-wallably

SYDNEY, Australia - Wallabies snacking in Tasmania's legally grown opium poppy fields are getting "high as a kite" and hopping around in circles, trampling the crops, a state official said.

Tasmania Attorney-General Lara Giddings told a budget hearing Wednesday that she had recently read about the kangaroo-like marsupials' antics in a brief on the state's large poppy industry. Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

"We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," The Mercury newspaper quoted Giddings as telling the hearing. "Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

Calls to Giddings' office were not immediately returned Thursday, and The Associated Press was unable to obtain a copy of the brief she cited.

'Act weird'
A manager for one of two Tasmanian companies licensed to take medicinal products from poppy straw told the newspaper that wildlife and livestock — including deer and sheep — that eat the poppies are known to "act weird."

"There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles," Tasmanian Alkaloids field operations manager Rick Rockliff said.

Others in the local poppy industry could not be reached for comment.

Tasmania supplies about 50 percent of the world's raw material for morphine and related opiates. About 500 farmers grow the crop on 49,420 acres of land.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Robert Sapolsky: Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality

My friend Paul Vigil recommended this Professor Robert Sapolsky lecture as a follow up to Graham Hancock: Entheogens & Evolution [MP3]. Only this is much more academic and in depth. That's one thing I love about Paul, he always recommends some really advanced and far out literature & video that I probably wouldn't have encountered other wise.

Prof. Robert Sapolsky is an American scientist and author. He is currently professor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University.

Bio 150/250, Spring 2002 Human Behavioral Biology



I. The Biology of Religion. Some opening caveats, disclaimers and fine print.

II. Religion and belief

1. A return to the final question of the schizophrenia lecture

2. Genes and the advantages of intermediate penetrance: sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis....and schizophrenia?

3. The Kety schizophrenia adoption studies: their second discovery, and the continuum of traits.

4. Schizotypal personality disorder: social withdrawal, odd perceptual experiences, a tendency towards concreteness, metamagical belief.

5. Who are the traditional schizotypals?

a. Paul Radin, Erwin Ackerknecht and Paul Devereux: hearing voices at the right time

b. Alfred Kroeber’s elaboration: “Psychosis or Social Sanction.” The common roots of ‘sanction’ and ‘sanctuary.’

c. Western cultures and schizotypalism.

III. Religion and ritualistic practices

1. Obsessive compulsive disordera.

a. Obsessive thoughts: intrusions, blasphemies, and so on.

b. Compulsive rituals: self-cleansing, food preparation, leaving and entering, numerology and symmetryc.

c. Genetic, neuroanatomical and neurochemical hints

2. Ritualism of the religious orthodoxy

3. Hindu Brahmans: hours of daily purification rituals involving cleansing, cyclical nostril breathing, defecation, ratios of handfuls of food from the left versus right hand, rules for entering temples....

4. Orthodox Jewry and the magical combination of 365 prohibitions and 248 requirements: cleansing, food preparation, and the importance of numerology over content.

5. Orthodox Islam: rules for numbers of mouthfuls of water, for entering and leaving a lavatory, for hand washing, and, of course, magical numbers.

6. The rituals of Orthodox Christianity: the magical number 3, the multiplicities of Hail Marys and rosary use down to Lutheran organists advised about dotted rhythms in the Lutheran hymnal

7. Freud: “obsessional neurosis as individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis.”

8. Ignatius Loyola and the 15th century concept of “scrupulosity.”

9. The underlying adaptive value of anxiety reduction

10. Making a living as an obsessive compulsive. An example in a 16th century monk named Luder: “The more you cleanse yourself, the dirtier you get.”

11. Why should OCD and religious rituals have such similar patterns?

a. An ecological explanation

b. A historical explanation

IV. Religion and the attribution of causality

1. Superstitious conditioning in animals

2. Hippocampal damage and increased vulnerability to superstitious conditioning.V. Philosophical religiosity

3. Temporal lobe epilepsy: humorlessness; perseveration; neophobia and a "sticky" or "viscous" personality; hypergraphia; concern with religious issues. Some concluding thoughts: What am I not saying

4. You got to be crazy to be religious

5. That most people’s religiousness is biologically suspect

6. That faith is any more biologically accessible or interesting than is loss of faith

Some further readings: Mark Saltzman, Lying Awake (a superb novel about the religious implications of temporal lobe epilepsy). David S Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral. 2002 Univ. Chicago Press. Religious groups as units of selection. Sapolsky. “Circling the blanket for God.” In: The Trouble With Testosterone’ and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament.

Links:

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Graham Hancock: Entheogens & Evolution [MP3]

Graham Hancock
SUPERNATURAL: Did entheogens make our ancestors human?

Speaker:
Graham Hancock

From:
Shamanic Freedom Radio

Date: May 26, 2009


FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD - PART #1
[58MB]
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FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD - PART #2 [58MB]
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Modern technological societies value only the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, and have demonized trance states brought on by the consumption of psychedelic drugs. But in his book Supernatural, the background to his talk at the October Gallery, Graham Hancock presents staggering new information that experiences induced by plant hallucinogens may have played a vital role in the evolution of our species – opening our ancestors to supernatural realms and making us truly human for the first time. It all happened very recently.
Less than 50,000 years ago mankind had no art, no religion, no sophisticated symbolism, no innovative thinking. Then, in a dramatic and electrifying change, described by scientists as ‘the greatest riddle in human history’, all the skills and qualities that we value most highly in ourselves appeared already fully formed, as though bestowed on us by hidden powers. In his lecture, Graham Hancock sets out to investigate this mysterious ‘before-and-after moment’ and to discover the truth about the influences that shaped the modern human mind. His quest takes him on a journey of adventure and detection from the stunningly beautiful painted caves of prehistoric France, Spain and Italy to remote rock shelters in the mountains of South Africa where he finds a treasure trove of extraordinary Stone Age art.
He uncovers clues that lead him to travel to the depths of the Amazon rainforest to drink the powerful plant hallucinogen Ayahuasca with Indian shamans, whose paintings contain images of ‘supernatural beings’ identical to the animal-human hybrids depicted in prehistoric caves and rock shelters. And Western laboratory volunteers placed experimentally under the influence of hallucinogens such as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD also report visionary encounters with exactly the same beings. Scientists at the cutting edge of consciousness research have begun to consider the possibility that such hallucinations may be real perceptions of other ‘dimensions’.
Could it be that the human brain is not just a generator of consciousness, but also a receiver of consciousness, and could the ‘supernaturals’ first depicted in the painted caves and rock shelters be the ancient teachers of mankind? This new approach strongly suggests that human evolution is not just the ‘blind’, ‘meaningless’ process that Darwin identified, but something else, more purposive and intelligent, that we have barely even begun to understand. By criminalizing and demonizing the consumption of psychedelic drugs it may even be that our societies are blocking off the next vital step in the evolution of our species.
Graham Hancock is the author and coauthor of a number of best-selling investigations of historical mysteries, including Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural, The Sign and the Seal, Keeper of Genesis, Heaven's Mirror, The Mars Mystery, and Underworld. His books have been translated into 27 languages and have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Sacred plants of the Maya forest

Sacred plants of the Maya forest
Matt Walker, Editor
From: BBC Earth News

Incense pot depicting the spines of the Cerbia tree (Ceiba pentandra)

Art depicting life: a Mayan pot inspired by the trunk of a Ceiba tree

Some of the Central American rainforest's hidden treasures are being revealed by the Maya, more than a millennium after their passing.

A study of the giant trees and beautiful flowers depicted in Maya art has identified which they held sacred.

Created during the Maya Classic Period, the depictions are so accurate they could help researchers spot plants with hitherto unknown medicinal uses.

The research is published in the journal Economic Botany.

Plants played a significant role in the ecology, culture and rituals of the Maya people, whose artwork reflected the rich diversity of plant life around them.

But while numerous examples of such artwork exist, few have been studied to see exactly which plants they depict.

So natural historian and archaeologist Charles Zidar of Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis, US, and botanist Wayne Elisens of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, US, decided to find out.

They hope to discover plants of importance to the Maya that are either unknown to modern people, or have since been forgotten.

The Maya have lived and used rainforest plants to heal themselves for thousands of years. We are just beginning to understand some of their secrets

Archaeologist Charles Zadir

The team's first analyses focused on artwork produced within the southern lowland region of the Maya, located in the modern countries of Belize, Guatemala and Mexico.

They examined more than 2,500 images of Maya ceramics created within the Maya Classical Period of AD 250 to 900.

The images are held within an image collection taken by Justin and Barbara Kerr, curated by the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, based in Crystal River, Florida, US.

In particular, the two men searched for depictions of bombacoids, a diverse lineage of trees in the Neotropics characterised by swollen or spiny trunks and big, colorful, conspicuous flowers with long folding petals.

Across different ceramics, Zidar and Elisens found depictions of five species.

"I was surprised that a variety of plants from this family were depicted," says Zidar.

The Maya clearly depicted the cebia tree (Ceiba pentandra) also known as the Silk Cotton or Kapok tree.

Trees of the Ceiba genus can grow up to 50m tall, with swollen trunks producing large buttresses.

Quararibea flowers and a cocao vessel

White blooms on ceramic: Quararibea painted on a cup for drinking chocolate

To the Maya, the ceiba tree was sacred, mapping out the upper, middle and underworlds.

Considered the "first tree", or "world tree", the ceiba was thought to stand at the centre of the Earth. Modern indigenous people still often leave the tree alone out of respect when harvesting forest wood.

The thorny trunks of the ceiba tree are represented by ceramic pots used as burial urns or incense holders, which are designed in a strikingly similar fashion. Two other tree species, the Provision Tree (Pachira aquatica) and the Shaving Bush Tree (Pseudobombax ellipticum) are also copied into the designs of similar pots.

On cacao pots and a plate for holding tamales, made from dough, the Maya drew flowers of either P. ellipticum or P. aquatica. On the cacao pot, the flowers seem to form part of the headdress of a high ranging individual.

Smaller white-flowered blossoms of Quararibea funebris or Q. quatemalteca also appear to adorn another vessel used for cacao drinking. The Maya used this species to flavour and froth cacao beverages so it is appropriate for them to represent the plant on the vessel, says Zidar.

"It was previously thought that only the ceiba tree was of great importance," says Zidar.

Pseudobombax ellipticum flower and cocao pot artwork

A Pseudobombax flower inspires a headdress worn by the Maya elite

"It has amazed me that so many plants are depicted. These plants are not as stylized as previously though, and thus you can name the plant family, genus and even the species."

Zidar is continuing the work, expanding it further to find out which animals as well as plants were considered of high importance by the Maya people. He also hopes the research will unveil secrets known to the Maya that have become lost in time.

"The Maya have lived and used rainforest plants to heal themselves for thousands of years. We are just beginning to understand some of their secrets."

"By determining what plants were of importance to the ancient Maya, it is my hope that identified plants can be further studied for pharmaceutical, culinary, economic and ceremonial uses. More should be done to conserve large tracts of forest in order to properly study theses plants for their value to mankind," he continues.

"This research has already been of interest to pharmaceutical companies that are looking to extract alkaloids from plants that were important to the ancient Maya."

Monday, June 8, 2009

Trippin' with the Dalai Lama

dalai_blotter
Based on a true story

Republished with permission from: Undergrowth magazine
written  by: DSM-V

The fourth method of awakening [i.e. enlightenment] is through the use of specific herbs. In Sanskrit it is called aushadi... knowledge of the herbs is a closely guarded secret. - Swami Satyananda Sarawati, Kundalini Tantra

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the Hindus and probably the Buddhists of earlier days did regard the taking of psychedelic drugs as part of the wide range of sadhanas which led to ecstasy... The mythological and iconographical corollary to this is, apart from the personification of soma as the quintessence of all mind-affecting beverages, the frequent epithet of oiva as the lord of Herbs (Ausadhisvara).  – Agehanada Bharati, The Tantric Tradition

The Dalai Lama story... well, there's not much to it. It might all have been a hallucination really, the eternal play of Lila as if wafts down from the hills of Mount Meru. I am an unreliable narrator at best, dear reader, and you must remember that this was in my psychopuppy stage, when I used to take psychedelics and explore with the Buddhist masters. So Caveat Lector, and don’t try this in your home reality grid.

Anyway, back in '96 when I was caning it on acid I pictured Andrew Cohen, a New York-Bronx Jew who was the famous student of the guru Poonjaji turning into a crypto-lock on the cosmic sex-drive, with a big red button. He was pugnacious, arrogant, and a complete control freak with almost no compassion – so of course I had to control him. You must understand though, that there was never any egoistic motivations. I had to be arrogant to even attempt Satsang on Drugs, but it was research arrogance pure as the driven snow off Mt. Meru. These sessions were never games for amusement. It was all heart-broken dharma desperado with his back against the wall on a planet going to hell in a hand-basket. I meditated with Master Charles, another famous Australian Buddhist, in the late 1990s. All these teachers were caught up in a Satsang-vortex, day in and day out, locked into a pattern. It might be an exquisite pattern, but somewhere on their paths it got to a stage where higher consciousness started to form a barrier around them like an airbag, to stop them going on to the next level of their realization. That's why I liked going to Satsangs on drugs, to get the masters wound up and hallucinating within their Satsang structure.

A Satsang is defined as the “fruit of all religious and devotional practices”, but around many teachers they can be like an eternal departure lounge where you can never get off the ground. How did I fall into this Satsang situation? Oh my God, I'm here and I'm surrounded by all these students and gush gush gush. When will I get a moment's peace to meditate, and all that? They're fucked. So in comes J. Random Psychonaut, who says "I'm going to rescue you. I'm going to pop you out of the spiritual teacher experience, and get you back on your path." Of course, they usually look at you like you're a fucking arrogant shit head. But that's karma, I guess.

Many people think that Buddhism is a force for the greater good in that it holds the template pattern of the prime reality together amongst the wavering sea of vibrational frequencies. And that is true. Buddhism is not a scam. It is a force for greater good, a MGO – Meta Governance Organisation in a way, just as the ACLU is more organised than the citizen field of the USA, and is an “reservoir consciousness” but it’s aims and objectives are by and for the citizen field of less self-organized and clear beings. In teh same way the Tibetan Buddhists are maintaining their own reservoir of consciousness, running their own renegade system in the Matrix. Most of their meditative output is devoted to maintaining it, with a bit left over for some active compassion in the world. But they still work to illuminate souls that come within the confines of their pattern. What most people don't know is that Buddhism, like virtually all of the root religions of the world, has it’s origins with different entheogenic plant catalysts, the somas of antiquity.

Deep connection has always begun with plant sacraments, and then become priestified and purified and controlled... Buddhism by way of plant analogies is like clover, it’s flowers are beautiful but modest, it integrates well with the other plants in the field, all plants in the numinous field feed off the earth of humanity, but buddha-clover is rhizomic is feeds back more nutrients by way of the rhizomes, back into the soil. Now the monks are like the nerds of consciousness with their fingers on the pulse of everything, methodically going about colonising different planes, like franchises. It's a bit like World Vision going to a third world country, but Buddhism is a trans-planar organisation, instead of a trans-national corporation. But they are the most eco-sound of the trans-planar corporations. As above so below, and all that. Buddhism established the franchise here on this plane about two and a half thousand years ago from some other trans-planar corporation of higher consciousness. It’s a self-sustaining hallucination of reality that they’ve forced onto the meta-structure of reality.

So anyway, one day back in '96, when the Dalai Lama visited Melbourne, I hacked the mainframe of the Buddhist Corporation and broke into the head office, straight into the mind of the CEO. The Buddhists were putting on a ten-day Kalachakra initiation, which involved the building of one of their mandalas made entirely from coloured sand. 'Kalachakra' means 'Wheel of Time' and is the name of one of the Buddhist deities which represents particular aspects of the Enlightened. It's pretty much the great tapestry of Buddhism, and by sheer force of will the Dalai Lama leads the monks in firing up the Kalachakra mandala on an astral level, which they then transmit to other Buddhists in the audience according to their lights and how pure they are in their practice.

After many years of intense meditation the Buddhists apperceive the astral in ways similar to the visions psychonauts can experience when on psychedelics and entheogenic plants. Yet drugs have often been referred to as the "left-hand path", as if their tumultuous psychic journeywork is in some way of a lesser quality than gradual mental strengthening. Such shortcuts are not conducive to the path of liberation, Buddhism says. But that's just the dogma of the Buddhist textual discipline – you've got to keep the shareholders in line. Buddhism is like the ocean. Most people are content to stay within the flags and play close to the shores in the tidal puddles. A few people may be capable of swimming out beyond the breakline into the deep swells. The opportunity is all there, but everyone's attention is on the beach. But as is well observed, Psychedelia is not necessarily conducive to discipline, it can be criticized as the muddle path in contradistinction to the middle path of Buddha-Dharma.

DAY ONE
I wasn't there to make a scene, or to interrupt the proceedings at all. I just wanted to see what the whole Buddhist paradigm was like from the psychedelic point of view. I'd pick apart the teachings and size everyone up energetically. I had a $750 ringside ticket and I just caned myself on every psychedelic I could get my hands on for ten days: acid, mushrooms, marijuana... whatever could be found at the time, and there was a bit of a drought on, I must admit. It was pure curiosity – I wanted to put the psychedelic spotlight back on Buddhism. And I kept a strict poker-face all the time – no spasms, no outward signs of loss of motor control were allowed. Diamond point will was needed the whole time to maintain discretion and politeness yet at the same time fierce intent of inquiry.

It’s interesting watching all the Buddhists together at these types of intentional gatherings because it’s all very Old MacDonald Had a Farm… You could judge different types of Buddhists and compare them to different bird species… The Dalai Lama is the big peacock and he’s got his coterie of littler peacocks; and when they go into their thing and start meditating they’re opening up their psychic plumage. And just like the birds their chests get all puffed up and they tweet away. And then the Dalai Lama comes with his beak and pokes around and inspects them, making adjustments here and granting boons there. And there I am, the fox in the psychic chicken coop, and the other monks are trying to figure out where I sit in the cosmic pecking order.

Every form of rank structure exhibits rank abuse, but the Buddhists pattern is the most mellow form of rank abuse. That’s why they stress the compassion, the compassion. As you go up the gradations of refined consciousness you realize it’s a spiritual food chain. Everything feeds on the levels below it, and the Buddhist mainframe is being fed by that consciousness reservoir they’ve been building all these thousands of years, that pirate sub-universe they’ve carved out for themselves on the inner wall of the Godhead.

So the Buddhist monks were there being very competent, rubbing their bellies and patting their heads at the same time while they're firing up the absolute 'biggie' of Buddhism – the Kalachakra mandala, which had a big thanka pattern on it. I waited till the Dalai Lama, the master programmer, was preoccupied flicking some psychic switches. He was vulnerable, so I went in for the kill, into the heart of the Buddhist mainframe. The Dalai Lama saw me coming, of course. Here's a member of the psychedelic ratbaggery, he thought, and I'll put on a show for him. We'll strut our stuff. Game on. He starts to generate his God-masks, and radiates unconditional love of all creatures, angels and demons. He was focussed on his work, not vulnerable, that gave me a window to dive in like Count Zero in Gibson’s Neuromancer.

I'd hack into the Buddhist mainframe one day, and the next day those portals would be locked, and there would be a smirk on the Dalai Lama's face as I tried to get in, only to go whoomp, and slide off his defenses like a fried egg on a frypan. And then I'd have to go around somewhere else and hack in again... They had all these bug fixes, these one day-turnaround bug fixes and they'd keep sealing all the holes. In a way, perhaps, they were just letting me in to do the annual stocktake on their filters and firewalls. I was like this little psychedelic bird on the back on a rhinoceros, picking off the ticks. Like a egg off a teflon frypan. I was impressed! One day turnaround on bug-fixes! Annual audit.

DAY TWO
This all started when I visited the Australian Buddhist Barry (Bazza) Long, he was a local guru. He was a sort of tantric teacher, all man-woman stuff and cosmic yin-yang energies, you know, get your fucking right and everything's right with the universe. That's not true, everything's just right for you behind your white picket fence of your privatised ego-complex. He wasn't actually activating Buddha-nature, or Gandhi-nature, or Noam Chomsky-nature in the students, or any type of practical spirituality. And then one day I thought, Christ, you need to be on drugs to endure this, and bing!

That's how I became a dharma desperado. I felt the fucked-up-ness of the world had forced me to put a) and b) back together, Buddhism and psychedelics. The world was going to hell in a hand basket and the Buddhists apparently couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag on fire. Christianity is clearly a negativity generation engine, but was Buddhism merely an apathy generation mechanism? I considered it strategic psychedelic activism. Unlike baseline politics the psychonautical terra-ist (Latin for Earth, not terror) doesn't conduct assassinations, they perform liberations. You single out strategic points in the reality grid, whether they be politicians, pop-stars or parking ticket inspectors, and you router your psychedelic love-bomb at them when in higher states of consciousness. Bath them in love, and stand back to watch the explosion.

Back in '96 I spent six days with Gangaji on acid. It was a six-day residential retreat and I had, I don't know, about 21 trips, a big bag of hash and not enough bulbs. Gangaji and Andrew Cohen are sort of brother-sister teachers. They both came under the lineage of Poonjaji and were sort of roughly students at the same time. But they fought like cats and dogs over their approach to things. I kept trying to fling Gangaji out of her Satsang trap when I was loaded up and firing possible Satsang structures. That was the name of the game, as a force of intentionality. Gangaji seemed to clock on to what I was doing, but you know, I was wearing my blue meditation shawl and I was immaculately behaved. I don't flirt with the Dharma-babes, and that sort of thing, I kept it very straight. She knew I wasn't there to be disruptive, so she kept the Satsang going but she had to juggle two balls at the same time, if you will. It was pure research arrogance on my part, but I just decided to do it. It wasn't as if I had any qualifications in my Curriculum Vitae to trip out spiritual teachers.

DAY THREE

So I started to tow the line a bit, and while on my psychedelic journey I entertained the idea of the relationship between Lord Buddha and Lord Mara, his ancient Nemesis. Mara was the one who came and tempted Buddha while he was under the Bodhi tree by firing off all the hallucinations, and tried to distract him from his path of liberation. And Lord Mara has this network of God energies he feeds on. The big thing about Buddhism is that there are no creator Gods, it's all a five-fold interdependent arising of different yin-yang attributes. Well, that's not true, there are creator Gods, but, well..., oh look, it gets complicated...

One could say that Buddhism is Lord Mara's greatest creation, his greatest indulgence. This is because even though they've achieved so much, Buddhists are still limited. They're so far against the wall they're in love with it, they want to know every nook and cranny of it. They want to know everything that's going on in consciousness because they're meta-policemen. There's a lot of nasty consciousness going down out there and the Buddhists want to know the causation of everything. They're the Nerds of Numinousity, Anorak wearing Godspotters.

So I stuck to the psychedelic communication level, picking away at them on the astral with my own inquiries. One shouldn't be able to ask these questions within orthodox Buddhism; I shouldn't be able to hack into the mainframe; I shouldn't be able to do anything. But when you're on drugs there's no rules anymore. Maybe I'm just hallucinating but I'm having fun.

DAY FIVE
Day Five, they decided to pull a practical joke on me. There was no earthly reason why I had to get up in the middle of these proceedings. I had five trips coming on strong and I'd taken care of the plumbing before liftoff. Yet I suddenly felt like I had to go to the toilet, and started crossing my legs and holding my bladder... Jesus, I really had to go to the toilet! But I hadn't even drunk anything in the last six hours, I thought to myself.

Then I looked over to the senior monks, and they were all smirking, and they sent this thoughtform out: hardy har har.

So I had to get up, dressed in black like something out of the Matrix, whacked on drugs, and discretely walk up all these aisles whilst facing off all these Buddhists to go to the toilet. But that was the worst they did to me really, and after that I came and sat back down. Not too bad, considering... They'd clocked on quickly that I had no interest in interfering with their meditations, but even still some of the purists were horrified by my attempts to traverse their spaces whilst on hallucinogens. So I'd almost peed my pants in front of the Dalai Lama whilst on acid, but that was only a gentle slap. We can hack into you, too, mate, they were saying.

After days of staring at it on acid, the intelligence at the heart of the kalachakra mandala came out as an eye, slowly looking around. And then it clocked on to me. Then the Dalai Lama looked at it and they both looked at me, and this thoughtform came at me, "who does this punk think he is?"

I am a simple traverser of the psychedelic planes, I pulsed back. No not, really. I don't know, don't ask me, I beamed at them sheepishly. I'm just on drugs.

DAY SIX
About Day Six... I got a transmission from the Dalai Lama. I'd been caning it every day, of course, in the front row with the good monks while the Dalai Lama did his work in front of us and on the astral. And on this day he was looking very grim at one stage and then he suddenly cracked into a smile and said: "Most unorthodox, most unorthodox." Then he whipped out this pulsating ball of yin-yang energy and just huuurrled it at me. It went ker-plonk, right into my chest, a recursive fractal ball of energy... and I did go a little bit spastic. He got right through my shields, and there were a few twitches... just a few twitches before the poker face cam back on.

It was like getting a processor upgrade on the computer. I'd just jumped from a 486 processor to a Pentium as he infected me with his psychic virus. I still don't know to this day what it did inside me; but he got his hooks into me. And make no mistake – from within the Buddhist mainframe the Dalai Lama looks like Schwarzenegger. Rippling muscles. He looks like a harmless, cheeky little man on the outside, but his avatar on the astral is buff, very buff. Extremely buff.

And suddenly some discarnate entity starts to appear above him, all teeth and claw and tentacles, multiple eyes and bright volcanic light as it manifested. It was like a star with teeth, Old Gods from the Cthulhu mythos or a Kraken from the ocean. It started to form above the Dalai Lama's right shoulder and grow bigger and bigger and bigger. The Dalai Lama remained calm, reading his Pali, his Tibetan prayer book, going chunka chunka chunk as he fired up the mandala. So in the astral I sort of tap the Dalai Lama on the shoulder and he glanced up. Hey buddy, look behind you!

I start communicating with the entity and it’s then that I notice he has all these astral puppet strings going into the Dalai Lama, some right up into his bum. If you did a psychic audit on our bums you’d find that all the control strings come through there. It's the last place you'd look, so the entities always go there. Anyway, this entity is sniggering. Now you've got to remember that the Dalai Lama is Jainist in his approach to the sanctity of life forms. He won't even kill a mosquito, he has to keep shooing them away. On a psychic level, when an entity like the one here starts to devour him into the cosmic ecology, he can't kill it. He has to have boundaries, but he can't kill even malevolent deities. He has to see through their God masks, and this one was a very profound God mask, sniggering quite a lot as it watched us.

You may think I would have jumped into the psychic fire and wrestled the entity to the ground, saving the Dalai Lama and getting some fine Buddhist boy-scout medals for my actions. But no. These are the big boys, and they know what they're doing. But what they know and what they act upon are two different things. Anyway, this might be a test – this might be something they do to psychonautical terra-ists like me all the time. It's pretty wild at the top levels of the Buddhist world, and clearly caution was needed.

Suddenly the Dalai Lama just catches the entity and compresses it. He doesn't let it come into this dimension, he just seals off that portal it came through in front of my eyes. He's onto it.
The Dalailamanator in action.

DAY EIGHT

Towards the end of the proceedings I started to get paranoid, thinking the monks were ganging up on me with the past Buddhist masters I'd dabbled with in the astral. I was having a flashback to an earlier session with Andrew Cohen, and remember, the man has almost no compassion. He goes into his Satsang and starts to build up his God masks, and most of it comes across as demonic. One of the themes that goes through his teachings is absolute unconditional love, and one logical consequence of that is unconditional love of demonic nature. I started to feel like I was in a psychedelic Vietnam... But thoughts of surrender were for weaker soldiers.

It started slipping into pure virtuality as I faced off against Cohen and tried to get him to remember that he was an intelligent being on the cosmic crypto-lock sex drive, and I was going to activate him so we could reboot the universe. As I said, I was in a psychopuppy stage. He was intrigued, you know, like he hadn't visited these aspects of consciousness before. Let's cane it, see what happens. So I routed psychedelic energy at him and he loved it. It wasn't a psychedelic attack, per se, just a signal he could choose to tune in on. And he loved it. I met him later in a coffee shop and we shook hands and he said "It's all good sport, isn't it?" But he hasn't come back to Australia since '97, he's in no rush, I'll tell you that.

So anyway, there I was meditating, begrudgingly, do I have to do this all by my fucking self, I wondered. Jesus Christ. DL was going through the part of the ritual where the dorje, you know, the lightning bolt – it looks like four infinity symbols stitched together– is joined by the bell, the tantric bell. And as he starts to sacralise the experience he rings the bell, ding-da-ding-da-ding, he shakes the dorje, the lightning bolt… That’s usually where it stops, but this time he found himself shaking two extra things. And he looked up in surprise at that. This is a ritual he’s been doing for centuries, ritual after ritual in reincarnation after reincarnation. Chonk. Chonk chonk. Chonk chonk, with the dorje. And now the pattern had been broken.

One of the things he was holding that broke the pattern was a Tripping Manual I had written some years previously. I’ve got no idea how my Tripping Manual got up there on stage at the altar, but it was there and he was shaking it. And he was seeing how manipulation of it could shape the fabric of reality. And then he shook the other thing, which was the Ohm system, and he saw how that too, changed the fabric of reality. Now you must remember: the Buddhists are the Prime Pattern Holders in equilibrium with Lord Mara. The Tripping manual is a textual psychedelic, The AUM-OHM system is a organizational psychedelic.

After he’s shaken both of them he glances over precisely at me, as if to say, what are you messing around with here? I pulsed back, that the world was going to Hell in a hand basket and you Buddhists are apparently incapable of moderating the process to stop it. So I’ve developed this text as a non-chemical hallucinogen catalyst. A psychedelic made out of text, and a psychedelic made out of the Ohm system, of pure information.

It was then that I felt these two gigantic cobra fangs stick themselves in either side of my neck. And then this sort of astronaut mask went zooonk over my head like a bank-safe door shutting. I was in the astral Cone of Silence, in the deep, deep end of the eschatological shit. I don’t know what happened to that helmet; I’ve probably still got it on to this day for all I know.

DAY TEN
Part of the $750 ringside ticket I had bought enabled me to press the flesh and meet the Dalai Lama at the end of the Kalachakra initiation at some private sponsors gig at a swanky hotel. I was in crisis mode by this stage because I wanted to meet the Dalai Lama and shake his hand on mushrooms as a final cheerio gesture, but I'd run out of mushrooms, of course. They'd been carefully deployed during the final stages of the Kalachakra initiation, and all I had left was a very dubious trip and a joint. The only other thing left in the altered states pantry was an Ecstasy tablet.

So I dropped my disco biscuit and the rest. After ten days of caning it all the drugs were the same by then. It was just another generic psychedelic, plonk. There wasn't any love or heart opening; I wasn't really feeling anything but bent, really, whacked. But I was in my merchant banker's suit and I was the best dressed person in the room. And this was the inner sanctum; these were all the serious students, the devotees and senior monks. I was the only one in the room on drugs, I guarantee you that without a doubt. Not whacked, ripped, twisted, bent, ripped and twisted, but nothing special. I was rallying the flag for the psychedelic embassy and all my diplomatic credentials were unauthorized! As Noam Chomsky might say.

You had to give mandala prayer offerings to the Dalai Lama, and as you remember, I was big on the causal relationship between Lord Mara and Buddha at the time. So my offering happened to be a little Catholic plaster rendition face cast of Jesus. I painted it up and one eye was the normal glowing white, and the other eye was a sort of red yin-yang eye. And that was meant to be Lord Buddha and Lord Mara. I passed the bodyguard test, and they were very clued in bodyguards, able to read the energy fields in the psychic ether. They all smiled at me and let me pass, and I gave the plaster cast Jesus to the Dalai Lama and shook his hand.

Just a shake, no agenda, no psychedelic spin doctoring. The Dalai Lama just smiled and gave me the white ceremonial scarf, placing it around my neck. But as soon as the senior students clocked on to what I was doing, this Catholic image of Jesus with one demonic eye and one normal eye, they became enraged. A wave of righteous anger and hate rose of them and seared towards me. That someone would dare do this to the Dalai Lama, they seethed. But there was nothing they could do. No spin doctoring, no winks or nudges nor secret masonic handshakes, no “I know, you know etc” just formal politeness and minimum energetic imprinting, anything else would have been declasse and infra-dig, this was closure, not competition.

The Dalai Lama talked, and meditated, and he had this huge mandala with 12 interlocking levels, like a psychedelic doormat. So I focused on that, and on him and together we both got the energy field moving within the mandala. And then I clocked him clocking on to me and I realized: this is the relationship between Buddhism and Psychedelia. That neither the left-hand nor right-hand path has all the goods, in fact all the goods only comes together when you put psychedelics in the context of Buddhism.

And you know what’s funny? The day the Dalai Lama left town, the drug drought broke, and you could score acid again everywhere. I wish I could say the same about the enlightenment.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Jay Weidner @ the 2012 Conference

These videos are of author, filmmaker and hermetic scholar Jay Weidner's outstanding presentation at "2012 and the End of Time: a Meeting of Minds" held in San Francisco, California on November 11, 2008. Hundreds of people gathered near the Golden Gate Bridge over the weekend to ponder the enigmatic date of December 21, 2012. The final day of the ancient Maya calendar and the focus of many end-of-the-world or major transformation predictions and theories. Even during these times of economic distress, participants paid $300 each to attend. You can now see this excellent presentation for the unbeatable price of FREE.


Jay Weidner produced the documentary films: 2012: The Odyssey, Timewave 2013, directed Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time, and the Sacred Mysteries DVD Collection. He is the co-author of The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye; Alchemy and the End of Time (Destiny Books) and A Monument to the End of Time (with Vincent Bridges) as well as a contributing writer for the book The Mystery of 2012 (Sounds True). Jay was featured on the History Channel’s Documentary, The Lost Book of Nostradamus. In 1999, together with his wife, Sharron Rose, he founded Sacred Mysteries for which he has directed and produced ARTmind with Alex Grey, Healing the Luminous Body with Dr. Alberto Villoldo, Healing Sounds with Jonathan Goldman, Sound Yoga/Nada Yoga with Shanti Shivani, Alchemical Healing with Nicki Scully, Quantum Astrology with Rick Levine, Yoga of Light with Sharron Rose and Secrets of Alchemy, a documentary based upon his research into alchemy, the Cross of Hendaye and the End of Time.

Jay Weidner articles:

Jay Weidner interviews:

www.jayweidner.com

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

US Federal Reserve & economic manipulation MP3

EROCx1 BLOG

The Creature from Jekyll Island
A Second Look at The Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin

Gnostic Media Research and Publishing: Podcast #33
An Interview with G. Edward Griffin
The following was written, produced & hosted by Jan Irvin.

FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD
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What force do bankers have on our society and government? Do the banks really control the world? Do global conspiracies really exist, or are these just traps of weak-minded, tin-hat wearing fools? If the conspiracies really do exist, who benefits? Is the US Federal Reserve really a branch of the U.S. government? How is money created? What does the future hold for our economy and global politics?

Today I thought that I'd do a show that's entirely different than the usual format. This is very pertinent information to understanding what's going on right now in the U.S. (and the world) with Bush and Obama's bailouts, and how the entire thing is a scam to protect the bankers and milk the public through the hidden tax of inflation.

Today's guest is G. Edward Griffin, the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island.

This is a fantastic, detailed interview at 1 hour and 40 minutes, and I thank Edward for offering this show a longer and more detailed interview than he normally provides. So make sure you listen to the entire show.

G. Edward Griffin is a writer and documentary film producer with many successful titles to his credit. Listed in Who’s Who in America, he is well known because of his talent for researching difficult topics and presenting them in clear terms that all can understand. He has dealt with such diverse subjects as archaeology and ancient Earth history, the Federal Reserve System and international banking, terrorism, internal subversion, the history of taxation, U.S. foreign policy, the science and politics of cancer therapy, the Supreme Court, and the United Nations. His better-known works include The Creature from Jekyll Island, World without Cancer, The Discovery of Noah’s Ark, Moles in High Places, The Open Gates of Troy, No Place to Hide, The Capitalist Conspiracy, More Deadly than War, The Grand Design, The Great Prison Break, and The Fearful Master.

Mr. Griffin is a graduate of the University of Michigan where he majored in speech and communications. In preparation for writing his book on the Federal Reserve System, he enrolled in the College for Financial Planning located in Denver, Colorado. His goal was not to become a professional financial planner but to better understand the real world of investments and money markets. He obtained his CFP designation (Certified Financial Planner) in 1989.

Mr. Griffin is a recipient of the coveted Telly Award for excellence in television production, a Contributing Editor of The New American magazine, the creator of the Reality Zone Audio Archives, and is President of American Media, a publishing and video production company in Southern California. He has served on the board of directors of The National Health Federation and The International Association of Cancer Victors and Friends and is Founder and President of The Cancer Cure Foundation. He is also the founder and president of Freedom Force International.