so how can you tell. so that is where like the faith thing comes in [youre telling me it was there all along..?]. when is it proof of something special going on... when are you just kidding yourself. maybe. i guess there will always be stories that fall a few words short of being absolutely convincing. i guess reading will always fall short of experiencing. the second hobo i met didn't quite live up to the mystique as much as the first one did [of what he could say that would change my world; 'nothings real', now make a note of that, because, it did]. in many ways his story took second place, in fact, it was easy to imagine there was no actual story to tell about him. of course there was mention of him anyway, he was called the false prophet at some previous point. john i think it was, the first slice of random coincidence. the words he wanted to put out there, because that is what i asked him; were...



it was a romantic moment at best - nothing quite earth shattering. to sell it more there were some elaborations on the theme; impressive sounding stuff that made up for whatever it was that was lacking. that in the beginning there was the word, well, that by itself just wasn't good enough. its true that recently B had had a close brush with death, thanks to Salvia Divinorum. its true that we met Diego soon after meeting John, who turned out to be the real thing, real enough to have had his arrival announced beforehand [like John seemed to have done]. i also remember a conversation, and at the risk of bringing that up sounding a bit too much like fantasizing...



the thing about this stuff, i explained, was it wasn't just so much the experience itself that made using these things weird... it was paying attention to reality afterwards, and watching out for, ohhh, i don't know, signs maybe. meeting john is something that jumped out as a good possibility. we talked about it afterwards as well when we got off the train. walking from the station towards cavendish square, explaining why i had to pay this stranger any attention. and, well, there had been this feeling; you know ive been doing an awful lot of reading and, its all aimed at trying to achieve something. and. well. so. you get to this point well its like, enough of this, it really isn't helping. there is something missing. you know what, maybe its time to put the books aside, and start thinking that those other guys have got it right; sometimes you need that bit of outside help; you need to meet someone who can set you right, someone who can help you take the next step. no big deal you understand, i mean, its not like you want to sign your life away to a guru or anything. well, maybe...



and that's what was going on in the background when we entered that last stretch, that last stretch with Aunt Salvia around. its just you know that an experience of her space is touching something big. something way bigger than how big reality seems. of course such an event would extend an equal and opposite effect at some point, an appropriate response to complete the equation. it could not really only have a first part and end at the customary 5 minute mark. that's just the beginning. imagine that initial disorientation hadn't ended there, you went on living. compared to the state where you left off from when you smoked... what was it again... comatose, not remembering. forgotten. now traveling in your mind towards a shamanic destination. experiencing through the world tree another life in a potential future maybe. it proceeds as a logical next sequence of events that, make you not realize what just happened, this is reality now.



and so now where is the proof..? well... a journey starts in a cave, or any hole really... how about in your mouth. but you could explore a cave with your physical body, not something you could use to explore your mouth with is it really. but this kind of exploring is not done physically - even back in this reality. it is with an imagined cave and an imagined physical body. imagined. now in this place called imagination, is it possible to be completely awed by something like air. it has every reason; like it gives life after all. at some fair point, it might be thought of as not much less than a god. i guess it might be possible to use such a powerful thing to explore within... breath as a bridge to the otherworld. through the cave that you breath into. onwards to an other place in time in what feels now to be like the future. maybe Salvia can help you see that, her smoke inhaled gives you an all-eye.



more proof..? or another coincidence maybe;;; a typical objective in this reality when going on a journey is to meet a guide. someone who teaches you something. and so we go searching. and marvel of all marvels, they go ahead and appear [pretending not to see them]. not enough. another objective..? to transcend the ego. as if if it happened you would realize it. the very thing you wish to defeat is the same thing you would use to realize it. ego is fine, but not as an identity. what you are, your identity, can be anything really. try being breath for a while, then you have a new tool with which you can travel, handy in the above visualization. at some point it will reassemble itself, does it automatically. you the breath no more, time to experience the fruits of where it got you. you cant as the wind, you can as your ego. stay and enjoy it for while. achieve what you were meant to achieve - have fun while doing it. and then... and then what...?



get better at it.



as a guru john didn't seem to cut it. i guess he could have from how he looked, and maybe from how he spoke maybe. even from what he was into. had a brother into energy work, seen him do some pretty fantastic stuff. told him we were stuck, trying to succeed at making something out of nothing, oh it's easy he said - he's quite good at that. as if so far that wasn't good enough. what could he say that would be life changing, if there was one thing he could say what would it be, something that would be laden with meaning. im not quite sure he got what i meant, well, at least not in the beginning. but eventually i think he did, and to that he said enough talking, its time to start doing.



it wasn't particularly enlightening. maybe an idea of it had already been circulating, i guess by the time it reached me it had become old hat. somewhere in the background there was something going on about it, a nagging sound, a sense of guilt. was it possible he had just hit the proverbial spot? how could it be possible i didn't already know that. did i resent being told this. maybe it was because i already knew it. up till this point, only ever created excuses why not to do it. i was doing it. i was taking drugs. not just any drugs either, the ones that released the divine within. wasn't that enough by itself already anyway. what john had to say, well, it was good, but it wasn't impressive. or was it?



at the time maybe it did, but the full impact of this meeting didn't really sink in, the impression wasn't all that long lasting. after all what were the odds in the first place of shit like this happening. we had caught a train, a once in a while thing. we saw this dude. there was stuff going on between us and him. some kind of cosmic nagging. most of the time day-to-day life is just plain sailing. its not very often you realize when there's a glitch in the program. this most certainly was a glitch. i couldn't hold back anymore and i just had to ask if he knew where we were going. i meant the station we needed to get off at, but the words oozed some kind of other more important significance.



and now its almost a full year later and im thinking. how can you tell when something happens whether it was more than just. when do you get to call it a stand out moment, use a word to describe it that you can only ever whisper, and not put it down to coincidence. and there was so much of it going on too. it seemed you could see it at almost every turn. how life was unfolding according to some awesome design. sure you had to be paying attention, and if you did the clues were abundant. but then there's always that awkward situation, trying to persuade others of what you are thinking, and as ambitious as you put it across, never being all that convincing. even less than that. arrogant at best for having this amazing suspicion.



when do you know. how can you tell.



and so once again we were talking about all this, huddled inside a coffee shop in a place our future lives feel intertwined with. the yin of our yang. still trying to figure out where the recent events fit in. its too big to fit in my head i said. its part of the problem with trying to understand it i think. its what happens outside your head, what happens in your life and all around you where you get to see it, that's maybe the place you get to realize it. maybe you aren't inside of you after all, watching random things going on out there. you are what's going on out there, watching something that thinks there's nothing controlling IT [yourself, who you think you really are]. it had been a while, and now maybe i was beginning to see. not from the inside looking out, but from the outside looking in.



the dmt arrived a week ago, amidst a great deal of rain and flooding [another imagined non-coincidence]. i had been expecting it and had an idea about my first attempt involving the arse end of an acid trip. except. except i thought it best to have some dope around if this was going to involve that. im not sure ive ever got dope for myself around cape town. there was that time i got some through a buddy... he's beyond my reach now though. so i contact another friend but he seems more interested in not being friends than in trying to help me [a shadow?]. we scoured the streets a few times looking for signs, places where you'd expect to find a drug fiend. long street maybe... but nothing. i tell B my plans over coffee and explain my difficulty. we pay the bill and head for home.



on the road just after we leave there is a hitch-hiker. we don't see many of them. we never stop to help any. but it feels like its time and i been looking for signs. long blond hair and bare feet, he says his name is Gary. i ask him if he knows where to get chronic, sure he says and takes us to the 'rastas' about 2 blocks away. seek and ye shall find. there's something unique about these guys. these middle-men that appear at the times you need help finding what you seek. there doesn't seem to be anything normal about them, always characters out of some kind of work of fiction, archetypal agents, henchmen of the cosmic joker. surely not every stranger that crosses your path can be this way inclined [tour guides = Diego!?]. when you part ways you have to wonder if you really did meet someone, or, is the memory of it merely the product of an active imagination? whatever the case it brings a knowing smile, on this long day it felt like an exclamation mark ended it.

"mushrooms made me do it."



post #6154;;;

so about a year ago we upped and left JHB no matter what the implications were. at the time it was like this is no way to live... being cooped up like a bird in a cage in an office... the crime... the pollution...

maybe that by itself would have been bearable...

but there was also the mushrooms...

there's so much more to life 'they said'... it's so full of magic and mystery... of angels and demons... another completely new world awaits...



and so we left for CT, to try make it work down here, except it didn't work really. how things are right now is our lives are a complete mess... waking up the next day after a serious party and realizing somehow you managed to throw everything in the bin... how the hell did this happen...? scratching your head wondering what to do that might make things right...

of course it was a case of some very bad decision making. leave it all behind 'no matter what'... even if at some point you run outta money to pay the bills...? brave... very brave... stupid brave... what were we thinking... were we deluded or something... from a dark corner of my mind;;;

'the mushrooms made me do it'.

did the medicine blind me to the reality of what we were doing... turn reality into some kind of fantasy... stepped through a fairy-ring where there was no water-and-lights bill... into a 'land of plenty'.

i guess we go back to JHB now, face the music from friends and family, ex-work colleagues etc. to try patch things back up. it's them going to save us now... not some fungus that stains blue.



post #6163;;;

>>>In life u only ever have yourself to blame

fully...

>>>i learned a lot and returned a better person as im sure you will return much better off

amen...

>>>Peace, Guidance & Blessings your way, comrad~

schweet bro'; was nice to meet ya...

>>>Put your pride in your pocket and move on.

spot on...



there are thoughts of what has happened something along the lines of 'everything for a reason'... i mean we were broken people when we left JHB, in serious need of a holiday i guess... a break... and we got that...



it might also sound a bit menial but during our stay here we lost one of our cats (to old age)... during a recent 'cid experience there was a kind of 'understanding' that being here was 'organized' on another level so as to spend quality time with her and bid her farewell etc.



there was a tonne of stuff that was going on actually... just difficult to convince someone outside of the experience... sort of a you had to be there thing... stuff that i comfort myself with and use to justify why it was all worth it...



but now it's tough to remove my gaze from an enthralling vision... should we stick it out and continue being amazed as things happen? an expensive and risky preoccupation... or do i call time-out on this, retreat to where i know it's safe and regroup for a while... i guess i think so... it feels like something caught fire while i wasn't paying attention, and i risk burning the house down if i dont come to, come to NOW...



post #6235;;;

i love you guys..!

@w79;;; thanx for sharing mon...

well... target date to end this should be end jan sometime... sure we can stick around a while longer but i'm really worried about running out of cash without a job and stuck a world away from anyone i know... until end jan though we will try looking for work i just hope the response is more encouraging than it has been to date;;; i cant figure it out... is there just no interest or is there a reason why just no interest... is it a white thing... is it an age thing... is it a jhb thing... anywhoo, we'll see...



about the 'JUST SAY NO' thing...



i guess that's why i started the thread in the first place and it feels like something that could be explored more...



it's not really a 'mushrooms made me do it' thing... that was just being a bit sensationalist... but...



there's a... feeling...



like maybe things are a bit less solid than they should be... that in some sense something has broken free... maybe it's a connection to reality... something is gone now that was before, it might have been useful to keep to navigate an everyday terrain maybe... lacking the eat shit and sleep ability...



maybe at some point i can put my finger on it.



oh yeah... the point... the point...

maybe that connection feels weak because of the dabbling... maybe a weak connection is making things more difficult... and so yeah... maybe it is time to put the magic away for a while... till things return back to normal.



"the end of the world..."



post #6442;;;

quote

prof_it_e:...the perpetual sound of surf turned into hearing a world hurtling headlong to its end...

end quote



[above from 'dmt crystals' thread]

there was a feeling like a point was being reached, a point of realization... every consequent time under the influence bringing me closer to it... that point would be when i 'woke up'... then would remember what was actually going on... on another level... another level that was more real than this one... bigger... i'm not sure what existence is like on that level... but there's a sense of dread about ever going back there... maybe waking up on that level means knowing that everything that seems so real here really is just a figment of that bigger things imagination... it has a bunch of hard to handle repurcussions... the people that you know and love dissappearing... and being left all alone [again]...



afterwards going back home i wondered if that was schizophrenia... not one person being two people... one person being everybody... everyone i know... speak to... just being other pieces of me...



post #6797;;;

what horror if your soul-mate was just another figment of your imagination... in fact even 'you' were... everything was... try see it this way;;; 'god created everything'... maybe more than that... 'god IS everything'... personalize it... 'you are god'... now if it's true, what does it mean exactly...? it means there aint nothing else out there... just you and your many selves playing with yourself... i'm not sure what 'constitutes my awareness' could handle a realization like that... in fact sometimes it feels like i have already, and now it's more a case of fighting it... denying it... resisting it... avoiding it.



maybe the end of the world is the end of everything seeing itself as separate from everything else... the moment when only one 'awareness' exists... one consciousness... if it's mine i might go nuts... please someone else say they own this show... i dont want it... too terrible...



post #6807;;;

a bit from 'DMT - OMG';;;

quote

prof_it_e:... felt a bit yug afterwards... it was... incomplete... decided to do a salvia 10x.

good idea..? not sure...

the wave came on strong... lined with a collection of duplicated 'things'... some idea rolling round in my head gets reinforced... this whole end of the world thing... we are definitely headed towards a 'combination'... a point where it all comes together... probably culminates in 2012... i guess when i 'wake up' 'there' i will be dead here.

end quote



hmmm... don't reallly want to pursue this thing like i'm in any kind of trouble with my sanity... humour me if it sounds like that - know that i'm still able to step outside of the situation and observe it objectively... as just something brought on by a powerful 'hallucinogen'... and not being able at this point to interpret the experience properly or something.



i'd put on hydroponic garden by carbon based lifeforms earlier for the dmt, by now we had reached track no.6 - the title track, 9.12 long. it all felt quite random at the time, i hadn't even thought of doing salvia. as it was while i was under it became everything. as she took hold i remembered now... it was the last bit of music i would ever hear... the world would hear... before it all came to an end.



'they' came from the west... my right more or less... streaming out of a hole... eating up the borders of what made up my world. they progressed and would continue to do so until it was all gone. and then i guess my world would start again. what they were i'm not completely sure, couldn't look directly at them... wouldn't.



i wasn't sure when my world started again whether it would be the same me that inhabited it [started again?]. in fact i was sure it wouldn't be. i'm not sure when the 'original me' had been 'taken away'... discarded. probably that first time i encountered salvia, way back when in rustlers valley.



there was a thing about their 'progression' being synchronized to the music that was playing... the music being perfect for what was happening... it was made for this substance... this experience... this occasion. there was a thing about how everything that was going on [in my life] had been leading up to this point, it all made complete sense suddenly.



off in the distance 'they'... 'agreed'... in the direction of steenberg mountains on the other side of muizenberg i seemed to have an audience. there was a familiar feeling about them, they were made up of all the people i had ever known, one of them felt very strongly like my mother.



what was that point exactly? the same damn persistent frustrating impression i had from before. the experience a becoming aware of reality consolidating [just memory instead maybe?]. a sense of dread at the realization that you are headed straight towards a moment you are left all alone, when everything outside of you becomes you.



i fell over on my left side as the wave consumed me. i voiced feeble 'no's internally resisting the realization. i begged for an intervention, for something to happen that would prove me wrong. if something would happen in the world right now independent of my participation i would be wrong.



nothing did...



post #6812;;;

okay well... after giving it some thought and chatting to B about it, another thought;;;

i opt for the not being able to interpret the experience properly at this point to avoid the awfulness of it's implications - as completely real as it may appear to be whilst under the influence...



another interpretation is sort of taking shape;



the idea is that the feeling of everything consolidating, 'becoming one', does not have to do with physical reality at all [you can try dress it up but if you understand what i mean the realization that you are all that is, everything else being a figment of your imagination HAS to be too terrible a thought to bare].



maybe what it does have to do with is a consolidation of your mind, or your memories... as though at some point when you went under it all disintegrated, splintered... if that's what happened the everything becoming one thing could be what you might expect to feel as your memories knit themselves back together...



this feels a bit more digestible than the impossible idea from before, in fact, it's got me quite curious... are it your memories that are loosened up and separated during the experience... is there a link between them and the things that make up the streaming 'things' that are the visuals... is it possible to use the visuals to access specific memories...



of course that leads up to wanting access to memories that need work... need to be relived and more psychologically sound reactions created for...



did i mention i'm feeling quite perky today? i'm feeling quite perky.

Full Stop.

That would be the full stop at the end of the last word; the last word at the end of the last sentence; the last sentence at the end of the last paragraph; the last paragraph at the end of what feels at this point like is a long, long story. The idea is to work backwards from there, maybe it will make thing a little easier to remember. It’s about twelve on Sunday, we are pulling out from the venue, up a dusty dirt track that winds through an apple orchard. Spent. It’s been an awesome overnight outdoor party, tucked away in the hills somewhere close enough to Stellenbosch in the Western Cape.



Some kind of thing catches my eye, a break in the vision that makes up an otherwise natural scenery. It’s a dark patch of rectangular draping over some reeds close by to where we were camping. Should I bother checking it out? Am I dragging it out what I shouldn’t be dragging out? Oh what the hell; I pull over. It’s a short walk and I start to notice what looks like litter strewn around where I am headed. It’s stuff that’s starting to look familiar. Some empty Checkers packets, a half eaten apple. The dark patch that caught my eye is a wetsuit I don’t really recognize, it’s not mine but the rest is; my heart aches from an unpleasant reminder.



A couple of hours ago some cretins raided our campsite, tore open a tent we had bought not much more than a week earlier and raided our stuff. What I was looking at now was what they had chosen to discard before leaving with whatever else. Here was a cell phone battery charger, there was a few items of clothing that belonged to B. But what was this? Tucked away in the reeds is one of those A4 size hardcover notebooks. It also belongs to B. It’s a book she’s kept for a good couple of years, a book she keeps to write down her dreams.



I get this weird feeling, I know this book is really quite important to her, it’s rather odd that it’s laying right here, almost like it had made it’s way back to her. It’s odd that I decided to stop the car, even that the little wannabe gangsters hadn’t taken it further to throw away, lost to us forever. It felt like some kind of affirmation that unusual forces had been at work during the last couple of hours, that there was definitely a bit more going on than what could look like just another normal sequence of events.



The Photo Takes A Camera.

It couldn’t have been a more perfect occasion. This was the third outdoor trance party of the new season that we had attended. It was by far the best party so far. At sunrise the venue became an exceptional highlight. Off in the distance a cloudbank hugged a silhouette of mountains. More clouds streaked across a predawn electric blue sky. Leafy green trees ascended an incline on one side of the farm hosting this event. We made our way down from the dance floor towards our car where the tent was, enjoying the sounds of birds and insects as they woke up and returned back to life.



There was so much going on, and I couldn’t wait to get back to the campsite to fetch the camera and take some photos. It was pretty much feeling like heaven on earth. We were parked right outside where it was all at, really quite far away from everyone else. In a way it wasn’t all that surprising when we got to the tent, to see a big fat rip down the front side of it. B asked what that was, and I said it looked like something bad. I scratched around for the camera, but it had disappeared now into the picture.



On hindsight it felt like maybe the gods were in attendance this strange day. They occupied the very spaces I was feeling had to be photographed, they were just too surreal to be true. On that note maybe there was a message in now suddenly not being able to. Maybe the gods did not want to be photographed - in taking their pictures we would not really see them how they wanted to be seen. Maybe there was a difference between taking a picture and seeing. For whatever reason, there was an air of mystery surrounding the incident, making it feel like something ‘invisible’ was around interfering with physicality in accordance with another agenda.



Three is a Magic Number.

At some point the previous evening we had decided to head back to the car from the dance floor. It was the one time we made the trip alone in the dark. Almost reaching our destination off to the right of us we passed the dark shapes of some people that seemed to be retreating into the bushes. It raised B’s hackles; she thought it was quite suspicious. From my side it was a time I wanted, I needed, to see the best of that which is inside of people. So it was that I reassured it her it was nothing, just a couple of other partygoers acting a little trashed.



On the horizon the moon peeped at us over the top of a mountain. If we had stayed where we were we wouldn’t have seen it rising. Once again meaning seemed to underlie what could be taken as mere coincidence. At the car B was changing clothes in the tent while I waited outside and made a big decision. For the first time in a long while we had gotten some acid. I dropped a cap of it with a few sips of water. B had decided at some point earlier to not go through with it.



Somewhere close by I was startled to hear what sounded like people running on the dirt road. I could make out some dark shapes approaching but then they went off to the side and huddled together speaking softly. Suddenly Diego was making a racket as he approached from the opposite direction quite unexpectedly. For some reason he had decided to make his way down to here as well. It was an unusual decision because it was quite a trek from the party to where we were camping. I told him about the people and we went over to where I had seen them. They had left and we could see them making their way through a field going further away from us.



The three of us headed back up but were stopped soon after by three guys coming down the same road. They greeted us and were acting all cool like they had been at the party and were going home to fetch some friends or something. They explained they worked on the farm and were acting all friendly, maybe a bit too friendly. I could see B was starting to feel uncomfortable with all the attention she was getting from one of them. I asked for their names and tried to suss out whether they meant any harm. I didn’t think if they were up to no good they would be capable of doing anything wrong, even with all their odd behavior.



We said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. We think it was then that they went on to raid our locked tent. That at this magical time they were the three wise men that brought gifts for the birth of Jesus, but because it’s the end of time everything is opposite to what it should be and so took instead of gave, and instead of it being for the birth of a savior it was at a moment that we were being saved. We think if it weren’t for Diego who pitched up at a moment when we were quite vulnerable we could have gotten ourselves into quite a bit of trouble with these three idiot people.



Jesus ’08.

We met Diego about a week ago. He had left a message on an internet website forum asking if anyone could spare him a lift to an upcoming party. On our way to it we decided to text message him and see if he still needed help. Half an hour later about two minutes after we decided to not help him anymore because we were too far to turn towards town to fetch him he replied saying yes he did. We turned back then.



He was in Cape Town for a week or two on his way back to Spain. Before that he had been in Zambia for a couple of months acting as a tour guide on some overland safaris. He loved animals and was vegetarian. He looked every bit the friendly foreign trancer, quite tall with long brown hair tied in a ponytail and face unshaven. He had a contagious smile that spread from his mouth to deep inside his eyes. At that first party we had got to know him a bit, enough to feel quite sad when we said our goodbyes the next day. We might never have seen him again but he got in touch the following weekend. And so it was that hooked up with him again.



This time things felt a bit different with him. It felt like we had met what you might say is the one single person that has had the biggest impact on our lives ever since we were born. It felt like we had met a Master. I guess with such a heady statement there is a lot of explaining to do, but I guess no amount of explaining is ever going to do it justice. Something like what happened between him and us wasn’t really something that involved thinking, maybe if it did it would make it a whole bunch easier to communicate. This thing was more about feeling, it doesn’t feel like there’s much I can put down here that would help you feel like how it was we felt like with him.



As we spent more time with this guy communication wasn’t so much about speaking; it was also about touching. A hug here and there, an arm round the shoulder, a hand on the knee while talking. If there was any room for misunderstanding from the words he chose to use or how he pronounced them in his thick Spanish accent, it was dispelled by the gestures that accompanied them. It felt like he radiated love and infected you with it if you were around. He made you feel like everything was fine, more than fine, even if it wasn’t.



I guess it’s possible that how we felt about him wasn’t just about who he is, or what he’s like. It was probably also about who we are, where we are at in our lives and; what we need. I think we needed to meet someone like him - we needed it really badly. We needed it so bad that when he came the impact was almost too overwhelming. We didn’t know what hit us. He fit so well it was almost like finding a long lost missing piece of a frustratingly almost complete jigsaw puzzle.



Things had not been going so well for us since our move down here from Johannesburg. There are times it doesn’t seem to make sense why we are still here. There is nothing going on at this point that provides reassurance that things will work out for us, and we will be able to support ourselves without having to go back with our tails between our legs feeling like being here has been a complete failure. If there is one thing that would make being here worth it, no matter how badly things worked out in the end, it was the fact that only from being here did we meet Diego.



When we told him we had been robbed he was quite devastated. Things like this didn’t happen in the world that he lived in. If there was one thing about him where he fell short it was that something like crime just didn’t happen. We got to thinking if there might be any possible good that might have come out of this incident. One of the things was maybe it was something that he needed to be exposed to, and he was only exposed to it from being with us.



Dark Energy.

Diego had a thing for trying to get an inside perspective of the dynamics of the place he was experiencing. As an outsider in South Africa I got the idea his impression was that black people here were good and white people ‘bad’. I think part of him putting up a message for a lift to a party was more about meeting the locals than about getting transport. When the conversation turned towards our life in Johannesburg and the crime situation there I’m not sure what we were saying really sunk in.



Maybe what he heard was two white people being a bit overly dramatic, struggling to come to grips with the countries new dispensation, people that couldn’t yet trust anyone who wasn’t of the same color. Whether that was going on I’m not sure, but it did seem quite obvious to us that he wasn’t taking us as seriously as we hoped he would. From our side the last thing we wanted to see was this guy, who we were feeling very privileged to have met, get hurt in a bad way on the mean streets of Jo’burg because in his world nothing bad ever happened.



And so it was that maybe we pushed the issue a bit more than we probably needed, even if only to make sure that he was definitely convinced, and hopefully in being convinced to not take any unnecessary risks that would put his life in danger while he was out there. After what happened later that night happened, I got this idea that maybe all the talk of the bad stuff in Jo’burg is what attracted a bad thing happening here. As if we had invoked the same kind of dark energy. As if it was the only way to get Diego’s attention. Show him that it was possible for people of color to be bad because they were bad, and not just because the people telling him this were untrusting and suspicious whites.



Strong Medicine.

Earlier on in the evening Diego had decided to get some MDMA. When he got back he gave us two tabs of acid. Looking back the event felt every bit like being given bread from heaven. It was a bit from what the effects were, how it colored the perception of events as they unfolded during that evening. But mostly, it was much later on in the morning. The sun had come up and the day was in full swing. We were sitting off to one side of where the flea-market was having a cup of coffee and an ‘all natural’ muffin.



It was at this point nestled in the dirt and trampled weeds we became intimately acquainted with the ‘language’ of emotion. Discovered it as if it was something we had never experienced before. That having spent fifteen years in Jo’burg cooped up in an office staring at a computer screen had robbed us of a more complete experience that is being human. If there is one thing defines our experience of Cape Town it is the extremes in how we’ve been feeling here. It’s been a roller-coaster ride that way with so many ups and a whole bunch of downs. It seemed to be culminating in what we were going through at that very moment. So we both sat there and cried at each other, saying little if anything. I made a mental note that I have a lot bottled up in around my throat area.



Now I have had my reservations about using LSD. My medicine of choice has been psilocybin. As it was it was still too soon to use that after my last experience, and so it was that I used this instead. Compared to what I remember of using it almost an age ago things were decidedly… different. In fact it felt different enough for me to think I had actually done ‘shrooms and not acid, albeit a low dose at that – psilocybin has a way of being a bit more… overwhelming. Although it did feel like an almost incomplete mushroom thing, it still brought enough to the equation to be appreciated. Whereas before I would have avoided it at all costs, now it feels like it can be quite the strong medicine.



Salvia Divinorum.

The acid was taking its sweet time to get working. I was less concerned about it than I was about dancing. It’s one of the things you can get done during an all night outdoor trance party, catch up with any dancing to loud music you’ve been missing out on. It was during a moment I was just sitting and staring that I realized something was happening. Opposite where I sat on the other side of the dance-floor were some bushes bordering a forest. What were its branches swaying haphazardly in a breeze became green tentacles that moved with structure and purpose.



It was hypnotic. With a bit of effort on my part it went a bit further. It felt like time had stopped, that wherever I was was not wherever I was, it was elsewhere. It was quite there, no-one dancing, no loud music, nothing. This was a place where the bushes were moving, I was dead still just sitting and watching. Something about this feeling was familiar. It felt like I was on Salvia. That the vision so happened to be dominated by green reinforced this feeling. The bush was the spirit of Salvia manifest, she was here now saying hello.



Back at our tent were about two doses of Salvia 10x extract. It was one of the things in my bag, which the three wise men stole. When we realized what had happened we took comfort in the fact that these guys had probably got a bit more than they bargained for. Surely it was the first thing they would do once they saw something smoke-able, fill up a pipe of this strange looking herb and take our new butane torch to it. If they did it right they might not see things the same way again afterwards. They might even decide to put all our things back like they had found them, worried about what sorcery was up.



But what actually happened next was even stranger than that. One of the things I found the next day with B’s Dream Book, one of the few things our wannabe gangster friends had seen fit to discard before leaving with the rest of our stuff, was all of our Salvia Divinorum. I got the feeling like she didn’t want to end up in the hands of these people, sort of like maybe they weren’t good enough, sort of like they didn’t deserve whatever gift she could give them.



The night before the day that we met Diego we had used her, for about the fourth or fifth time over the previous three weeks or so. It was different for B this time, this time it was so much more stronger. She was convinced she had died, and confused to how this might have transpired tried to return back to where she knew she was alive. Of course, that place wouldn’t be around for the next few minutes. She managed to restrain herself from any physical escape from this unbearable realization.



It feels like meeting Diego the next day and him being able to do what he did for us was related somehow to her immersive experience. Like maybe it isn’t the experience itself that you have whilst under the influence that is significant, but it is what happens then, what manifests in your life afterwards that is. What can make it quite significant especially is that you might seek something, from having a need to make further progress maybe, feel like what might help you is meeting someone, someone specific. We had been talking about that nearly three weeks ago already actually, back there when we were on a train, back there where we had met the False Prophet.



False Prophet.

We were on a train going to fetch the car from a car service place. This guy got on the train at one of the stops and despite there being plenty of room he sat opposite and across from us. He looked like a bit of a weirdo and at first I thought he might be one of those hippie trance heads with dreadlocks etc. B and I normally feel quite intimidated by these kinds of folk and are not sure what to do with ourselves when they are around. At first it was a question of doing the normal thing and pretending like he didn’t exist. But it started to get so that he was being difficult to ignore. When eventually he upped and left we literally breathed a sigh of relief. And then he came back. He wasn’t just difficult to ignore now, getting up close and personal with this guy seemed to be inevitable. I agonized over what to say to him for a while.



The next day we were going to an Alien Safari party, I wondered if he would be going and whether to ask him about that. Instead I settled for something I had asked a homeless bum a while back. I leaned over towards him and asked if you wanted to tell someone something, something important, what would it be? He got complicated straight away, I realized I had put the question the wrong way. When he got the gist of it though, the thing he felt he would like to impart was along the lines of “More Action, Less Talking”. It turned out his name was John and there was something about the guy that was quite pleasant and appealing. Although I had botched it up a bit at least at this point the ice had been broken.



We got to talking about all sorts of stuff. He was saying that people often tell him he looks like Jesus. I laughed and said we were pleased to meet him. The guy looked a bit of a mess – hair everywhere and unshaven. He had shaved just the one side of his face so the one side was a bit more unshaved than the other. I thought he did kind of look like what Jesus might look like in 2008. Some prim and proper people around us started looking a bit uncomfortable, from how he looked Jesus ’08 had a lot of explaining to do.



I had a thought but struggled to express it, something to do with it being so hard to see where this event would fit in. It just had that feel of being something that happened that would lead on to something else later, something bigger and better. That it would only be sometime afterwards where you can see whether what felt like a random chance meeting with someone plays any part in your life going forward. B and I spoke about it some more after we said goodbye to John and get off the train. She was a bit what-the-fuck about the incident so I tried to put it in a better light, to illuminate it.



I explained that something had happened recently, maybe in a dream the previous evening, something that made me feel like I need to pay attention, to watch out for a sign. So when this guy started coming across, as being somewhat in our faces it wasn’t all that easy to ignore – was this the sign I was looking out for? There has been this feeling going on, that it was time for us to meet someone. Someone that might be able to help us a bit further on our journey, because how we were doing it now had reached a dead end. So part of working with Salvia which we had just started doing, was also about putting it out there, sort of a request for such a person to make an appearance. Although it didn’t turn out that John was this person, that John was our Jesus, it does feel like he was some kind of messenger. His message wasn’t that he was Jesus himself, his message was that Jesus is coming. And then we met Diego.



The Snake.

So how much of all this is just a normal sequence of events? How much of it needn’t be read into so intense? It’s not just in the last couple of things I’ve written either, that so many dots seem to be connected somehow. But just how far can you take it, that what goes on around you has meaning, can be interpreted to be more than what it looks like.



The way I’ve put some of the recent past together, and some of how it was interpreted could feel like a bit of a stretch of the imagination, but somewhere inside of me it is almost 100% believable, 100% accurate. There’s no room for doubt in my head that what I’ve said is how it is. If there is then it’s not from it being untrue, it’s from how I’ve said it. There’s a thing about the level I’ve communicated on, that maybe it’s a level that’s difficult for people to relate to, that makes my story less convincing.



Walking in a forest after all the excitement had died down B and I were talking. We had just passed through a stretch of trees that lined both sides of us. Something about the sounds coming from around us felt all weird and quite different. It felt surreal and put our heads in a strange place. On some level something more had just happened than us just walking through some trees. I said to her if it was Carlos Castaneda writing about the incident he would put it in a way that made it feel more real, include the spirit of what had just been encountered, talk about the place having power, put it in a way that more people could relate to. Maybe that’s why his books sold so well.



In a way it feels like what we are going through involves the same stuff that Carlos speaks about. I just haven’t written it down that way yet. At that point B called me a bit back, where a small snake was passing across her path. I remembered last week after meeting Diego for the first time, another large snake crossed the highway as we made our way home.

I got chatting to an old friend about a recent ordeal. At that point things were still quite bleak, and we had not got a buyer for our property yet - that happened the very next day oddly enough. We went into what death is in quite some depth, covered a lot of ground and I wish I could remember half of what got said. As it is the tolerance threshold for alcohol is quite low and so any attempt at complete and accurate recollection can only ever be just yet another ambitious project, destined for a premature termination.



Now it might be fair to say that I have spent an amount of time trying to figure a couple of things out. One such thing is a way to get my head around what the purpose of any particular ‘spiritual’ path is. I’m guessing if you get that down pat, can buy into it, use it as motivation maybe, it could be something that helps you realize why bothering with that path is actually worth it. So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that a potentially valid, all encompassing reason why to bother with something turns out to be because it prepares you for death.



I don’t mean that in any kind of warm and fuzzy way. The way that makes it is easy to agree with, dismiss and move on to the next topic of conversation. I mean it like being in a situation where death is the very next thing that is going to happen, no time for any more distractions, no time for fond farewells, no time for final goodbyes. Are you ready. Are you really ready. If the idea sinks in properly the odds are no, not ready. The odds are it’s not something much thought about, taken a step further something that is denied. Death just does not happen.



Is this a recent development? A natural and healthy one? Or is it something that people had respect and reverence for in some bygone age. Allowed it it’s place in the great scheme of things. More than that - is it possible there was a time specific routines were made available to people, designed for them to actively engage in preparing for it. And even further, were people encouraged to experience ‘mini-deaths’ in a religious framework, in a spiritual perspective as an effective aide in their development on a path. Well apparently, this was indeed the case.



Denial of death is a recent development. There was a time it was not denied. Not that events on earth were ever completely harmonious and peaceful for such lengthy periods of time, but is it possible a relationship exists between what one might call the most extremely dangerous state of affairs our planet has experienced for a very long while and this concept of denying death?



If you agree that things are looking bad from a planetary perspective… If you agree that a cause of this situation is irresponsible use of limited resources… If you agree that another cause is mismanaged disposal of pollution… If you can consider it possible at all for these things to be the province of the human species… If you can think the more people there are the worse these things get… Then perhaps maybe… Perhaps yes there is a link…



You might think the fundamental flaws inherent to such a self-destructive ideology is blatantly obvious. Evidently not so. For some reason it makes perfect sense to encourage people to cling to life until well past their sell-by date. Witness the drab well concealed institutions housing droves of wrinkled and worn out corpses of a human being, disconnected from the rest of humanity save for the most tenuous of connections being contempt, and scorn. For that is what they receive from strangers. From friends and family as well even.



Intrinsically linked to the denial of death is an unholy reverence for the sanctity of human life. It’s not just a question of making sure people can live for longer it’s also a question of making sure people successfully breed as much as possible. This despite the fact that the more people there are the more of a burden. That this in a world where resources are strained to the max equals an existence spent in abject poverty and dismal squalor. Even where hordes of people manage to eek out a living in the middle of a desert being eaten alive by flies and maggots the cavalry drops food into the starving melee from the safety of airplanes that pass overhead.



This makes sense? Does it not make more sense that other motivations exist from outside ourselves that involve these insanities? Motivations on an economic scale? How much money can be made from a small, young, healthy virile population? Not much. How much money can be made trying to keep a large number of old and sick people alive? A lot. You argue that surely the marvels of modern technology experience it’s zenith in the ability to preserve human life, and that such a feat can be nothing short of god-given. That it’s not something can be objected to if that’s the case. I argue then that your understanding of god is immature, convenient and self-serving.



My point is that a lot more death is needed to balance things out, for there to be any hope of salvaging what seems to be quite a desperate situation. That if a lot more death is needed it might help if people were prepared for it, and being prepared resisted it less. If preparing for death is an honorable objective, could it be the premise of a spirituality. If it is the premise of a spirituality and had been realized, can there be anything wrong with committing suicide.

So after about a year of arriving in Cape Town we get to a point where it seems we can’t survive financially outside of an office. We had been working on other ways of making money, but it might be time to concede defeat. Along with the concession a dawning ominous realization that the money we did have was only good for monthly expenses over about the next four months. Getting an office job to help pay the bills does not feel like a quick and easy solution either in the current economic climate, and then there is the whole employment equity thing going on as well.



As some kind of fail-safe mechanism we had a property we could sell up in Johannesburg and possibly enough profit to tide us over for a while. But of course, interest rates have gone through the roof on the back of escalating inflation thanks to oil getting so expensive. Needless to say it’s not a good time to sell property, which for the first time in a long while is actually depreciating in value. So it didn’t look like we could sell it any time soon. All in all things were looking pretty bleak.



We had got another place to live, so were living out of boxes that had been packed for the actual move. We were leaving a semi-detached in Observatory for a small town-house effort in a complex in Muizenburg. I’m not sure the contrast could have been much greater. Obz was getting a bit much for us - there was all sorts of drama. The house was on a busy street in an area that many less than desirables had access to. There was the time a guy was shot just outside… The time someone stuck a screwdriver in the lock of the car door… The time a bunch of rowdy idiots scared our dog so bad it escaped from an enclosure and got lost.



At this point it seemed we would move, and then run out of cash shortly thereafter. The prospects were daunting… In a last ditch effort we spoke to family, were they perhaps interested in buying our property? We could cover the installments with the profit, and help them settle the bond once a buyer did eventually appear. It was asking a bit much so it was no big surprise when none of them could do this either.



Soon thoughts turned to suicide. Alone in the dark at night tossing and turning in restless sleep contemplating all manner of escapism with an emphasis on being able to ensure B would still have enough money to survive without me. I needed a way to die that wouldn’t draw any untoward attention from an insurance company that gave it grounds to default on the capital benefit. I imagined scaling the heights of Table Mountain in dreadful weather and hope the elements would claim me.



It felt like the plan was being quite clinically processed, observing it from the outside, surely it was not the death of someone close to me, me personally. It only got complicated once I began to imagine what impact this course of action would have on those I left behind, particularly on B. Waiting in the embrace of rock and sky for death did not scare me, but the thought of leaving her behind made me cry like a baby.



The next day I spoke to her about it. There wasn’t really a way to do this and hope for some kind of miraculous solution. All I did was drag her into the same desperate cold and lonely claustrophobic place that I felt trapped in already. B felt that if I was going to go through with it, she would join me. As much as this made me feel quite a bit better, it was still a very desperate and unpleasant situation. And so we spent our last days in Obz feeling as depressed as we had ever managed to feel before in all our lives.



It was at some point during the move, traveling on the road between our old and new homes that I realized all it would take to buy us more time, was to sell the property in Johannesburg for a whole bunch less than we were wanting for it. It would be so that someone would get an absolute bargain, and we would still get enough to not have to kill ourselves. The simplicity of the solution was so obviously that not having thought it before felt absolutely absurd. I began to feel a great deal of relief that day.



Muizenburg is all sorts of weird, a totally surreal corner of the universe. It’s a lot quieter than the other places in and around Cape Town. It’s nestled in a corner of a bay where a peninsula is connected to mainland. The weather seems even more volatile than usual with spectacular scenery of mountains, clouds, the sea, stars, sun and moon rise. Compared to Obz it was easy to think we had left Hell and landed right in the lap of Heaven. It seemed like all the drama about money was synchronized with being there. After a few days we reduced the selling price of our property and found a buyer, which felt like a second chance was synchronized with being here.



And so we died. We died and were reborn.

integrating The Experience...



anyone think it can take you over the edge a bit sometimes... something about an introduction to something so different to 'normal' that 'normal' just seems so messed up afterwards... specifically an acute awareness of how stupid everything is... everything that people involve themselves in that constitutes our everyday waking reality... that there is very little that people do, that is REALLY worthwhile. can it seem like of all the options and guidance available to you, all of it is rotten to the core, riddled with lies and deceit.



i guess an important question is; is it...? maybe i missed something and the world is an okay place, everything that involves people is mighty fine... somewhere along the line i might have misunderstood because at this point, something feels very wrong. it's one of the things that seems to get exposed during my 'experiences'... that the stuff we do, how we exist at this point is a joke, and things would need to look VERY different compared to reality now before it actually made any sense...



maybe this kind of education is unique to me. is it? in any event the situation is that once this awareness exist, could it be a bit of a challenge to return to your life 'the next day', and pick up from where you left off, start playing the games all over again that you were before The Experience? because surely you were playing games, anyone that needs to survive 'normally' would have been, wouldn't they have?



would it be a valid statement, that you might need to be prepared to have your world turned upside down, forever afterwards, if you were to establish relations with plants that have power...? return to a world where absolutely everything no longer made sense... that it might be with quite a Big Degree of Difficulty you have to indulge what constitutes The World.



is it possible that suddenly everything it has to offer you does not provide an iota of comfort. that all the activity and guidance no longer provides safe buoyant passage in a boat on the sea of life. or at least, very little does... of course there are bits and pieces of stuff floating around you, you can only try to use it to keep you afloat... but surely it's not the cushy office job that will do it... maybe taking up a devotional practice will...



okay well... so maybe that's not quite what happens to everyone all the time when they get into this stuff, maybe it's an extreme. but isn't it what you will get if you aim high enough, are persistent...? isn't it what you are going to end up and find if do this work in earnest...? is there a chance this will be the result the more seriously you get into it, and the more powerful the plants are that you use...



>>>



quote

Lenard:

It’s what we were chatting about Fri nyt man...

end quote



yeah, t'was fri nite that led me to write this up... felt like it was something i was trying to discuss with you but not sure i did adequately...



i guess i could write a whole lot of stuff... but will try to not. i think at the end of the day maybe i just have a hurdle to cross, involving Iboga. in my head it's not the same league as the Others... it concerns me when people say they want to work with it, if they are comfortable saying it then it feels to me like they aren't actually familiar with what it can do.



in my head it's a 'Very Big Deal' even bringing that word up. it's a word that you use when you want your world to end, because if you work with it, and work with it properly, that's what will happen.



maybe i just need to lighten up about it. be prepared to accept it's something that you can use like 'shrooms are used, like cactus... that like with these things you can still exercise a degree of control, and have options... that you 'Can do Iboga'... that it's not 'Iboga does You'...



>>>



thanx Z... i get that... or am trying to... isn't it possible though that with the Others you can still get away with it, if by any chance your path needs work... i'm not sure you can get away with it when it comes to Iboga though... i mean if you falter... approach it wrong... are careless... you could pay with your life... there are people that have... i'm not talking toxicity... i'm talking synchronicity...



>>>



quote

Lenard:...Oh, yes Prof, I think know that feeling you're describing. Like you don't have enough time. Time running out ( feeling like you're gonna die soon if something isn't accomplished ). Personally, I think that is Spirit promting you in a particular direction. Buuut, also good to chill, be wise in not making hasty decisions...

end quote



i guess... the more acute a sense of stupidity in everything involving established society the more urgent the need to find something to involve yourself in that does make sense to you... i think my point was that working with this stuff is going to put you in this situation... i think the disconnect is that my opinion is most people will have to change their situation radically for life to make sense again...



that this might be quite a difficult thing to do... it is in anticipation of that difficulty that it seems prudent for people to exercise a degree of caution - before taking leaps down the rabbit hole... my other point was that this was especially the case if you wanted to leap down the rabbit hole with Iboga...



>>>



anywhoo... if everyone could please excuse my further self-indulgences...



to scratch a surface... what is it exactly that is so bad... what are the things that are such a joke that would make it so difficult to continue to exist submerged in the midst of it...



an example...



any attitudes... messages... pleas... that involve the sanctity of human life... -complaints about war... -having to feed the starving... -sympathy for the sick and elderly... -expectations of starting a family...



stop me if it sounds delusional... that this stuff doesn't get rubbed in your face day after day...



this stuff is a a Big Fat Joke. and yet to react to it for what it is, is what defines you as deprived... how can anyone seriously be rethinking existence... what the solution to The Problem is... if the prevalent attitude towards Death is Denial... and longevity... immortality... continues to get clung to...



i must admit... perhaps this is not necessarily A Truth as experienced [by everyone] whilst under the influence... it feels suspiciously like the murmurs of what came before... this is a truth that has experienced an emphasis thanks to Their Influence? and what was an occasional annoyance has become an unbearable inconvenience...



so what the future... implementation of 'sustainable'... 'environmentally friendly' communities... or a new favorite pastime - sit back and relax, observe and do nothing... feel nothing... as the world and the people in it drop dead like flies all around you...



my 'empathy' needs work...? emotion is a tool being used to sucker you into behaving like a fool... you Dont Think that it's in the best interest of any growing economy to keep society sick and alive... you Dont Think it's just about creating a whole bunch of jobs and making a lot of people wealthy... you think caring for people is a question of ethics... it's ethical to keep as many people alive for as long as possible just so a buck can be made?



>>>



heh...!

it's less about pointing fingers, not at all about whether i'm compassionate...

it has a whole lot to do with common perception... thinking how you/ the world understands stuff IS... when it is NOT... and pointing out that this can be exposed once under the influence... and how difficult it can be to return and realize... everything you thought you knew you didn't... everything everyone else thought they knew they didn't... and being able to operate sanely in such an environment... whether if it would be difficult it is such a good idea to use the power plants... especially if this curve ball is thrown at you.

thanx for reading... anywhoo.



>>>



1000% agree... i think it's what i've been trying to say all along... what i doubt though is that many who get into this stuff do not know it... or think they do but do not really [as in, have their own idea in terms of what would pass for adequate, when actually, it is very far from it].

anywhoo... it's been a blast...

Cohesion. There was a nifty definition. “Physics The intermolecular attraction by which the elements of a body are held together”. No, no, more to do with a description. Or something. Was it important, having to do with reality at all. Is it what the body does; something it does very well, it makes sense of nonsense. Is everything nonsense. Are you just the eye in a cyclone, something around which molecules can structure themselves like so much debris…



I’m not sure I got it, that book Valis by Philip K. Dick, maybe it’s about not getting it. Not getting what. There’s this thing about what reality is, is it what it is. I mean generally speaking, people seem to have got it down pat. Apparently we actually haven’t got it down pat at all. What happened to Philip and what he writes about in Valis kind of has to do with that. But I got that. Maybe what I didn’t get was what all the hype was about. Was there hype. Did someone say the book was worth a read. Worth reading or worth buying. Well, it’s available online, pretty much for free, I guess it’s worth a read if you have the time.



There were a couple of lines I enjoyed to read, like “What we have here is a Zen paradox. That which makes no sense makes the most sense.”. Maybe the uncertain bit involves whether it dented my worldview at all, or gave me enough to go on so as to prove a useful guide in the event of finding myself in a similar dilemma, or even being in hot pursuit of warping that deceptive reassurance inherent to our physical (or physiological) composure; that which pertains to just what constitutes reality. I know, I know, thems exist that might wonder why you might want to mess with that. It has something to do with not being satisfied with it, feeling it probably interferes with learning anything constructive about that which is “beyond” here.



It would make sense that a default reality construct would be one that most resonates with physical (or physiological) survival. Of course “beyond” here is not the realm of physical (or physiological) survival. That might be “why you might want to mess with that.”. Sure thems exist that feel the tools they employ to navigate reality being as successful as they are entail being adequately equipped to deal with anything beyond here. For others this logic might be a bit faulty.



Maybe the issue is not that a default reality construct is merely that, a default, implying it is something that can be changed, improved upon maybe. Maybe the issue is a limited perception of what can be gained from that, even if it involves any progress made learning anything about that which is beyond here, beyond life. Not enough can be gained from learning about that, to warrant messing around with how you perceive the universe works.



“prove a useful guide” Valis did not. In a way I get the feeling the hype about it is not from it being a really fantastic piece of literature, or that the “science-fiction” like concepts in it (if that is what they are) are so awesomely mind boggling, neither that the storyline or plot are complex or deeply satisfying. Maybe it’s more to do with the semi-realness of the events and in being real, are quite incredible. I didn’t feel particularly persuaded though, of any massive impression these events left on Philip, it felt like it was partially left up to me to feel as impressed.



There’s enough in the book to be intrigued though, enough to create a bit of curiosity about the other books Philip wrote, the other two books in particular which apparently make up a Valis trilogy. Or to do some mucking about on the internet, find a bunch of stuff to flesh out the book, flesh out the author. You might stumble on some kind of link to another two people this way, being Robert Anton Wilson and John C. Lilly. I picked up Roberts Cosmic Trigger after Valis, and so far it seems to feel like a bit more of a rewarding read.

I guess a continuation… smoking powdered Amanita with plain leaf Salvia, and it’s impact on dreaming. Too early I guess to proclaim being over the moon with results at this stage, but as much as I can be allowed to feel it, that’s how I feel. A tentative validation is in receiving the same response from B. Having smoked the blend about five times now over two or three weeks, there have been a few remarkable dreams, and a generally improved ability at dream recollection. Dreams seem to be having a different kind of atmosphere as well, weirder, but not off the wall weird.



I had an experience last night that convinced me of the potential of this blend, it will be interesting to see where this goes going forward. It started off with me sort of returning to consciousness after having been asleep, and not quite allowing myself to return completely, to remain sort of detached and relaxed, floating in a kind of reverie. To help with this I focused on my breath for a while. After focusing on it for a while I was able to kind of induce a kind of feeling of my body, a not feeling it feeling, as if it were not there. There was something about breathing in a way that made it feel like the body did not exist.



At some point I was in a dream that did not feel like a dream. Like whatever it was I was doing was being done in that place as if it was reality. What I was trying to do there was similar to what I was doing in reality proper. Trying to induce an exit from myself; astral project. The environment there was similar to here, I was in bed sleeping next to B, but not in a house like we are in now, it was more like an apartment on an elevated floor in some kind of residential building.



There was something going on there, some kind of situation, I could here a song playing, Whitney Houston maybe, I wanted it softer or turned off altogether because I found it distracting. Also something to do with the power being off, I had a sense of candlelight coming from the window of another apartment. And also, at some point the memory of trying to switch the lights on and them not working.



In my dream bed trying to exit from my body by feeling it levitate I realize I am levitating, and think this is not right, the exit I desire is not meant to result in a physical levitation. I kind of float back down and try again but this time to feel something inside of me levitate instead of doing it in “reality”. There is something going on about heavy breathing, maybe worried that it will disturb B’s sleep, and feeling reassured because she seems to be breathing heavily as well.



It does happen, I can feel a separation, something inside of me floating outside of my dream body. Because I am lying on my back it is the opposite wall that is the floor and I can see it a few meters beneath me. I feel really heavy, somewhere in my mind I’m thinking this has to do with close proximity, that it will feel lighter if I can get further. I wonder a bit about feeling energy and it comes, an electric feeling spreading throughout my fingertips, hands maybe. Maybe I am processing too much information because I start to feel myself returning to consciousness, and so I remember what was just happening.



Afterwards there was a bit of like a recalibration thing going on, feeling pleased at what had just happened, great joy at being able to remember it all, and a sense of conviction that we had a winning formula in the blend being used. That it would only be a question of time and a bit of persistence before finally managing to learn the fine art of astral projecting. I can feel myself starting to consider what the implications of this might be.

Feels like forever since I’ve had any significant success at dream recollection. In what can best be described as something that blew up in my face, using Salvia x10 extract whilst goofed seemed to result in the exact opposite of what was sought, leaving me high and dry instead of with a dreamlife that was renewed and reinvigorated. At that point I had managed to establish frequent recollection of lackluster dreams that were missing the so-called “x factor”.



About 2 weeks ago I started to work with some Amanita we found out here. Apart from the traditional tea and drinking of urine part of it, there is talk of being able to get effects from smoking it. I smoked it on 3 occasions recently, so far the preferred preparation is to mix it in powdered form with crushed Salvia (plain leaf) in a spliff. Plain leaf Salvia by itself does not seem to produce any significant effects for me. The light burning leaf seemed to be a good choice as a carrier for the heavier burning powdered Amanita. I have yet to try making a smokeable resin from the plant material by mixing it with alcohol and evaporating.



The smoke does make me feel a bit stoned, but isn’t as intense for me as MJ is. But a possible and most welcome side effect appears to have manifested after falling asleep – impacting on my dreams/ dream recollection. Here’s a little one I had called “Significator”. (One who, or that which, signifies. In this diagram there was one significator which pressed remarkably upon our astrologer's attention. - Sir W. Scott.). I guess it’s relevant because I bought a Tarot card deck earlier that night. Well, cashed in a gift voucher really, which I got way back in February. Around about the same time as when my dream life took a nose dive…



I’m in the nature, on a hike, there’s a mountain, veld. I set up a circle for ceremony somewhere close to a large bush maybe, not quite a tree. I light up a smudge stick, creating sacred space etc. Then commence with drumming to journey. The sound of the drum goes weird, the tempo increases impossibly, I think it’s thanks to an electronic intervention or something? It starts going so fast it’s less of a tempo now, more of a droning. The smoke goes weird as well, not disappearing, it creates a mist that envelopes everything. I’m dancing now (well, sort of) in my circle, the native American Indian chants from one of those Sacred Spirit cd tracks fills my ears.



Sound is something that gets messed with when you smoke this stuff.



I can hear voices now, people approaching. I start to gather my stuff, wanting to avoid any awkward encounters. I had my smudge stick, and that which I used to beat the drum with, some third thing as well. But it’s too late, the group of people are upon me. The protective cloak of smoke has vanished, everything is alarmingly clear. I have no shirt on, I absently note that my body looks different to how it looks usually. As odd as things appear I decide to just greet them as they pass. They are young woman, American maybe, tourists. They pass and sort of double back above me, as the path sort of bends that way going forward. They stop there and marvel at something going on in the distance, a leopard is chasing two wildebeest…



At first this is an awesome spectacle to behold. Everyone is quite impressed. There doesn’t seem to be a need for fear, this does not feel like it is near. But then the buck dart towards us and before we know it they are here, with the leopard in tow, she turns on us now. The girls huddle in a group, I try herd them towards the face of a large flat rock, backs towards it we might stand a chance to fight the wild animal off. One of the girls get singled out by the large cat, she has a bit of a run in with it. I am overcome by an instinctual protective urge and intervene…



The stick I use to beat the drum with becomes a much more solid thing, an adequate weapon, quite capable of inflicting a great deal of damage. I parley with the beast, there’s a moment a look in it’s eyes seems familiar, and a moment of feeling recognition. I return it’s lunges at me with swipes at it’s muzzle with my weapon. I can see she’s getting hurt. Eventually my defense becomes an offense, and I think this continued until she was dead. No more a threat I return to the girls and check that they are alright. I hug the one that was singled out and tell her she must hike more and loose weight. It was more a lighthearted thing than demeaning.



There was something about needing to do something to respect the spirit of the deceased leopard… I woke up and felt like this was a profound dream, and grateful for whatever it was that was responsible for it. I was convinced that the experience was some kind of initiation.

Man, there’s so much to get out of the way before most people could pick up something like this. Its so weird how much of a different space a person can get themselves in compared to someone that wouldn’t get involved with this kind of stuff. A space where they couldn’t see things the same anymore like how everyone else sees them. I guess it’s a separate discussion altogether, a lengthy preamble that wouldn’t really go anywhere anyway.



There might be other better places to start if you still need to be convinced that drugs [as entheogens are controversially described in general] have any useful purpose to serve. If you’re in a situation where you find yourself needing to fight off a bunch of thoughts that balk at the idea of disturbing your safe, stable and sane understanding of how things work, then that might be a good place to start. Get yourself to a point where you can suspend disbelief, even just for a short while.



In fact, maybe that’s a good description of what this subject is all about. Recognizing how convinced you are of how things work. Recognizing how unprepared you are to shift your perceptions. Are you able to loosen them up just a bit. Can you handle turning your world (view) on it’s head. Not only is the earth not flat, it’s also not quite the right way up.



So what is there in this that someone who is prepared to take that step might find here that could be quite useful? Maybe it’s a complicated subject, and fraught with peril. It’s a strange situation sort of like when you’ve taken a drug and got to a point that you would like to make sense of your experience with it. It may have felt like it’s not quite what you were told it was, that there might actually be just a little bit more to it than getting trashed.



Sure there is the crowd that does this and feel it is what it is. Maybe even at some point feel the exercise has become a bit too disruptive. Its like you know what; this is not actually always that pleasant, in fact, its downright messed up. From there I guess theres a bunch of possibilities. You could turn to those that do subscribe to the current prevalent model of reality to help you deal with a bad habit. You could mnage to disconnect from it independently altogether. You could explore the subject a bit more and see what other have to say about it.



Fortunately there are people that have gone to the effort of making something available if you decide on this last option. Not that I think they would pretend to have all the answers, just that they might be able to provide a bit of direction. This context seems to fit best. It’s not 100% about convincing anyone that they need to take drugs, you would probably [need to?] have been doing that already. It’s also not 100% about saying here are all the answers and you need to take drugs to achieve understanding them.



No… it’s more like the answers were always there already anyway. The important thing is to understand that part of the answer requires a degree of effort on your part. That there are a variety of tools and resources available to you that can be used to help out in this process. If you feel comfortable including drugs as a tool then I guess this is the kind of book you might find quite useful.

One post about The Fountain – a movie I got the dvd of recently. I thought it touched on some pretty deep themes and from what I’ve read about it on the net, it’s meant to do just that. I think it probably deserves it’s own entry and maybe once I’ve summoned enough strength to watch it again it will get one. The other post is a couple more cents worth of thought on the Salvia videos being made available online. It’s (encouraging?) to see other people in the entheogenic community also getting bent out of shape about this issue. I would wager a guess that the people that make these videos available are mostly not the same people that you find online discussing them. They do not seem to be the same people that are trying to achieve anything with them other than trying to draw attention to themselves. In that sense, they deserve just as much attention as someone recording themselves falling off a skateboard, or being kicked in the face by a horse. Why anyone would want to watch that kind of stuff is beyond me...



Re: The Fountain movie.....

"Read about it somewhere that someone was talking about Apocalypto, I think because the common theme was Mayan. Anywhoo, looking into it a bit I decided this was a DVD I needed to get imported (it probably wouldn’t make it on the circuit here, and wouldn’t be stocked in the shops either). I watched it last night and woah, it is one seriously intense emotional movie. It seemed to contain some pretty profound insights and would help me put a face on some things that might otherwise be quite difficult to grasp.



The dude in the bubble with a tree is on some kind of journey, he might be like God or something – or a higher self of somebody, on his way to complete disintegration…? The bark of the tree he chomps is medicinal in some way (entheogenic?). It takes him to a time he was someone else, living another life, in which he had a difficult situation to deal with – the immanent death of his spouse…



Cut back to him and the tree and he needs to reassure himself that this is what he wants – to relive this experience – that he will be strong and go through with it. There are moments when he comes out of it and its too intense – he wants it to stop/ for her to leave him alone! And in the end it’s something that I think he learns to come to grips with – he lets go and is able to (enter the light…?).



The experience might be like a necessary cleansing that a soul needs to undergo before being able to move on. This could be like soul retrieval, where a part of yourself gets so traumatized “it stays behind”, leaving you a bit less complete than you could be. It would manifest in another incarnation as some kind of mental or physical aberration – karma like maybe.



This movie can have a big impact on you. I think people that are slamming it might be finding it hits a bit too close to home. That maybe they are not in a position right now where they feel very comfortable having to deal with the reality of death. That they would rather spend their money on stuff that will carry on distracting them from it? I for one am very glad I got it, and think it will come in very handy going forward on my journey."



Re: Get Salvia Videos Offline

"How many people are using Salvia with honourable intentions...? Does the number of people using her irresponsibly/ recklessly/ DISRESPECTFULLY far outweigh the rest? At this rate so it would seem. More and more I see people on the internet pointing out that entheogens ARE just another get-high quick-fix (see "Non believer that plants teach") - it re-enforces the perception. If this is the way it is maybe these things should be made illegal? What is the point of going to any effort to defend it if the majority who disrespect it stand the most to benefit?



Maybe a Friends of Responsible (Salvia) Use Society should be created which you have to be a member of before being allowed to use or buy Salvia. If you get bust not being a member you are breaking the law? If you are a member and get bust making stupid videos or being irresponsible with it then your membership gets revoked? I don't know.



What I do know is these videos are definitely getting some people upset about Salvia being legal. I got my ass whipped on someone's blog trying to defend Salvia being legal. I tried the cant let some stupid people mess it up for the some not so stupid people argument - you can find that blog on this link. (And I'm not supplying it for you guys to go there and cause trouble okay?).



Maybe when our knights in shining armour this side approach the people that post these stupid videos it can be with examples of where these videos are causing more harm than good? One thing I doubt is that they are posted with an intention to further Salvia's cause, it all just seems like adolescent attention seeking to me. A thread created here by someone that made one of these videos categorised it as "Entertainment" on youtube - not educational, started this thread with...



Quote:

Originally Posted by Carijok

I had two sitters, and they still couldn't stop me from breaking my furniture... (haw-haw)

My Salvia Trip



...? haw-haw.



Then tried proclaiming her innocence as intending to educate by stressing "the importance of having a *competent* sitter and being in an environment free of obstacles you might hurt yourself on." only once the heat got turned on (I didn't see anything about this before that). If they are meant to add value at all they really should come with some kind of commentary on what was experienced and/or what insight was gained. Okay, so that was the post making pro-Salvia videos solution, which I think is a great idea, did it get taken any further?"

My last experience with Syrian Rue left me feeling having no desire at all to dip my toes back into the water of altered states of consciousness. At least, not until I manage to make a bit of progress on the diet front, and maybe even a bit on the energy work front. This could also be from a couple of other things as well, like it being the middle of winter now and also us having a bit of an upheaval to deal with, as in having to sell the house and move to another town on the other side of the continent. It's been really weird watching as things progress on this. From it becoming a possibility, to it becoming a reality, and all the little bits in-between. There's no way we could have expected everything involved to run so smoothly especially trying to squeeze it all into such a small amount of time, and yet… It wasn’t all that long ago that B and I were saying there's no way something like this could happen, and if it did it had to be with some kind of divine intervention. One thing is for sure and that is both of us feel an increasing need to acknowledge the impact (spirit?) can have on your life.



In some aspects things have happened that are just too damn convenient, events have played out in such unlikely ways to suit us, they border on being creepy. We had thoughts in our minds of needing to put a deposit down on a new property development that would only be ready to occupy from 2010. As impossible as this might have been we found such a place which is fine, pretty close to where we are moving to. What made it unusual was it has the same name as another complex that we bought our first unit in going back 6 years. The day we applied to purchase it we got a buyer for our house - which we needed to find a buyer for before we could bother trying to apply for a bond to buy another place. We got a buyer for our house within 3 weeks of putting it on the market, which in some circles could be considered a small miracle in and of itself.



4 weeks ago we sighted an old friend (J) we hadn't seen in a while. I almost walked into his brother (B) 3 weeks ago - also an old friend. 2 weeks ago we bumped into N - also an old friend we hadn't seen in many years (5+). Then this past weekend sitting at a restaurant another old friend (G) joined us for a while. All these people we haven't seen for very long times, and we knew all of them from when we first started getting established in Johannesburg. There seemed to be little chance of seeing any of them ever again, let alone see them all in the space of a month, 2 months before we leave. When B and I chatted about it we thought maybe what's happening is things are being made so that we can get to say goodbye to all these people before we leave. B was so moved by this that after talking to G she actually broke down and cried - happy tears - something special was definitely going on. Then I got an invitation from a colleague I used to work with over 10 years ago. These people I used to work with when I first got here are arranging a reunion for next month, where I will get to see a whole bunch of people I haven't seen for a very long time - and get to say goodbye to as well - in about a month before we leave for Cape Town… weird.



I have backed off on the psychedelics for a while, but have played with MJ a couple of times. Going back a couple of weeks we got a movie called "The Fountain" in the mail. While it might be quite popular overseas it's still relatively unknown over here. From some of the stuff I read it did seem like it might be worth a watch (maybe), but nothing could have prepared me for what happened when we put it in the dvd player. So I light up a small one and check out one of the special features - Life on Ship? The dude basically goes through a mushroom cultivation tek (that I would love to have a go at doing myself), and I gather trips out on shroom tea when he sits in the lotus and meditates. The movie itself moved me to tears, and I'm not one to cry very easily. I was overwhelmed as the story unfolded, and I couldn’t believe that what I think are some pretty profound truths/ principles, could be contained in any movie, yet here it was. I am eternally grateful for the experience.



I passed the dvd on to a colleague at work, who promptly gave me two books to read (and keep!) after having watched it - Galactic Alignment and Maya Cosmogenesis by John Major Jenkins. I had had my eye on them for a while but never got a chance to order them yet - finances are taking strain, but it seems I was destined to read them one way or another and they elaborate nicely on the theme (from the dvd). At this stage half way through the one I can hardly believe some of the stuff I am reading - how important it all seems and how much sense it all makes. On a hike through the Botanical Gardens last weekend I lit up another small one, and had one of the most illuminating conversations with B about it all. In fact, it was getting so illuminating I was starting to feel like I was triqping, rather than being just a little st xx ned. In fact, with all the stuff that seems to be going on and how strange it all seems, it's starting to feel like I am triqping permanently. I am starting to think of having a bit more respect for MJ after this experience.



A while ago I read (and posted a "review" of) a book called Astrotheology and Shamanism, which basically punts (the return of) these two practices as (inevitable?) integral to the future (spiritual?) evolution of our species. It brought the subject up of it seeming like what Christianity was is based on very early traditions involving worship of the sun, moon and stars. It felt like this was more about making it evident that things are not quite what they may seem, and less about providing some kind of direction to help you pursue the subject further. I made a mental note about it and wondered where a good place to start on this might be, that is, to learn more about the worship of the sun, moon and stars. To be quite honest, all I felt was it being a bit of an anticlimax, and a bit of relief at thinking oh, so that's what it was all about then - no biggie. I mean, just how big of a deal can you make a system of belief out to be if all it is about is the position of stars and planets etc. in relation to each other? I'm not really sure you feel the impact of what this might mean from reading just Astrotheology and Shamanism.



In the books by John Major Jenkins I think you get that impact. You get to understand just how big a part (astrotheology) played in our ancient history, enough so as to make it entirely believable how derivative Christianity is. Not just that though, you get to learn what the logic is of why these things were so important. The impression I get is an entirely new impression of things beyond the physical, and it's beyond the physical I think you need to go to understand the full scope of what (astrotheology) is all about. Suddenly, whereas before, exploring the inner realms felt entirely a subject restricted to what I could achieve from a this body perspective, it's become a matter of being able to step outside myself and into the universe to learn about portals and passageways, metaphysics and perceptions. It feels like this is definitely something worth learning, and that it is definitely the right direction to go in. If I am going to journey significantly again sometime in the foreseeable future, it's going to be with a head filled with these things, and it will be outside at night, underneath all the stars, just like they did it back in the good old days...



As it is, in Cape Town we will be bunches closer to a place called Sutherland. It turns out they’ve built a massive observatory out there. Apparently it's one of the best places on this planet that you can get a decent view into outer space from.

We had a bit of snow to wake up to this morning. The last time it snowed here was in 1981.

:o|

My contribution to a thread on the entheogen.com forum - linked here. Maybe bothered with just as much to convince myself as to try convince the sceptic? Although in this particular case I don't think the source made a very solid case against the ability of entheogens to teach, at the end of the day I think more and more people are starting to point out they do not feel the same way about them as some of us do, which I guess could be construed as a bit airy-fairy. I think these opinions are a bit self serving, as in it does not make the user feel obliged to use them in any more of an honourable context other than to "party it on down dude". Perhaps this is preferable to a more noble reason because it would require time, effort and energy. And it would. Because ideally I think it would involve needing to commit to things that might encroach on an otherwise undisciplined lifestyle, needing you to commit to things like meditation, energy work, dream work, and a whole lot of reading/ learning. It might even interfere more with things like your diet, and what other substances you involve yourself with - and I would venture a guess that anyone with a use entheogens to party on down mentality are quite familiar with other non-entheogenic mind altering substances that do more harm than good. To start subscribing to a more noble approach to entheogen use would probably mean having to sacrifice these other things, and some people might not want to do that. Anyway, moving on, here is a copy of my post, #168.



Wow. Fascinating thread - thanks to all! Apologies to drag it out a bit, I just feel obliged to add my 1.98c worth!



Personally I am not very comfortable with the idea of using the teacher plants recreationally and if that was what the intention of protecting them or legalising them I think you could count me out - I would much rather be interested in making them available only for much more noble intentions. In fact I can only guess that this attitude is a pain in the ass to anyone going to the effort of trying to make them legally available. It's a sad situation that those with the least motivation stand to benefit from the efforts of someone whose life was touched by these substances enough so as to spur them into action.



As to whether its possible to gain insight into the nature of reality by using them you might instead ask if something that can provide insight into the nature of reality can also just provide an escape from reality? If you understand just how illusory reality is then perhaps an escape from it is exactly what equals exposure to the truth of it, or at least, an increased chance of an encounter with it. If you understand even just a little bit of how these things work then you must know that entheogens do not teach, so much as help you understand something you are trying to learn. In this sense where you are in your life and what you surround yourself with makes a big difference in what your experience of them might be.



If you *ask for* an escape from reality and you are inclined to just party all the time and you are just young and happy and free the odds are your experience of the teacher plants will emphasise these kinds of things. However, if you are looking at a complex situation and are putting effort into gaining an insight the odds are this might be what you manage to achieve. You do need to challenge yourself and you do need to try harder. Sitting back and just being critical of the efforts of those around you might not work. Not putting effort into it and waiting for someone to give you all the answers might not work. Expecting a teacher plant to teach you something when there is nothing you are willing to learn might not work.



Returning to the concept of reality; having to deal with death is a very real thing - just like you sitting at your computer and staring at the screen. Whether it is your own death or that of a close relative it is something that can be real. Perhaps if you found yourself at the mercy of a chemical induced addiction wanting to overcome it that is also a real thing. Another very real situation is needing to come to grips with yourself in some or other psychologically complex fashion, in fact, perhaps psychology is another language you are very interested in learning. It is intangible yet it does exist, the implications of it are that obvious. Just like we are aware that something like psychology exists is not so much from its tangibility as much as from the effects it has on reality, so too the principle might extend to spirituality. The point is, in all of these areas the effects of entheogens has been one of a very effective "teacher".



Whenever I come across a comment being made that doubts the deep impact an entheogen can make the first thing I wonder about is what that persons experience of them has been? The second thing I wonder about is what effort that person is making to help put them to some kind of constructive use? I'm not saying I have all the answers (and I hope my tone is not self-righteous or that intimidating), but I am trying to learn. Learning takes time and effort and I am prepared to make that sacrifice. My experiences so far might be as superficial and meaningless as yours, but at this stage I am quite prepared to abstain for a while from doubting or criticising their abilities, and the profound insights, the life changing experiences they have supplied to a countless number of people.



I guess at the end of the day, you get out what you put in.



In this light, some comments made on the posts in this thread:::



(post#3 by AloneNotLonely0...When using an entheogen and lets say you see an ancient woman explaining how small robots control humans and now only that you have used this plant can you be free and fully understand life. This was not an actual experience I just made it up to explain my views. Many people talk of such experiences and believe them. I can not to me it is crazy and loads of fun, but nothing more it can not be real. It is completely ridiculous to me. I have a question for those who do believe their experiences like this. How can you go on living in reality if you really believe some of your outlandish experiences and learning's as fact?)



Language can be quite a barrier sometimes. I would try interpret something like this from a personal perspective and the subconscious. The experience could make a lot of sense if you thought maybe there were impersonal things (machines) that affected how humans behave. In a sense this is what astrology is all about. If you mean on a molecular level it makes sense too - your body is full of systems and mechanisms that affect your behaviour - sometimes something *as simple as* hormones have a much bigger say in how you react to a situation, as opposed to where the intellect fits in. Coming to realise something like this whilst under the influence seems totally possible to me. The question is what are you prepared to hear? What are you prepared to believe? Is it wise to always take people so literally when they are trying to explain something?



(post#6 by Burning_Copal...but by either tilting the glass , or changing what the light is filtered through further, we can understand it differently, see it differently...)



This post reminded me of the idea of how set in a way a person can get when it comes to how they are willing to experience something. Over time it is so easy for this willingness to be restricted to some degree, depending on the effect of past experience, your upbringing and mental conditioning. These things can and do act as the stained glass that we see things through, turn an object on the other side of the glass into something that it is not. Whilst being under the influence might not necessarily help you see the candle as it truly appears (or maybe it will), it can help you to experience something differently to how you are used to. Depending on how set in your ways you were before, this flexibility could be quite refreshing - and significant enough to be construed as a valuable "lesson".



(post#9 by scyhop:per… This would support the claim that the big-bang created 4 dimensions, 3 of which we can readily observe with the naked eye, the 4th being time or gravity, I dunno, and the other six 'folded up', whatever the hell that means)



Its easy to get caught up in the idea of multiple dimensions, without really getting a handle on what that means. I found the following way of trying to understand it quite helpful, I just wish I could remember where I came across it::: 1 dimension - a point on a screen can only experience itself - it could not experience what a line does. 2 dimension - a line can experience the length of itself from end to end - two points at the same time - but it could not experience what a square does. 3 dimension - a square can experience all points at each end of the length of itself, plus each of the points at its breadth. Now consider that the experience of the square was invisible to that of the line, and that the experience of the line was invisible to that of the point, what does that mean to the square? That the experience of it is conceivable in dimension 4, but that dimension 4 is invisible to it. Would it really have been wise for the point to write off the possibility of the experience of a line, just because it could not experience it directly itself? Well, that’s what we appear to be doing where it concerns dimension 4+ in dimension 3.



(Bleh. That sounds awful I know).



(post#28 by Anima...If I had a nickel for every time I listened to some burned out hippie spew absolutely nothing whilst mentioning energy, spirits, and good vibes a dozen times in the course of some crap manifesto he came up with while tripping)



My experience with teacher plants has kind of fell short of convincing me that anything exists on this level as well. I put it down to what I was prepared to believe, and that I had a paradigm or two to shift before I could have luck with it. Lucky for me it's not just burnt out hippies into tripping that talk about energy though. Energy forms the premise of both yoga and tai-chi disciplines. Proponents of astral projection count energy as key to facilitating this practice too. Various mystic faiths all suggest a practice that increases your level and sensitivity to energy. The point is that you can subscribe to the idea of it without being considered delusional or misinformed from overexposure to entheogens. I think that most of us neglect this aspect of ourselves and write it off as beyond our control or scope of comprehension. The rest of us are just too lazy to bother with it. Are these really such good reasons to be critical of the idea of it?



(A number of posts by a number of people, on the whole plant consciousness and science thing.)



Hmmm, tricky. I think it's quite amazing that we struggle to give the rest of what constitutes life on this planet even an iota of respect considering it would not be possible for us to exist in the first place without it. To add insult to injury we are willing to draw conclusions about the rest of life around us about it's mind, body and spirit - even though we are quite prepared to admit that the tools that we measure these things with are really quite limited. The most we can say at this point is yes, physically there is a difference between us, and them. We use this difference to gather that well, in that case, it is inferior, or not capable of anything other than taking up space. Consider this, it is possible that other dimensions exists that we are inherently blind of. That life in this dimension is quite possibly merely a consequential manifestation of the workings in those other dimensions. That in those dimensions the necessary may exist for what produces the rest of life here to be considered our equal, or even better, superior to us. Now if this was the case, might not our conclusions be a tad hastily produced? I mentioned before some very real subjects that the contribution of entheogens might be considered teachers in. I think our disrespect of life around us and the environment is another good example - the adjustment of this attitude of those / some that use teacher plants could be another tangible lesson learnt that does indeed have an impact on reality.



(A number of posts by a number of people as well, on how valuable science is. Or is not.)



Science is quite valuable, and you certainly can use it to a very large degree to measure why something is the way it is or works this way because of that reason or whether the why of something is this or that because hard evidence exists to say it is so. On the other hand is it fair to deprive or limit or discredit or doubt your understanding of something that everyone is still busy trying to get to grips with, at least from a westernised mind perspective. I think the general pattern usually in these circumstances is to for this thing to be got to grips with first - let it exist first then we dissect it. Once we are much more literate in this area is when it will exist, and then might be a better time to explain it from a scientifically measurable perspective. In this sense perhaps the entheogen community are pioneers of something they can eventually help science begin to understand - one day. Lets just hope it doesn’t involve incarceration and a scalpel.



I don’t really have anything to say about the last bits involving love, except that whether it is measurable or not, I really really hope it does exist. I also really hope that in some small way, I have helped to persuade AloneNotLonely0 even just a little bit, that entheogens can and do help people to see things differently and change how they react to those things back out here in reality. In that sense that they are worthy of being deemed teacher plants.

Is it possible to achieve what needs to be achieved without guidance from mother nature? Why is it that the use of entheogens is frowned on by those punting the mystery traditions? Perhaps for this reason my opinion is swaying, or maybe it's just I can feel a new wind blowing... Cape Town beckons... In a few months I will flee from here, and embrace the arms of the mother city. It's been 14 years of landlocked overcrowding tooMUCHcrime and pollution - the fruits of privileged class competitive labour\ self-righteous snob behaviour.



In Cape Town Dream Herbs are dished up standard with every toasted cheese and tomato, the whiff of DiMiTri wafts in from every blade of grass so temptingly always within reach. Not that using them will be at all necessary...! With change comes opportunity. It's a chance for a new leaf and perhaps even synchronicity, a feeling that the coincidences are symptomatic of something much larger at play. It's this something larger the plants have managed to identify to us, and so there is more than enough to go on from here...



And so an end to my (fictitious) endeavours involving psychoactive sacraments. I feel there is something missing at this point involving them anyway. I think going forward I need to emphasise a few other things for a while - dream work, energy work, exercise and diet. I look forward to increasing the scope of what I write about here to include what is probably going to be quite a turbulent period, uprooting from Johannesburg and relocating to Cape Town. With a bit of luck the change of scenery will coincide with a different way of living, I guess at this point its a wait and see situation...

I’m not sure who deserves a bit more scorn, a bit more ridicule. I thought I would take a stand on an entry at another blog by fracas called “Have you heard about SallyD?“ that seemed pretty alarmist in its tone concerning Salvia Divinorum. As it is videos are being posted on the net of people floundering around whilst under the influence of SD. Some of these involve those of us more endowed with an infinite supply of wisdom – youngsters; teenagers; or in another word, freaking idiots. So how do you expect a parent to react when they stumble across something like this? Is it really such a big surprise that they want this stuff taken off the street? Exactly how do you defend the legal status of an entheogen, if this is what it does and this is what it is being used for?



My stand was you cant throw the baby out with the bath water - that you cant let irresponsible use by some mess it up for responsible use by others. Except, its complicated. First up, whether the use is responsible or not, is there anything anyone can hope to achieve with it that for all intents and purposes, is nothing more than a narcotic buzz? I mean, all you are doing with this stuff is messing up your body right, I mean, at least that’s all you can gather from what can be seen in these videos. So you reply that no it’s something you can use to access a mystical state, and throw in a big word like “spiritual”. Is it really surprising that this can prove to be quite a weak argument, in an age when “spiritual” is quite easily confused with “religious”. How spiritual is someone behaving when they use an entheogen to help them make America’s next funniest home video? Not very. Not to me.



The next big question is, compared to all the idiots competing for the prestigious asshole of the month award, how many people consider their involvement spiritual? It’s not rocket science to figure out on all the available forums more people seem to be using entheogens just for the hell of it. If this is the case, is fighting for legalization really worth it? It might very well be, but not for any noble cause that I might have thought of, it’s really just to get a bunch of what I would normally think of as idiots a get out of jail free. At this point I cant argue against pissed off parents, not to defend people that act like this.



On the blog I did take a stand. It was easy to point out that Salvia wasn’t really the enemy. That it isn’t fair to categorise it alongside other drugs like meth, speed and cocaine (or heroin). That for some an entheogen induced altered state seemed a more effective mystical experience than any that a bastardized religion could offer. But just as convincing is the extent of human stupidity, and the more you give them, the more stupid they get. The more I look for someone that I feel is on some kind of constructive path the more I find someone that’s involved with entheogens like it was some kind of toxic industrial cleaning agent that can make your eyes bleed and throw your body into convulsions, look mom, fried meat... As if to add insult to injury defenders of the cause that came after me on this particular entry made just as much sense as see-through coffee beans. As much as I might have been tempted to carry on trying to make sense I ran out of steam when I saw the direction it was going in. The contributions were appearing so ludicrous I was even tempted to point out they must have been fabricated as a way to validate what the author was saying, or maybe generate a bit of obvious controversy... bumping the thread etc.



At the end of the day it all seemed pretty pointless anyway. I feel like I need to put distance between this and me. I only feel obliged to put on record that no, I don’t think entheogens should be made legal. That I think people are too stupid to expect them to act responsible. That if you are under 18 or use drugs recklessly you are not welcome here. All I can do is hope that anyone that does use them ends up directing the relationship in some kind of constructive manner, one that affords entheogens the appropriate respect, one that doesn’t make the rest of us look like idiots (okay, I think I’ve used up my quota on use of that particular word). Another thing that comes into the equation is the whole spirituality thing. I got the idea from the entry and it’s comments that people can have very different ideas on what it is actually. I found it quite ironic that looking after your body is what was construed as spiritual, as opposed to messing it up with (drugs).



What people seem to forget is just because you eat something that doesn’t alter your state of consciousness – it does not mean it is good for your body. It is rich coming from someone that probably gorges themselves on fast food, that they are spiritual because they do not consume things that mess their heads up. I find that from my exposure to them, entheogens amplify my sensitivity to how much I eat and what it is I am eating. One thing is guaranteed and that is if I do eat crap before I alter my state, the resulting experience is all the more worse for it. But no, I don’t agree anyway that the emphasis in spirituality is about looking after your body, maybe just a little bit. To me it feels more like it’s about learning things that are beyond the physical, and maybe the integration of that knowledge back into day-to-day reality. Anyway, the point is that there is a lot more to it than what I think is the general perception. That it’s too easy to get caught up in the tangled web that is religion and mistake any progress with it as then being spiritual. More than this will have to be it’s own entry.



There was something on my last experience (psilocybin combined with an MAOi) that I forgot to mention and it sort of ties in with the whole what to use entheogens for argument. Being as normal as I think I am it’s not easy to start subscribing to things that are not quite all that normal, you know, all that warm and fuzzy over the top esoteric stuff. It wouldn’t be difficult for me to join in on the laughter and finger pointing of the general public at the new agey wannabe Buddhist types chanting Aum in their luxury accommodation at an exotic location. It would be easy to dismiss it all as a fad and unworthy of any further exploration. I would give it oh, say two weeks before I started to feel no benefit and too self-conscious to bother continuing. Even if I did manage to stick with it for a bit longer, how long before my practice started to feel bland and uninteresting, something I did without putting my heart into it? I put my practice together to create a framework within which I could explore entheogens. Now it feels like actually, I am using entheogens to explore that framework. My last experience left my practice feeling rejuvenated, something I was inspired to continue working with, even if on an every day basis. It was like if it was feeling a bit stale, entheogens introduced a breath of fresh air.



The rest of what I had forgotten to say involves my impression of using an MAOi with psilocybin, compared to using shrooms by themselves. Well, there could have been other factors that resulted in this, but I felt the Rue softened the experience somehow, took the edge off a bit. It made the altered state feel less erratic, none of this waves that come and go business, the state felt more consistent. Also, more visuals, intricate and colorful patterns, what felt like a more mature effect on the mind and on the eye. The dose was quite low though, or low for someone that does not seem to be all that sensitive, unless I wasn’t sensitive because I had eaten the day before. My next adventure should be this weekend, and I need to try eating less beforehand, or maybe upping the dose a bit.

I am still trying to establish why it is anyone might feel compelled to post an entry on what music they might have. In particular, why I would feel compelled to do so and whether it really pertains to the subject matter that I have emphasised in this diary. All the while at the same time whether I really need to bother with worrying about these things - probably not. In any event, the compulsion is because I really enjoy it, and who knows, you might too. Also, music can be made a very big part of psychedelic self exploration, and this stuff tends to feel especially suited to that task. So, in this post, probably the first of many, is about the following cd's that I enjoy, with extracts and links to what some other people have had to say about them:

Cell - Phonic Peace; Various - Portal of Perceptions; Various - Chilling Goddess; Puff Dragon - Sazanami & The Kumba Mela Experiment - East of the River Ganges.



For the really green and more curious amongst you, the following extract from the (ever evolving) description in Wikipedia under Psybient:::

"Psybient, also known as "ambient psy", "ambient Goa" and more commonly within the Goa/psytrance scene as "psychill", is a genre of electronic music that combines elements of psychedelic trance, ambient, world music, new age and even ethereal wave. It often has many dub influences and can also sound somewhat like glitch. Psybient pieces are often structured around the concept of creating a "sonic voyage" or "musical journey"."



Some Resources:::

Psymag; their Chillout Releases Archive has the most comprehensive listing of psychill i've ever seen. Release notes are attached to each release.

PKS/ chilltriberecords; writes a lot of reviews - available @ Discogs. Discogs is a nifty site that you can use to keep track of what cd's you have and/or want etc.

Psyshop; well, is actually a shop. World and Chillout music available from here. They ship quite fast internationally and accept credit cards etc.

MORPHEUS; the reviews you find here are quite surreal, they tend to limit themselves to the more ambient/ downbeat.

DeathPosture; writes an awful lot of reviews. This is a link to his blog which has links to all the reviews he's written. Check him out @ Discogs as well. DP normally review a cd track for track which is quite helpful.

Psynews; forums on all things psy, cd reviews by year released.

PSYREVIEWS; should speak for itself. Their reviews are quite... colourful, mostly involve psytrance releases.

Last.fm; somewhere that you can listen to this kind of music on an audiostream.

Isratrance; also forums on all things psy, cd reviews by most recent post, interesting to watch people fight with promoters when crap cd's get good reviews.

IDSpiral; get your psychill here if Psyshop don't stock it, the shop is just a part of it though - IDS presents a few variations on the theme... "A journey to the core of chill is as much a journey to the core of each and every one of us in the minds of the creators behind IDSpiral.



Chill, however, is not simply relating to a moment of relaxation, much rather it refers to a deeply insightful place of reflection and realization, a space we too often go amiss in the western world, governed by fast fading desires and the breathless pursuit of our wants.".

Cell - Phonic Peace I was impressed by Cell who appeared on a compilation called A Magical Journey. Phonic Peace really has its moments and the last track "Orange" is one of my all time favourites. I thought the PSYREVIEWS review was a bit harsh and if "the much cleverer and more rewarding stuff out there than this" is the likes of Gaudi or Blumenkraft I would not be convinced - this sounds like an entirely different style compared to their output. To be sure there is plenty of foreign vocal warbling and an excessive amount of tabla, but this is quite distinct from track to track. The 4/4 track - White Call - is not really that impressive, but not so bad as to give the cd a 3/10. From "PKS" @ Discogs::: "Track 5 goes even deeper and more mystic. Here we get some down tempo beats and a quite dark sound picture. Still, totally relaxing, with flute sounds, ethnic voices etc. Track 6 has the sound of water, an owl, flute, tribal drums and deep, floating vibes. Some of you will probably recognise the flute in this one from other tracks. Very tribal, beautiful track that will do good in the chill out areas this summer. Track 7 takes another direction. This one has a very atmospheric vibe, and it builds up to a stumping trance track. Still it is very relaxing. Chill out you can dance to... Track 8 slows down again, and we get a beautiful floating journey with a really nice, little melody, which Cell has proven several times that he is really good at. The last track on this album is also one of the most beautiful chill out tracks I have heard by this guy. The Indian vocals are melancholic, and we get som breaks and a totally relaxing melody." Promotional Text taken from @ Psyshop::: "Indica Music presents the first long awaited album from Cell, aka Alex Scheffer. With many tracks already released on top ambient compilations from recognized labels, he's one of the most talked about chill out artists in the scene nowadays.We can describe his music as a mixture of acoustical instruments and ethnical rhythms with electronic beats and digital loops." Review taken from PSYREVIEWS::: "While the whole chilled-psychedelia market is kind of saturated at the moment, stuff has to distance itself by being very different (Gaudi, for instance, or Chilling Matenda, or even Blumenkraft in its day) or by being very good as a package (the Floating Point and Mountain High records for starters.) Whether Phonic Peace will do it for you generally depends on your tolerance for sampled peasants wailing and tablas. Yes, it’s hippy chill alright. It works best on Lord Of Silk, which actually progresses into a decent tune in and of itself, rather than disappearing into sample-CD-heavy ‘authentic’ instrumentation. But for the rest of it, it’s repetitive and self-indulgent, with identical themes and sounds cropping up all over the place. This whole thing of bringing eastern sounds into music isn’t big and it isn’t clever; the Beatles were at it forty odd years ago, it was almost shit then and it’s definitely shit now. Cell’s stab at 4-4 (White Call) is shambolic and sounds like something Roy Aquarius did in 1997, and while the deeper chill tunes may be immaculately-produced and sound amazing in the small stoned hours (Phonic Peace For Tibet, Magic Karma) you can’t help but feel a little patronised by it all. Why are we being doled out this National Geographic musical orientalism? Are you preaching to me? Are you coming over all Baraka on my ass? Nine tracks of tabla’s and wailing with a variety of different beats whacked underneath them. There’s much cleverer and more rewarding stuff out there than this. 3" Review taken from MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS::: "Tracks interfade creating a flowing whole where the mood is consistently Asian but always evolving with new shades and fresh nuances. Classical male Indian singers and chimes interlace cutting edge programming and production. Crystalline arps and crisp beats accompany lush flutes and tablas - electronic drones and pulsing basslines lurking beneath. Cell presents a softer side on Phonic Peace than you may have heard on a number of previous compilations and this is very welcome. The final track 'Orange' is one of my favourites where flickering d'n'b loops creep imperceptibly in over a bed of chilled melodic electronics and the semi-classical voice of Meena; building in intensity hurried tablas keep pace all the while until the concluding dissipation when the lazy pace of the opening returns once more." From "BrettFromTibet" @ Isratrance::: ""Phonic Peace" takes us on a holographic carpet ride from North Africa to Tibet via the Middle East and India. The mystic moods and sensual atmospheres that are evoked during this journey feel even richer than the ones on French ambient classics such as Saffi Brothers’ "Mystic Cigarettes" or Toires’s "Qued". The mastering on this disc is absolutely perfect. It comes out of the speakers so crystalline clear, warm, and vast -- it feels easier for me to ‘‘disappear inside’’ than any other music in my collection. I highly recommend listening to this during a sophisticated chill-out session, yoga, or meditation. Cell’s music does more than just give me great pleasure when I listen to it. There is a rare quality to this album that is both other-worldly and soothing; it actually liberates me on a spiritual level. I feel deeply inspired, comforted and completely unafraid of life whenever this is playing on my headphones or Hi-Fi. It’s as if these sounds are a glimpse into an ethereal paradise that I am eventually destined for. Just listen deeply enough, and you too will experience this glorious state of "Phonic Peace."

Various - Portal of Perceptions I was lucky enough to pick this one up locally - Psyshop never seemed to get it in stock. It gets two big thumbs up from me - if you stumble across it be sure to pick it up. Promotional Text taken from @ Psyshop::: "Compiled By Pete Pan and Wabi with a gentle mix by Aes Dana. Just relax and let Celestial Dragon take you on a journey through the various styles of modern chillout mastery." Review taken from PSYREVIEWS::: "There’s something very different about this album, it manages to get a journey from start to finish and it manages it well. All the bases are covered, and the flow from each tune into the other is impressive, making this a worthy investigation for late night laid back herbalism. 8"

Various - Chilling Goddess Peak Records put out an interesting psytrance compilation cd called Peaking in Tongues. I was so taken by it that I decided to try their chillout compilation. I was quite happy that I did. Last week I got their more recent release Chillogram, and at this stage it seems to have been an even better buy. From "PKS" @ Discogs::: "There are mostly quite unknown artists on this compilation, but first out is an artist that most people who follows the chill out marked these days should know about, Aes Dana (Vincent Villuis) from France. Aes Dana has released several strong albums on Ultimae Records, but here he gives us a new, fresh floating track. Totally chilled abient with some whispering voice samples. Track 2 is by a new artist called Astral Waves from the US. Here we get Asian vibes, with some sitar, chilled drums and some praying vocals. Nice and ethnic. Track 3 is by another fresh artist called Capsula (Yosi Shamay). Here we get some relaxing guitar vibes, chilled beats and some nice psychedelic swirling sounds. Track 4 is by the compiler himself, Master Margherita (Moreno Antognini). Here we get several humming vocals and some guitar. Mystic vibes all the way through. Then we get a track by an artist who has a pretty cool name called Lucid Picnic (Serhan Berberoglu). Here we go even deeper into mystic vibes. This one sounds a bit darker, mostly floating all the way through. Track 6 is by a guy who is getting a very good reputation for his chill out tracks these days, Cell (Alexandre Scheffer) from France, here in a collaboration with someone called Kalifrogz (E. Brandy & C. Fabulet). This is a really deep track, with the sound of water, spacey sounds, relaxing down tempo beats and a beautiful melody. My favourite track on this compilation. Great one! " Promotional Text taken from @ Psyshop::: "A springtime celebration conceived by the Swiss labels crew and compiled by Master Margherita, 'Chilling Goddess' is a glimpse into the lighter side of Peak, inviting you to kick back, suspend your worries and float for a while Whether you like slow dreamy pads, that shpongly sound, the ethnic vibe or powerful chill beats, this compilation will delight you with its broad range of music and intelligent evolution. Mastered by Aes Dana, 'Chilling Goddess' is a carefully selected chill odyssey featuring well-known artists and and upcoming talents." Review taken from MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS::: "Otherworldly astral chillout - dark in places, soft and caressing in others - but consistently emotive and evocative. Peak Records have put together an album that takes us on a journey through strange and foreign terrains - where unusual synth voices, tribal pulsings and rhythms, ethnic flutes and psychedelic sensibilities work together to send our imaginations reeling." From "DeathPosture" @ Psynews::: "Well, I must say that Peak Records again surprise me positively… Last years full-on compilation Peaking in Tongues was an instant smash, and now the Swiss collective have proven that they also can put together high quality chill compilations… Besides from a couple of the really dark, minimal tunes in the second quarter of this CD, I like most of the tracks here… The diversity is rich, and we get a taste of most kinds of chilled music… From dreamy beatless chill-out, over dark gloomy ambient, to trippy tribal ethno dub... A diversity that should satisfy most fans of rich chill-out music… Diversity rules! I’m really looking forward to the next chill compiliation from this magical Swiss collective to grace our ears… And I do not hesitate to recommend this to fans of chilled, mellow soundscapes… Enjoy!"

Puff Dragon - Sazanami Another release that I am really surprised never got reviewed by PKS, Morpheus, Psyreviews or DeathPosture, because it is a superb cd. It sort of reminds me a little of Cell's Phonic Peace but maybe a little more adventurous, if you need to choose between the two I would stick with this one. Promotional Text taken from Psyshop::: "This led to his new project, Puff Dragon, a more mellow, relaxed vibe that combined the crystal-clear production style that he'd picked up from trance with smokier, phatter beats and the endless echoes of dub. While still rooted in an electronic style, Puff Dragon tracks are notable for the live elements that carry the melodies, like the warm, breathy Indian vocals on 'Skin as Soft' (a remix of a Makyo track), or the ecstatic, ascending violin solo on 'Sazanami'. The album veers from the cinematic, epic rush of 'Qi Gong', all swelling strings and swooning Asian vocals, to the electro-dub echo-trip of 'Spacefunk', and the wash of electric piano and filtered breaks that closes things out on 'Shimmer'." From "abasio" @ Psynews::: "So to sum up, this is a really nice release. It's floaty and dreamy. The beats are really good throughout and each song's progression is patient. It never tries to do too much and so does so much more than some albums that try too hard. If you are a Dakini fan you will love this. If your not you might still love it. Because each song has a slow patient progression you might not like it from just hearing samples but I would recommend taking a risk if you like floating dream chill out music." From "derek" @ ethnotechno::: "For the most part Good does good. In fact, the layers of "Qi Gong" and the more techy "Chinese Radio" really explore his ambient mind, the use of Japanese stringed instruments and tricked-out flutes on the latter playing nicely within the more electronified synthesizers. He has a tougher time with "Marine Drive" and the opening "Sazanami," where beats lack significant structure, making 7-9 minutes a bit long."

The Kumba Mela Experiment - East of the River Ganges Has quite an epic feel to it this, complete with a pretty abstract initiation that feels like the begining of some kind of festival that builds up into when it finally starts to begin. Some serious dubbed out moments in an otherwise very cultural atmosphere, I like this cd a lot! The Dub Trees cd that Psyshop mentions is also a nice treat, although it seems to be a bit less accessable than this. From "bomble" @ Psynews::: "Every moment of this production is intricate and beautifully produced - there's never a 'filler moment' let alone a filler track. I caution anyone who doesn't like 1) Indian influenced music 2) Roots/dub 3) Trippy trippy samples ... that you won't like this either ! However if you like to take the journey - you like the dub trees/celtic cross albums or you just want to try something new then this is the one to get. I don't want to go into too much detail about the tracks - this review will get ridiculously long - but I really want to get across the splendour of this release as a whole. Briefly, track by track : 1) deep, mystical, eastern influenced, 2) funky, energetic & building, 3) dub & roots, blissed & tasting of Orb,4) check the Henry of Rawlinson sample probably the most amusing tune I've ever heard! 5) deep dub, full power dub trees style... oooooh!, 6) bit darker & slightly spooky - breaks & electro beats ..., 7) Indian & dub ...warm & psychedelic at the same time... total bliss !,8) crazy sample, big tough beats & trippy high frequency bits, 9) dub & roots style - sit back and sway ...,10) goodbye from Terence." Promotional Text taken from Psyshop::: "Following on from Youths acclaimed Dub Trees album of last year comes... ... the hugely anticipated 'East of the River Ganges', a sublime album of ten chilled out tracks from Youth and host of collaborators including - The Orb, Suns of Arqa, Tangerine Dream, Dreadzone and Uri Geller. Inspired by the awesome 'Kumba Mela' (the gathering of holy men that converge on the River Ganges every 4 / 12 / 64 years), the album was originally meant to be a loose soundtrack to a documentary being made on the festival." From "dimm" @ ethnotechno::: "If you're a Dub fan, you MUST have this cd. The quality of production and vision are unmatched by any other trance-dub effort to date, with only Shpongle coming close with their catalogue. Originally created as a soundtrack for a documentary about the Kumba Mela [at times the largest gathering of humans in one place at one time on the entire planet, able to be seen from outer space as a big brown dot...] the album has reached many more people than the film itself. With the vigorous pumping of hardcore basslines under ethereal ambiences, the Kumba Mela promises to take you to the actual event in your mind... as long as you hold that tab of acid on your tongue for ten more minutes before it completely dissolves...."

Linking up to various sites on the net that provide for some pretty interesting reading. As an example of the kind of stuff that you kind find there I included an extract from a page of each on The Council on Spiritual Practices, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Gnostic Media ("Astrotheology and Shamanism"), The Shroomery, The Psychedelic Library, Ego Death, the Lycaeum - Entheogenic Database & Community, Erowid & The Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center. Enjoy!

Supplies are available from; Spirit Garden, I Am Shaman, or Ethnogens

The Council on Spiritual Practices (From "Entheogen Yoga: The Application of Yoga Meditation Techniques to the Use of Psychoactive Sacraments by Sri Brahmarishi Narad")::: "The goal of all Yoga practices is to discover and directly experience what the attention or faculty of consciousness in man is. The yogi seeks to know that principle by which all else is known. This goal is achieved by observing the observer or placing the attention on the attention itself. This may at first seem very abstract and hard to grasp in terms of practical application, but there are workable, time-proven methods for achieving this state of pure consciousness which when consistently applied and practiced are bound to yield results. It should be constantly remembered during a psychedelic session that whatever perceptions, thoughts and even hallucinations occur, they are all the creations of one's own mind and consciousness, and are filtered through one's own instrument of perception. These perceptions are patternings of our own psychic energy. We give energy to whatever thoughts and feelings we allow the attention to dwell upon. Wherever the power of attention is focused, it generates mental and emotional energy in the form of its own lower overtones, thus feeding and energizing the thoughts and emotions which the attention dwells upon. It becomes clear that the key to remaining in control of a entheogenic experience is in controlling the flow of attention. Distractive experiences can be avoided in the first place, and the flow of attention can be properly directed by the use of Raja Yoga techniques of meditation. The following is a description of several such techniques which can all be applied while under the influence of LSD, marijuana, mescaline, DMT, hashish, psilocybin or other consciousness-expanding drugs."

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) (From "Handbook for the Therapeutic Use of LSD-25")::: "The great value of LSD-25 lies in the fact that when the therapeutic situation is properly structured the patient can, and often does, within a period of hours, develop a level of self-understanding and self-acceptance which may surpass that of the average normal person. On the basis of this self-knowledge he can, with the therapist's help, clearly see the inadequacies in the value system which has underlain his previous behavior and can learn how to alter this in accordance with his altered understanding. So sweeping a claim must, upon first reading, seem like nonsense but a growing number of people have come to accept it as undeniable fact. These are the people who have tried the drug on themselves and on their patients. They are convinced that within the next two or three decades LSD-25, will be by far the most common adjunct to psychotherapy. They feel too that since the psychedelic experience can lead to a very high level of self-understanding, and since self-understanding is the key without which the doors to interpersonal, intergroup or international understanding can not be opened, its use as a catalyst in the development of better human relations will become almost universal. To reject the views of this group as being too extreme without investigating the matter seems a remarkably unscientific attitude. The fact that those who have tried it feel that it offers astonishing possibilities would, in itself, seem to be sufficient reason for a thorough testing of the claims made."

Gnostic Media ("Astrotheology and Shamanism") (From "The Pharmacratic Inquisition video")::: "The definition of Pharmacratic Inquisition Pharmaco-, a combining form meaning drug, medicine, or poison used in the formation of compound words: pharmacology, pharmacy, etc. -crat, a combining form meaning ruler, member of a ruling body, or advocate of a particular form of rule, used in the formation of compound words: autocrat; technocrat. Cf. -cracy. Inquisition, n. 1. an official investigation, esp. one of a political or religious nature, characterized by lack of regard for individual rights, prejudice on the part of the examiners, and recklessly cruel punishments. 2. any harsh, difficult, or prolonged questioning. 3. the act of inquiring; inquiry; research. 4. an investigation, or process of inquiry. 5. a judicial or official inquiry. 6. the finding of such an inquiry. 7. the document embodying the result of such inquiry. 8. (cap.) Roman Catholic Church A. a former special tribunal, engaged chiefly in combating and punishing heresy. Cf. Holy Office. B. see Spanish Inquisition. Pharmacratic Inquisition nov. verb. - The Christian persecution of archaic religions based on sacramental ingestion of entheogenic plants and the consequent personal access to ecstatic states; whose first great victory was the destruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries at the end of the fourth century; which then reached a gruesome climax in the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages; and which continues in today's Pharmacratic State in the guise of a public health 'War on Drugs.' 1994 Ott Ayahuasca Analogues, 12. May the Entheogenic Reformation prevail over the Pharmacratic Inquisition, leading to the spiritual rebirth of humankind at Our Lady Gæa's breasts, from which may ever copiously flow the amrita, the ambrosia, the ayahuasca of eternal life! Source: The Age of Entheogens & The Angel's Dictionary by Jonathan Ott"

The Shroomery (From "The Mushroom and the Synapse")::: (Chapter 5, from the book The Psilocybin Solution) "At this point, consciousness lies at the centre of our inquiry. All our paths of investigation lead directly to it. The psilocybin cultural history covered in the first few chapters of this book arose solely because of the radical change in consciousness induced by the mushroom in the Aztec and Mayan psyche. The pre-LSD events at Harvard were likewise spawned by the psilocybin-induced state of consciousness. Indeed, the whole 60's thing happened, in part, precisely because of the new ranges of conscious experience originally kick-started into existence by the mushroom. The growing second wave of psychedelic research has likewise appeared on account of the compelling nature of entheogen-inspired states of consciousness. One cannot escape the mystery of consciousness. Psilocybin simply highlights the boundless nature and mystical potential of the human mind lest we allow this fortunate state of affairs to pass us by. As I pointed out at the very outset to this book, if we are interested in apprehending the ultimate nature of the reality process then it makes sense to home in on consciousness since consciousness represents the interface which links us to the 'world out there'. If we can understand what consciousness is, then we might also understand how consciousness is able to be transformed and whether such a transformation does indeed yield bona fide insights into the subtle nature of Nature. Nothing less than reality is up for grabs."

The Psychedelic Library (portal) "The Internet's most comprehensive resource for the literature of psychedelic drugs. Research reports, philosophical essays, articles, and complete-text books are available both for professional research and for general interest." (From "Peyote Wisdom"; Through The Lens Of Perception by Hal Zena Bennett)::: "I moved closer to the lens. Deep inside it I saw movement. What were these shapes? I saw many images from my childhood—my brothers, the house where I'd lived during my high school years in Michigan, my parents, my first lover. I thought about how people often reported seeing their lives flash before their eyes when they were faced with death. Could this be the case? Was I near death? I looked deeper into the lens, as though I might find the answer there. I saw a cat, a powerful mountain lion. There was also a giant bird. There was a groaning cave, and a beautiful sunset over the ocean. There was a rugged trail up a mountain, and a man. I looked more closely. It was Sen. He was sleeping by the rock, his head on his knapsack. I could not figure out where he was—in the lens, or beyond it, or both?."

Ego Death "Myth describes this mystic-state experiential insight and transformation. Religious initiation teaches and causes this transformation of the self considered as a control-agent, through a series of visionary-plant sessions, interspersed with study of perennial philosophy. Most modern-era religion has been a distortion of this standard initiation system, reducing these concepts to a weak interpretation that is based in the ordinary state of consciousness. The ego death theory is, specifically, the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence, and it incorporates the entheogen theory of religion." (From ; Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita by Michael S. Hoffman)::: "Introduction This article summarizes the theory that visionary plants play an instrumental role within Christian origins and the Bible, and helps straighten out the citations, issues, and relationships among John Ramsbottom, Erwin Panofsky, R. Gordon Wasson, and John Allegro, to clear up many of the inaccurate assessments and characterizations regarding their views on these hypotheses. More precision has been needed about exactly which arguments or issues were mentioned by whom, and what the reasoning and argumentation was, specifically. The treatment of the views of Wasson and Allegro has been too undifferentiated and careless. Scholars of Christian history have too readily utilized the mycologist Wasson to dismiss Allegro’s theory that there was no Jesus, that the first Christians used entheogens, and that the first Christians considered Jesus to be none other than visionary plants. Wasson’s dismissal of Allegro together with mushroom trees has thus proven to be important for the study of Christian origins, the ahistoricity of Jesus, and historical Judeo-Christian use of visionary plants. This detailed treatment shows examples of pseudo-arguments in disputes about religious history, and demonstrates point-by-point critical reading of a set of arguments. Even if the reader considers the interpretation of Christian ‘mushroom trees’ in art to be trivially obvious and to need no intensive point-by-point argumentation, or is uninterested in the subject of mushrooms in religious history, there are nevertheless interesting patterns of argumentation exposed and explained here. Recognition of these argumentation patterns is useful in other potential disputes as well, including the historicity of Jesus and the authenticity of all the Pauline epistles."

the Lycaeum - Entheogenic Database & Community (From "Confronting Teonanacatl - One of my favorite reports.. - Substances: Psilocybe cubensis, Peganum harmala")::: "Getting weirder - at the exact moment I had the "Galactic drama" revelation, there was a flood of noise - cars starting up and zooming off outside, a plane passing overhead, doors banging, toilets flushing... I believe someone on this list posted similar experiences. The galactic conspiracy theater worked its way down to the waste management industry. Apparantly, this "fluid" is contained in the waste we flush down our toilets, wash down our sinks and throw in our garbage - in our urine, on our bloody tampons, on our snot and semen soaked tissues, etc. I got image after image of some giant distillery somwhere employing thousands of government workers who were combing through tons of garbage and millions of gallons of waste-water just for a precious few tiny drops of this "life fluid". It was quite creepy and yucky. Too much for my tiny ape-brain to handle. I was losing voliton. My body was becoming heavy. I was yawning more and more. More tears. More fluid. I was creeped out and starting to pass out. I stumbled to bed."

Erowid (From "PERCEPTION AND KNOWLEDGE by FRANCIS VAUGHAN from: Psychedelic Reflections")::: "The world view that made most sense of this experience was clearly a mystical one. Neither the subjective nor the objective pole of experience could encompass the totality. The possibility of transcending boundaries between self and other, the illusory nature of ego, the interdependence of opposites, the relative nature of dualism and the resolution of paradox in transcendence became clear. All mental content was simply the play or the dance of life, and what could be known about consciousness became the focus of my attention. Psychodynamic material that came into awareness seemed irrelevant. My own personal drama was no more significant than light playing on a movie screen. Even feelings of joy, ecstasy, and liberation in letting go of attachments were less important than the insight and sense of knowing, or remembering, inexpressible truth. "Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" were the words that seemed best to capture the nature of my experience. I felt free to be exactly who I was, free of fear and social constraints, and filled with love and compassion for all beings. Although many of the insights that flooded my awareness were forgotten, many remained to influence my life. I felt I could see how much human suffering is self-imposed, how our beliefs shape our reality, and what it means to awaken to the realization that life is a dream of our own making. The dreamlike quality of existence, the unreality of past memories and future fantasies, and the acceptance of the interrelatedness of all things were insights subsequently confirmed as I learned more of the perennial teachings of both Eastern and Western contemplative traditions."

The Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center (From "The Salvia Divinorum User's Guide")::: "Salvia divinorum is an extraordinary visionary herb. It is not a recreational drug. It produces a profoundly introspective state of awareness that is useful for meditation, contemplation, and self-reflection. Its effects are unique and cannot be compared with the effects of other drugs. The effects of Salvia do not appeal to many people (young or old). The people who are most drawn to it are both mature and philosophically minded. Beware of inaccurate information. There are many unethical vendors who try to lure naive customers by portraying the effects of Salvia as more appealing than they are. The news media often sensationalizes stories about Salvia, exaggerating its effects, risks, and popularity. Much of what has appeared in the popular press is inaccurate and misleading. Salvia is not "legal pot." It is not "legal acid." It is not a substitute for any other drug. Before trying Salvia, it is important that you know about its effects, appropriate uses, and the potential risks associated with irresponsible use."

"Unveiling the Law of Duality in Christianity and Other Religions". Can't glean that much from these words so far. It's got shamanism in the title so it should be interesting? Does unveiling the law of duality mean making sense of Christianity? Are these things worth getting into? The emphasis on the internet is that this book explains how Christmas originally was about tripping out on shrooms, is this in itself substantial, apart from generating a bit of controversy, in fact, hasn't it been suggested before and debunked already? Tough job trying to draw attention to it again if it's already still so "last Tuesday doll" (or so 1960's). Paging through it some familiar names appear, Terence McKenna, Christian Ratsch, Dr Rick Strassman, Gordon Wasson... are we in for just some more of the same...? Lots of pictures, pictures of mushrooms, pictures of religious stuff. Skimming through the literature some pretty obscure sounding ideas, unpronounceable words and many, many, references to other books. It doesn’t look like this book is going to deliver a simple idea in an easily digestible way, it looks like its going to require a lot of patience, a lot of effort, a lot of hard work. It does not look like it’s about the whole magic mushroom Christmas thing after all, that just seems to be like an example to demonstrate something. What that is I'm not quite sure, so lets get reading...



We start off with a Special Note from Judith Anne Brown, the daughter of John Marco Allegro. These are not really names that I am all that familiar with, but I like her exciting first words; "This is a mind-expanding book." She goes on to explain that her father wrote "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" in 1970 which involved the origin of religion. It was condemned for some reason and this book vindicates it by adding the study of symbols, iconography and mythology to the equation. I never quite did "get it" on these subjects, they weren't ever presented to me as necessary or interesting, or maybe as Judith says, they were "merely decorative or reflective". It seems that actually, a big part of getting things like Christianity depends on being able to understand what power these things had in the past. I like this idea, it makes sense. This isn't about dismissing Christianity entirely because it doesn’t work, it's about trying to understand it and so be able to make it work. From the perspective of a Christian it's quite easy to point a finger at people looking for salvation in being drugged up on psychedelics and have a good laugh, especially when no context appears to exist (in fact, people using psychedelics without a context deserve to be laughed at). On the other hand its easy to point a finger at any particular religious institution and say it's ALL bad. Maybe the answer is they both actually need each other...



A Foreword by Jordan Maxwell is up next, pointing out some of the more eyebrow raising history of the Church, and how this has had a ripple effect on some of our more current nonsensical behaviour, obviously in relation to the subject at hand. Here is something that I struggle to understand sometimes. Just what on earth did the Church get up to in the past? Was it quite bad and has it all been explained away adequately? The way that people around me carry on is that its all good, there's no need to cover that ground again, as if, well, yes, there was a bad time, that bad things did happen, we call that time the "Dark Ages"... And, without needing to get into it too much, we quarantine it from the present with that label - from a time when those things have worked themselves out already, and so, moving on… But, have ALL "those things" worked themselves out really? What exactly were those things? Were they big things? Where did the Church fit in on them? Was the Church being unreasonable? If the Church was being unreasonable, what did it take for them to adjust - was it an easy adjustment - did they resist? From a more relevant perspective, depending on what the answers to these questions are; is it possible that No, actually, the Church is still being unreasonable about some things. That just like it had got it all wrong before about a big thing, and that it took a major upheaval and a large amount of time to adjust, the same might apply to other stuff that hasn’t gone through this process yet…? Jordan points out that "Astrotheology & Shamanism" proves these subjects are the framework of Christianity. All the more reason then to make sure that what we understand of them is 100% on the money, and not what gets regurgitated to us by an institute that has proven incompetent (and whose continued incompetence could merely be just an exercise in Self Preservation).



The Preface gives us a different spin on how you can look at words and what they mean and provides some examples, seems to culminate in the idea of language having experienced a degeneration, implying that our ancestors were a lot more intelligent than we might have given them credit for. This intelligence gets linked to the use of psychedelics (or "consciousness-expanding plants"). In line with the degeneration of language is our reluctance at directly experiencing change of the paradigm shifting variety, and the use of psychedelics is linked to that here as well. And then Death gets dragged into the equation. If ever there was a change of the paradigm shifting variety, I guess death would be it. It's pretty awesome that death gets a mention, what makes it even better is the idea here of psychedelics being used by the shaman as a practice run to prepare for it. Even the most obnoxious of people would start paying attention at this point, it is after all in everyone's best interest to learn as much as they can about it. If a book comes along that suggests it can teach you something about this transition, and you were serious about learning, surely you would lend an ear at the very least, and if what you heard made sense possibly begin to subscribe to what you hear. At least until you figured out that it's just a bunch of bullshit, or... Which brings us to the last point of the Preface; taking responsibility. In this case, taking responsibility for finding God. Are you going to continue to expect the Church to do this for you, or are you going to start "doing-it-yourself"...?



It’s not the only thing that Part 1 is about, but what sticks out in my mind after reading it are answers to some of the questions I asked above. It turns out that as recently as 1600 the Church was being unreasonable, and it was being unreasonable about a big thing. What it was being unreasonable about was insisting that the earth was the centre of our solar system, that the planets in it circled around our stationary earth. How did it react when someone (Galileo) came along with proof that this was not so? Not very well, words like heresy and inquisition start polluting the conversation - it took another 200 years before his books were unbanned. This scenario gets extended to the present and a parallel drawn with the idea of using psychedelics (to shamanise). At this point anyone that does it is "persecuted, mocked, pushed aside, and made out to be criminals". Is it possible that just like with Galileo, at some point we will look back and admit that on this subject we had got it all wrong as well?



What comes next is pretty much a crushing blow to what might be called the current version of Christianity. It becomes blazingly obvious that too much existed already before for the story of Jesus to be totally unique, that if you know what to look for it's quite easy to see what it was really all about (let's just say, it isn't all quite as literal). It's quite clear to me at this point that yes, it is necessary (or at least okay) to alter your state of consciousness, and yes, there is a certain special something behind the veil that is Christianity involving stars and things. I guess at this point this is quite a lot more than enough for anyone to go on, that a whole bunch of time can be spent on integrating these things and making some kind of (spiritual?) progress. And I guess like it says here, the Truth is not something you find in a book, that it is... alive. But I can’t shake a feeling, a certain expectation, that somehow despite what has been said already, I still need to know; so... what now...?



Part 2 starts off with probably the most disgusting thing I have read in a while. Now, I live in Johannesburg, South Africa. At this stage we have something like 50 murders a day in this country and 150 reported rapes (even babies get raped here). During holiday months the death toll on our roads soar to around 1500. The point is, there’s always a gruesome story or two in the newspaper. If I say I read something that disgusts me, it’s not because I’m overly sensitive or something. An example of the lengths that the Catholic Church went to, to exert it’s influence in the good old days (1556), involving three woman being burnt alive at the stake, one of which was pregnant. She actually gives birth during this horrific event, the baby is pulled from the flames, but - is ordered to be thrown back in.



There is a point to bringing this up at all. I’m not sure people realize just to what lengths these people were prepared to go to make sure things were done their way, and no other way at all. That the stories and beliefs we are provided with by them are not valid because they are valid, they are valid because they were forced down our throats by the schoolyard bully. Isn’t it possible then that until today, their influence is still being felt. Is it really fair that things are being seen the way they are because an overzealous institution burnt and pillaged their way into the fabric of our imagination? Isn’t it time for things to be judged according to merit and not because of a prejudiced and poisoned inheritance? I think to a large extent, that’s what all this book is asking; for people to discard whatever it is they think they know, and to start opening their eyes... is it really too much to ask...?



You know, maybe it is too much to ask. It is awfully convenient actually to subscribe to something that has exerted itself on the general population. Maybe it’s just way too much hard work to try and figure things out for yourself? I think it was easy enough to be lazy in the past, it really was hard work. These days, I’m not so sure though – so much information seems to be available at your fingertips (literally). Cracks are even appearing courtesy the mainstream media, pointing out things are not quite as they might seem. You can still be excused for avoiding the internet, but what about best seller books? what about blockbuster movies...? Let me just emphasize, it is not that a tangible alternative already exists, it’s just that we are running out of excuses to see things the way we have always seen them. We need to destroy (the past), before we can create (the present).



The detail is explored next with regards to who John Marco Allegro was, why and how he got involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and what he thought he discovered (that Jesus was a psychoactive mushroom). This was not very consistent with what anyone expected so he got defamed and nothing further about the scrolls was released for a very long while. Where Gordon Wasson fit into the picture comes next along with a brief mention of a bunch of people whose work explores the relationship between entheogens and religion. Point being there are a bunch of resources, a lot of them post 1960's, available to the aspiring sceptic interested in covering this ground properly before publishing his, or her, criticisms. If what Allegro had to say was difficult to swallow then the next couple of pages that go to the earlier mentioned vindication of his work are going to be quite a bumpy read. They involve some of the finer detail involving psychoactive mushrooms, from lifecycle to consumption, and how these pertain to some of the symbolism in what might be thought of as innocent enough culture. Obviously I can't go into all of the detail which would go some way to making it a whole bunch more digestible, but anyway some of the ideas are as follows;



- Various aspects of Christmas being influenced by behaviour involving the Amanita - how we decorate a pine tree on this occasion - and this is one of the trees that it grows under - and gets dried on (looking decorative). How Santa wears red and white, and these being the colors of the mushroom. Stocking getting hung over the fireplace? Another way to dry the Amanita (you have to dry it before you can eat it). Santa climbing through a chimney = Shamans doing the same thing;

- Easter gets a similar treatment;

- The image of Christ being crucified as a symbol of a shroom once the cap has opened (profile = T);

- Where references exist in Christian literature that allude to urine being special somehow, and how this pertains to using Amanita (active compounds in urine after ingestion);

- Some background on the Caduceus, the Phoenix, the symbology of Serpents and Virgin births and how all of these can be traced back to a representation of the Amanita;

- Using entheogens to access the astral and experience the universe directly to get a better idea of what reality is (more than just matter)...

- A couple of other things; Alchemy. Sex symbolism in faith (and how the stem and cap of a mushroom can be seen as the union of male and female genitalia).



Wading through the above was quite a chore - the yawn factor became quite large. There were little bits of everything flying around all at once, and not much by way of helping me keep it all together. At the end of the day what it sort of boils down to is that at some point in our past, using entheogens was quite traditional, that this can be traced back to from some of the everyday things we are surrounded by now. That this little secret was disguised by those in the know, even by those in authority, and if you look hard enough you can see this. That in a certain light it all makes sense, and it's not difficult to figure out the relevance. I have a feeling that for the hardened sceptic or mister joe public, it would be easy enough for the last thirty or so pages to not do what they are meant to be doing.



I did find the next thirty odd pages a bit more rewarding, which covered Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden from a different angle - how it's possible what happened there was a good thing? - how it's possible it was Jesus (sort of) doing the feeding (of the forbidden fruit) - basically turning any preconceived notion you might have of this story on it's head, and so too similarly the mark of the beast issue. Then it's on to your body being a temple and implications from an entheogenic perspective and the original sacrament possibly being psychoactive. Things were starting to feel a bit less elusive and like I was approaching familiar territory. At last a name that I recognised appeared - the late great Terence McKenna... then Dr. Strassman... then Dr. Narby... as incredible as they are some of their thoughts get outlined briefly.



A hop skip and jump later involving some more of what came before and we reach the Conclusion, AppendixES, and a very large Bibliography. This is a liberating read. It also offers a whole bunch of rabbit holes that you can explore and disappear in for a while. In this sense I am not sure many people will feel completely satisfied when they put the book down, like every loose string has come nicely together as it does in a well written work of fiction. There's no quick fix solution presented either in how entheogens can be used for one to become instantaneously enlightened. If anything all it does is say it's time for some elbow grease people. There's no "turn on, tune in, and drop out" mentality, just a scholarly investigation into a controversial subject that it is high time was once again treated with dignity and respect.

I think I ran out of patience with this book before I could appreciate it, or put a decent review of it together. I am not 100% comfortable with the below yet and would not post this on Amazon until I tidied it up some. There was a point I thought why bother putting a review together at all? Well, I guess because I got the book and, maybe I feel some kind of egotistical need to let people know when I think something is crap. Maybe it’s because I’m getting sick of books that only seem to justify getting embarrassed by being involved with all things “new age”, and it did happen here - I was the butt of jokes in the office when people saw what I was reading. I could have defended myself if the book did come in handy, helped me learn something substantial and make my crown chakra glow for a while, but it did not. It’s quite sad how many books like this are out there, at least it has what seems to be an interesting title. What’s even sadder is how many people subscribe to these empty books, and sing their praises. Anyway, here goes nothing.



You must sort of know about Kundalini (K) by now. From a psychedelic experience perspective there could be a relationship, to make absolutely sure I guess the first thing is to get up to speed on what it is and what it feels like when it has been "activated". K is an experience associated with someone that has advanced quite far on their spiritual path, that would be of a more eastern persuasion. Spiritual paths of a more eastern persuasion are a little different to their western counterparts - in the east it’s more a question of experience, whereas in the west it’s more a matter of faith. The impression I had in the beginning was that raising K is meant to be quite a serious issue, that it's not supposed to be possible to do it alone, and that it can only happen in a very few "special" people. In Solomae (SS), it happened "spontaneously". You can dispel any ideas that come to mind involving spontaneous being fast, or instantaneous - she went through this during a period of about five years. I don’t think spontaneous means random either, the book does occasionally hint at a religious past.



I guess like with any product, whether it is good or bad depends on what you are looking for, or expecting in terms of any impressions you might have of what the book is about. What did I want, what impressions did I have? I wanted a bit of background, from the title I thought this would build a bit of psychology into the equation, considering this is something that the author went through I was expecting a lot of personal detail on what she experienced, perhaps reflect on any uncertainty or confusion she experienced, and where she looked to for help - what books/ authors websites etc. that she found quite helpful. From the back cover, "A wealth of information and insights are shared in practical, down-to-earth language, as well as a remarkable view into advanced states of consciousness far exceeding the threshold of enlightenment." It goes on to say "Kundalini and the... is her account of this transformational process as well as important guidance for the sincere student." I did not think there was much of a disconnect between what I was looking for, and what impressions I had from how the book is punted. On Amazon.com there were several glowing reviews as well and so I thought okay, with this I cannot possibly go wrong.



Somewhere along the line, I was not paying enough attention.



No, it did not meet my expectations. I could put it down to something natural enough - overzealous marketing? The reviews on Amazon being biased somehow? Just me seeing something where nothing is to be seen maybe, getting confused when nothing exists to confuse me? Everything "out here" about this book hits the nail exactly on the head... I guess everyone knows how true this is - NOT TRUE AT ALL - and so perhaps it is expected of people to accommodate for it when sussing something out that they intend to buy. It's just such a pity that when looking into something the hard work is not reading what gets said about a product, the hard work is figuring out how true what gets said is. I guess at the end of the day it comes down to having to take that chance, getting the product, and figuring out for yourself whether it was worth it. I wouldn’t mind so much really, if books were cheap, easy to get, and I had all the time in the world to read. None of this is true though, and so I do mind. I mind all the more when I come across so many books that just seemed so unnecessary to write, and yet here we are, in a market flooded by so many books it’s just not funny, all with absolutely nothing in them worth reading. I guess to someone, somewhere, yes actually, it was necessary to write - so that I can make a living. So that I can make some money. You need to wonder about that a bit, so a book exists not because it’s worth a read, it exists to support a family, or something. To fulfill certain contractual agreements maybe even.



What bad taste am I left with in my mouth exactly, after I have read this? I have a thing for titles, for a start, and the title of this is a bit ambitious. I think the "Evolution of Consciousness" intones a very heavy weight subject. There's a tone of stuff that it could involve, and plenty of resources on the subject available. Accessing those resources and writing about them from the perspective of K (as the title might suggest) sounds like something worth doing. This book doesn’t do that - and counts against it. There’s a lot of ground to cover on what K is, and where it fits in from an eastern perspective. How it could be interpreted from the perspective of western spirituality would also involve a lot of work, encompassing the more esoteric inclined of our faiths. Things could get even more interesting by adding Christianity to the mix, and unpacking it to such a degree so as to support the phenomena of K, sort of make it make sense and a desirable practice. Now the book is peppered with references to God, and Jesus Christ, but there is no context, no elaborations, and does not cover this potential aspect to any significant degree. For all intents and purposes SS is quite comfortable to create the impression that raising K goes hand in hand quite well with cake and tea on Sunday, everyday garden variety Christianity. In fact, I get the impression from here that a person needs to subscribe to exactly this in order to make raising K work, and reference to it come complete with the whole good versus evil paradigm.



I couldn’t shake the feeling as I was reading that SS had come across some literature of raising K and had then aimed at experiencing the symptoms. I don’t get the feeling of getting an inside perspective on this as I read. It's not a you know what this is happening to me and I can fit that into the raising K framework, it's more like I know what raising K entails and now I am striving to experience it. It's just got this it's too convenient feel to it, like things just progressed too much according to the book. The words, lines, paragraphs unfold as though skimming through the major landmarks, which are easy enough to encounter in any literature available on the subject. Also a regurgitation of the concepts from an I think this is how it works on a this or that day-to-day level stuff, superficially. There’s a *this is how it is* theme that runs through the book that made me feel quite nauseous after a while, as though SS was imparting inevitable truths but without any substantiation. A phrase I got really sick of was balancing of polarities. I get that polarities need to be balanced, it only needs to be mentioned once. Here we get to read how it needs to happen in each of the three realms of the seven chakras. The unpacking of these 21 realms is especially tedious and un-noteworthy, they all sound just too much like each other. After enough reference to it, I also started to resent any references to needing to be ready or prepared first in whatever way before this or that could be experienced, needing to be "ripe", before the "fruit drops", as SS is inclined to say. Other words that I started to encounter a bit too excessively are enlightenment, transition and separation.



What’s missing for me in this book is it being written by someone that doesn’t sound like they think they know everything, that their opinion is just an opinion, that their advice is just advice. It would be much more digestible if they were like, you know what, this happened to me and this is how I made sense of it, and this is what worked for me. With regards reference to any "advanced" concepts or theories, don’t bother mentioning them if you can’t go that deeply into them, or you can’t translate how your personal experience relate to those concepts. This book does not read like life as it unfolds whilst K is being awakened inside of you, it reads like a draft bill, according to which how something should be executed. There are names which get mentioned here, Carolynn Myss and Deepak Chopra. Get this book if you would like a subject you are interested in to be covered from what some might call, a warm and fuzzy, fluffy new agey kind of angle. There are all of 9 books referenced in the bibliography, including the Bible, so make of that what you will. What I make of it, overall, is someone trying to say this is how something works, without bothering to put any effort into it, or bothering to provide any real life experience relevant detail.

I wouldn’t normally bother with posting details of dreams in my journal, I have a diary for that and normally they are not all that significant. What’s different this time round is that it felt like a big dream and the proximity of it to a recent experience with Salvia.



For a start when I woke up from this dream at 01h30 I had tears in my eyes and felt very weak, shaky & emotional (this is not normal). Also, that although I had committed to renew my dream practice after a months break it is not like it was very established at the time that I stopped. In other words I think this event was less about having an effective practice and more about having used Salvia.



It started of with me holding this huge folder with all these papers and feeling like I was talking to somebody about this “case”. I was frustrated with it and had no idea how to resolve it. My colleague suggested I go have a chat with the lady involved, and I asked him if he really thought that would help at all.



Then I was “talking” to the lady involved and she explained what had happened, except I did not hear words I just experienced what she was talking about. Everything was normal and happy. It was raining and they were running to get inside somewhere from a car maybe. He (her husband?) had stopped in the rain, took out a gun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.



I am not entirely sure whether he died though because the next scene involved me looking at him in what looked like a hospital ward maybe. He was standing facing me and his eyes were so weird, sort of like holes made up of fibers similar to the entrance to a spiders web, the fibers were moving around to create the shape of he’s eyes. He looked ghastly. His lips were encrusted with a thick white sticky foam and the impression I got was that this was from a bunch of pills he had been chewing dry, this stuff stretched between his lips as they were moving... If he had lived after the gunshot now he was trying to take his life by overdosing?



Then it felt like I had not been listening I had been doing something. I was coming to and she was asking if I had seen him? She was so happy when I told her I had. She wanted to know something and I could tell her. His death had created a rift in the remaining family, a step-mother and two children – teenagers a male and an older female. She wanted to know what she could do to get rid of this rift and I told her. She did it and suddenly things were good between her and the kids. The girl especially was a problem and got incredibly emotional during this process. I felt very much a very big part of it and experiencing all the excitement I think is what woke me.



I can’t think of anything that I have been exposed to recently that might have brought on this subject in my dream. I did not intentionally write about it the way I have although I can see there seems to be a soul retrieval theme (but I am not saying that this is what really happened). This is not something I have been aiming at doing although once I am managing to astral project etc. would love to take it in this direction. It’s the first time I remember having had a dream like this and it feels really special. I had a further two dreams later and remember them both as well and I think all of this is thanks to the Salvia.

Technorati is a nifty blog indexing website, you can use it to find blog entries that were posted about things you are interested in. You can automate your searches by using their Watchlist and Favourite any blogs that you really enjoy reading and need to keep track of. As a member your own blog posts are searchable by content and tags & your blog is registered against any blogs that you have linked to... In this post I have linked to entries from various blogs that I found interesting and/or relevant, complete with extracts and comments. The blogs on Technorati are not limited by host (livejournal, myspace, blogger.com etc), it's just a pity that sometimes you can't post comments on an entry becuase you don't have an account with the host of the blog...

Pinchbeck Watch: 2012 Review in Reason "Quetzalcoatl has chosen to speak through the curious medium of Daniel Pinchbeck, 40, a former editor of the Manhattan lit-journal Open City. Pinchbeck has had a glowing reputation in hipster circles since his 2002 book Breaking Open the Head, a travelogue and treatise on exotic psychedelics, which transformed him into the 21st century's chief pop guru on the meaning and significance of altered states - a thought leader whose musings, no matter how offbeat, are considered worthy of review in publications as mainstream as The New York Times. ... [Pinchbeck's] general sense of dread and dissatisfaction regarding capitalist modernity existed before his spiritual journey. Those sentiments are in fact nearly universal in the post-'60s counterculture for which he is a spokesman. Indeed, they're pretty common in mainstream intellectual culture as well; few literary intellectuals under 40 do not share them to some degree, though most refrain from claiming they learned them from a supernatural serpent with feathers."	Comment on (Consciousness Cafe) "serving the Chicago consciousness community". Less of a solo effort by someone wanting to detail their everyday mundane activity, and more of a voice with weight providing an illuminating read. In this particular post a review in "Review" (a magazine) is referenced (and linked to) of Daniel Pinchbeck's fantastic book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Consciousness Cafe lists "several areas of Pinchbeck's thought that have concerned me for some time", and provides some links to other posts in the blog that involve Pinchbeck. What is quite cool here is Pinchbeck responds in person though the Leave Comments facility on this post - it makes for a fascinating read... enjoy!
DNA is the informational molecule of life ---- Dr. Jeremy Narby "One school of thought insists that humans are actually made of sound and that DNA itself may be a form of sound. Drawing on meticulously documented research, Harvard-trained Leonard Horowitz explains that DNA emits and receives both phonons and photons, or electromagnetic waves of sound and light. In the 1990s, according to Dr. Horowitz, "three Nobel laureates in medicine advanced research that revealed the primary function of DNA lies not in protein synthesis ... but in the realm of bioacoustic and bioelectric signaling." In recent years a new artistic field called DNA music has even begun to flourish. It therefore seems appropriate, at the very least, to compare DNA to a keyboard with a number of keys that produce the music of life."	Comment on (The Ronin) This link is to all entries instead of to the front page on MySpace as provided above, in case like me you wish to avoid all manner of valuable memory chomping bits and pieces the MySpace frontpages are normally polluted with - the bane of my existence (and so, why I prefer to use livejournal). The Ronin has several entries not all particularly of the entheogenic inclined but still of some interest none-the-less (of the serious brain-straining variety). In the adjacent post an interview with Jeremy taken from Souldish.com, and an interesting comment from Sol Luckman (author of Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method). Jeremy Narby wrote "The Cosmic Serpent", involving DNA and the use of ayahuaska.
Hallucinogens . . . . . (Magazine article from Slate) "Further research has shown these fears to be exaggerated, says John Halpern, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. To be sure, psychedelics can cause acute and sometimes persistent psychopathology, especially in those predisposed to mental illness. But Halpern maintains that these compounds are usually harmless when ingested by healthy individuals in appropriate settings. As evidence, Halpern cites a five-year study he recently completed with a Harvard colleague of members of the Native American Church, who are permitted by U.S. law to consume the mescaline-containing cactus peyote as a sacrament. Church members who had taken peyote at least 100 times showed no adverse neurocognitive effects compared to a control group."	Comment on (Denitio del Toro) It really was a waste of time checking Denitio del Toro's frontpage on MySpace so I wouldn't bother. The adjacent post from Slate which represents the sum of his posts though was quite nice to read. Unfortunately he doesn't link to Slate so I could point you there instead. That post provides commentary from someone who feels that their use of entheogens is beneficial, and goes on to discuss research into the subject from a couple of quarters. "The Antipodes of the Mind" by Benny Shanon gets a mention as well, which is about as serious a book as you can get in the study of ayahuasca visions.
Ecodelic. "Before their possession became a criminal offense in the United States, tryptamines (e.g. Psilocybin), phenethylamines (e.g. mescaline), and Cannabinoids (e.g. Cannabis Sativa and Indica, THC) were given to engineers and designers to break "creative logjams" and promote innovation in the Cold War United States. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, for example, the Ampex Corporation(inventor of the Video Tape Recorder) studied the effects of LSD and mescaline on their engineers, and the result was a growing body of literature and data on tryptamine and phenethylamine "regimens" and their effects on technical innovation.These regimens included precise and intensive rhetorical practices such as the epigraph above – although essentially ineffable, psychedelic experience was treated as fundamentally and essentially programmable."	Comment on (Quetzalcoatl - 2012). I was quite surprised to find this blog. It was put together by Daniel Pinchbeck himself before the release of 2012. It only has two months worth of entries in it for November and December 2005, I guess after that he moved the circus to his other websites which you can find easy enough on the www. The adjacent is an example of what you can find on this site, amongst a couple of other intriguing subjects. You can also get some background on 2012 and an idea of how he writes, which is quite awesome.
Mushrooms and mysticism. "Following a series of four two-hour preparation sessions with a psychologist experienced at guiding hallucinogen sessions (from his days at the Spring Grove Hospital when it was a center of that research effort) the subjects were then brought into a living-room-like setting and given either a fairly hefty dose of psilocybin (almost half a milligram per kilogram of body weight) or a comparably hefty dose of methylphenidate, the stimulant prescribed as Ritalin to treat attention deficit disorder. After swallowing the capsule, the subjects were encouraged to put on eyeshades and earphones (with a set music program) and "go inside." The dosing was triple-blind: neither the principal investigator, the subject, nor the two "guides" present for the session (including Bill Richards, the psychologist who handled the preparation sessions) knew which material was present in the capsule the subject took."	Comment on (The Huffington Post (The Blog)). Another blog I wouldn't normally have bothered with except for what I thought was at least one worthwhile post, involving whether entheogens (psilocybin in this case) could facilitate mystical experience. It refers to what I think was a recent study on the subject that concludes that yes, scientifically it is possible. Detail of what institute is involved, what journal and which professionals are also included. Basically it covers this angle to the extent that anyone that still doubts it looks really stupid. The million buck question now of course is, what next? And this is where it gets icky because it involves the law and if it means that people can go solo on this - or need to subscribe to some kind of institute. Anyway, an encouraging read. The Huffington Post reads a bit like Consciousness Cafe except most of the time it seems concerned with American politics and the Oscars.
Willie Nelson’s ‘Narcotic’ Shrooms. "Perhaps we should accept the term “narcotic” as a description of any illicit mind-active drug since it is now common usage. But the word still carries more than a whiff of its original connotations. Drug warriors and reductionists do think of all illegal drug effects in terms of stupefaction. Most psychedelic fans would argue that these substances result in the opposite of stupefaction. Indeed, the experience frequently makes trippers painfully hyper-aware. On the other hand, if you’re hoping that your buddy who is tripping on a hefty dose of shrooms will help you sort the garbage for tomorrow’s recycling pick up, you might consider the slacker – laying on the floor for six hours staring at the back of his eyelids – to be stupified."	Comment on (10 Zen Monkeys). "a webzine". This post nitpicks the use of the word "narcotic" and goes to great pains to prove it is not really an accurate verb to describe psilocybin. The next inevitable step is to drag the subject of Americas War on Drugs, as inconceived of as The War on Terror... Apart from the adjacent you can find some really absurd entries in this lively blog, here are some titles: Atheist Filmmaker Issues ‘Blasphemy Challenge’; Paul McCartney On Drugs; Hallucinogenic Weapons: The Other Chemical Warfare; A Selection of Obscure Robert Anton Wilson Essays; Keith Henson Talks about Memetics, Evolutionary Psychology & Scientology, etc. etc.
A New Approach To Invocation, posted by teriel. "We use invocation in our lives with the way we navigate through life. For instance when I teach my students, I invoke a persona of myself that is an effective teacher. I essentially invoke a role, one expected of me that is a synthesis of myself and the role of a teacher. Likewise the various other functions I'm engaged in inform the invocation of the various roles I adopt to fit the expectations of the people. For instance when I do a workshop on magick, obviously I am being myself, but I am expected to be at least somewhat knowledgeable on the subject I'm discussing. As such when I'm doing my workshop I'm invoking into myself the various magickal experiences and knowledge that I have so that I can provide all of that in the workshop."	Comment on (Disinformation). "The gateway to the underground - news, politics, conspiracy and weirdness." Sort of like a blog that became some kind of franchise (predictable I guess - they DO have a book AND a DVD out). Lists posts by category which can be quite handy. Categories include Forteana, Magick, Spirituality & the War on (Some) Drugs. As the title might suggest the emphasis here is pointing out the lies we are fed like some kind of herd of sheep (or when the truth is conveniently not made known). Quite well written and interesting, but only worth it if you have the time and the inclination for these things. Personally I got a bit intimidated by an all pervading sense of intellectualism in the posts that you can find here. The reason why I include it is pending, at this stage it just has potential. Oh, they have a thing for all things "23", except Jim Carrey's latest movie (see their review category)...
A Shamanic Link to Christmas Symbolism. "The shamanic technique involves the ingestion of a particular dose of the entheogen (psilocybin, in the example above); the shamanic dose is high enough to evoke a death and rebirth experience without physical pain. This continued through the mysteries as the initiate is given this secret, forbidden fruit. Upon ingestion, the effects take a hold of the initiate as they are overwhelmed by the plants powers. Movement is not an option and there is only one place to go: out of body...life flashing before your eyes as you get a complete review of your choices in life. It's only natural to pass judgment on yourself after such a deep review of your life. So unlike a real death experience when you get this FINAL review of your life, these entheogens provide you with that experience and let you live through it. It's nothing short of a near death experience. The adept is left with the feeling of being born again when they reflect upon the profound experience. The adept is then able to enter these states of consciousness with no fear of the profound experience; this training prepares the adept for his or her own actual death. I believe that at the moment of your death, if you resist or turn back toward your body and long to remain human, you will reincarnate. How can one conquer death without ever practicing for it?"	Comment on (Andrew Rutajit). Lawds the frontpages on MySpace take ages to load! Anyway, Andrew is one half of the author of "Astrotheology & Shamanism". Am busy reading it and a post should be coming up going into it at some length. The adjacent post from Andrews blog (which loads a bit quicker) goes into some detail on this fantastic book. Another interesting post on this blog is Dreaming While Awake – The Duality of Consciousness. This should give you some idea on what kind of stuff you can find here. Just for interest sake "A Shamanic Link to Christmas Symbolism" was also posted in Brent's (MySpace) blog. The comments here were quite interesting, basically concerning Drug War Facts and leftwing Marijuana politics, from someone called Ganja Granny - hehe. My explorations were prematurely terminated on account of the liberal amounts of memory MySpace sucked out of my computer. For a bit of a different spin on the same subject you can check out Joe Rogans post called "Santa Claus was a mushroom." (also on MySpace). Joe is a comedian and writes on the subject from an everyday cool dude perspective. He seems quite popular and had 305 comments on this post at the last count. Here's a timeless statement from it::: "Now I know to a lot of you, all this shit must SOUND insane. It certainly did to me when I was first looking into psychedelics. I thought of psychedelics as "drugs," and "drugs" were for losers. Period." Cool read, with nice pictures to boot.

When having a link is just not enough! So, consider this an elaboration on the theme, necessary reading at the very least. Deoxy.org can be tricky to figure out at first but seriously worthwhile once you get going. This post has links to a couple of pages that sprout from deoxy, complete with extracts and comments, weather permitting. Yes, the content is inspired by all things hallucinogenic. Its not just a "woah dude" thing though, it leans more towards reigning in the concepts that could help you create a more responsible context to use them in. Of course, that would mean including all things involving those that have had an influence on the psychedelics scene.



Be sure to check out the "Related-Linked" pages which changes depending on what page you are in below. The below are supplied to provide an idea on what you can find on deoxy and so help you decide whether it's worth checking out, it's by no means comprehensive though. I feel pained at having excluded the Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson page links especially, you can pick them up on some of the below pages and if you do please check them out too.

Psychedelics and Religious Experience by Alan Watts "The experiences resulting from the use of psychedelic drugs are often described in religious terms. They are therefore of interest to those like myself who, in the tradition of William James,1 are concerned with the psychology of religion. For more than thirty years I have been studying the causes, the consequences, and the conditions of those peculiar states of consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God, with the Universe, with the Ground of Being, or whatever name he may use by cultural conditioning or personal preference for the ultimate and eternal reality."	Comment... Table of contents for the rest of this page: The Psychedelic Experience (slowing down of time, awareness of polarity, awareness of relativity, awareness of eternal energy), Opposition to Psychedelic Drugs (danger, escape from reality) & Footnotes. Alan lucidly explains why westernised spirituality has to be superficial from the perspective of governance - "Moreover, mystical experiences often result in attitudes that threaten the authority not only of established churches, but also of secular society." A bunch more pages/ sites involving Alan Watts sprout from here. He seems to have written quite extensively on the subject and definitely looks worth checking out.
"bemushröömed", From Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico by Robert Gordon Wasson "At last you know what the ineffable is and what ecstasy means. The mind harks back to the origin of that word. For the Greeks ekstasis meant the flight of the soul from the body. I can find no better word to describe the bemushroomed state. In common parlance, among the many who have not experienced ecstasy, ecstasy is fun, and I am frequently asked why I do not reach for mushrooms every night. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will chose to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that door yonder into the divine presence? The unknowing abuse the word, but we must recapture its full and terrifying sense. As man emerged from his brutish past, thousands of years ago, there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery of a mushroom (or perhaps a higher plant) with miraculous properties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and love, to the greatest pitch of which mankind is capable, all those sentiments and virtues that mankind has ever since regarded as the highest attributes of his kind. It made him see what the perishing mortal eye cannot see. The Greeks were right to hedge about the mystery, this imbibing of the potion, with secrecy and surveillance. What today is resolved into the effects of a mere drug, a tryptamine or lysergic acid derivative, was for them a prodigious miracle, inspiring in them poetry and philosophy and religion."	Comment... It's easy enough to get caught up with all the controversies that surround Wasson, involving some pretty heavy claims - that mushrooms were responsible for the creation of religion (or spirituality), and that the Eleusian Mysteries involved tripping out. You can get annoyed with the guy for exposing some fragile cultures to the West and turning something that even he thought was sacred into some kind of party trick. You can get pissed at him for taking credit for stuff that Alegro actually did all the hard work on etc. etc. It's easy for all of this stuff to be thrown like so much sand into your face and to write the whole thing off as some kind of bad mistake. It's easy to confuse the man with the experience, a very subtle but pivotal distinction. He had an experience with something he thought was worth getting excited about, and then tried to sell it to the rest of us by regurgitating it in a context that we could understand, and subscribe to. He tried to do something to encourage us to put our cultural "superiority" aside and incorporate what we have come to understand as being a detrimental practice. Incorporate something once again that from a development of civilization perspective, was a very important missing part of the puzzle. Considering that it could be exactly what the human race needs right now, perhaps the end does justify the means...?
A Short Guide About Hallucinogenic Drugs For the Explorers of Inner Space by Donald J. DeGracia "Introduction There are a variety of tools available to anyone interested in exploring altered states of consciousness. Such tools include meditation, out-of-body experiences, brain and biofeedback instruments, occult type rituals, visualization exercises, and also in this category are hallucinogenic drugs. Each of these tools provides a different doorway into the inner spaces of our subjectivity and consciousness. In this article, I would like to provide a brief overview of hallucinogenic drugs as one means among many for achieving altered states of consciousness. It is not my intention here to debate whether it is right or not to use hallucinogenic drugs, whatever is ones motive, though I will discuss the variety of opinions that exist in this regard. My purpose here is twofold: 1. to give a broad overview of hallucinogenic drugs in general, and 2. to show how hallucinogenics can provide, if used reasonably and responsibly, a valuable and substantial tool for exploring inner spaces."	Comment... Donald goes on to give us some background on where all the excitement started and why. Leary gets a mention with a link to all things Leary-esque. Two models are put forward then involving the effects of hallucinogens - "scientific" and "occult", (or esoteric), involving chakras etc. How the effects of hallucinogens tie in with the chakras gets speculated on, as well as where kundalini might fit in. Set and setting does get a mention but I am not sure what this actually means gets properly explained. I get the impression that it is enough to just take LSD and make sure that you are comfortable and happy. I think a bit more effort is necessary if you want to achieve anything worthwhile. It would have to involve an ongoing practice and exposure to philosophical and psychological literature. Also, a concerted effort to deconstruct the ego more and more as time progresses, see egodeath.com.
"The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, Q&A with Jeremy Narby by Todd Stewart" "You write of how the ideology of "rational" science, deterministic thought, is and has been quite limiting in its approach to new and alternative scientific theories; it is assumed that "mystery is the enemy." In your book you describe how you had to suspend your judgement, to "defocalize," and in this way gain a deeper insight. Why do you think we are often limited in our rational, linear thought and why are so few willing and able to cross these boundaries? I don't believe we are. People spend hours each day thinking non-rationally. Our emotional brain treats all the information we receive before our neo-cortex does. Scientists are forever making discoveries as they daydream, take a bath, go for a run, lay in bed, and so on."	The Cosmic Serpent "Some excerpts from this important book: Some biologists describe DNA as an "ancient high biotechnology," containing "over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices." Could one still speak of technology in these circumstances? Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this duplicable, information-storing molecule. DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology: It is organic and so miniturized that it approaches the limits of material existence"
Seduced by the Image of Reality "A spectacle also isolates the people whose attention it commands. Many of us know more about the fictitious characters of popular sitcoms than we know about the lives and loves of our neighbors--for even when we talk to them, it is about television shows, the news, and the weather; thus the very experiences and information that we share in common as spectators of the mass-media serve to separate us from one another. It is the same at a big football game: everybody watching from the bleachers is a nobody, regardless of who they are. They may be sitting next to each other, but all eyes are focused on the field. If they speak to each other, it is almost never about each other, but about the game that is being played before them. And although football fans cannot participate in the events of the game they are watching, or exert any real influence over them, they attach the utmost importance to these events and associate their own needs and desires with their outcome in a most unusual way. Rather than concentrating their attention on things that have a real bearing on their desires, they reconstruct their desires to revolve around the things they pay attention to. Their language even conflates the achievements of the team they identify themselves with with their own actions: "we scored a goal!" "we won!" shout the fans from their seats and sofas." ((extracted)Text by NietzsChe Guevara.)	Comment... One of many interesting perspectives that you can find on deoxy. Not quite directly related to literature involving psychedelics, goes more to what I think might be one of the side effects of both using them, and DECIDING to use them. It points out how we disconnect (or are disconnected) from direct experience, preferring to experience life as spectators. (And then we wander why we feel so alienated and unable to control our own destiny). This feels related to an issue that is bouncing around in my head lately, it involves this impression people seem to have of being separate from the rest of the world somehow. I wonder if part of the problem (and I mean the world being in a bad way problem) involves feeling separate from everyone else - and looking for symbols to unify us. The symbols to unify everyone are absent, it would take direct experience to do it. To make us feel like you know what, we are all actually one (big, happy) family. I think it would take this realisation to stop people from living so selfishly, and, so... extravagantly.
T e r e n c e M c K e n n a L a n d "Terence McKenna (1946-2000) has been studying the ontological foundations of Shamanism and the Ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation for the past quarter century. An innovative theoretician and spellbinding orator, Terence has emerged as a powerful voice for the psychedelic movement and the emergent societal tendency he calls The Archaic Revival. Poetically dispensing enlightened social criticism and new theories of the fractal dynamics of time, Terence deobfuscates many aspects of the visionary lexicon, and then some. As Artist Alex Grey suggests, "In the twilight of human history, McKenna's prescription for salvation is just so crazy it might work."	Comment... Multiple links from here categorised as follows: Written Word, Spoken Word, Audio/Video, Text, Interviews, Encounters, Reviews, Timewave Zero, Misc, Required Reading & Related websites... yes, you have access to a vast resource on the subject right here. I wasn't blown away by "The Invisible Landscape", but then that's going back a bit, to a time when I think Terence was still a very young man. He came a very long way since then and now nobody can turn a blind eye on what he had to say when it comes to researching psychedelics. Enjoy the ride.
Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness by Terence McKenna "The experience always reminds me of the twenty-fourth fragment of Heraclitus: "The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls." One not only becomes the Aeon at play with colored balls but meets entities as well. In the book by my brother and myself, The Invisible Landscape, I describe them as self-transforming machine elves, for that is how they appear. These entities are dynamically contorting topological modules that are somehow distinct from the surrounding background, which is itself undergoing a continuous transformation. These entities remind me of the scene in the film version of The Wizard of Oz after the Munchkins come with a death certificate for the Witch of the East. They all have very squeaky voices and they sing a little song about being "absolutely and completely dead." The tryptamine Munchkins come, these hyperdimensional machine-elf entities, and they bathe one in love. It's not erotic but it is open-hearted. It certainly feels good. These beings are like fractal reflections of some previously hidden and suddenly autonomous part of one's own psyche."	The Ayahuasca-Alien Connection (some kind of paper by deoxy? complete with bibliography) "Flying is one of the most common themes of shamanism anywhere. The shaman may transform himself into a bird, insect, or a winged being, or be taken by an animal or being into other realms. Contemporary shamans sometimes use metaphors based on modern innovations to express the idea of flying. Thus it is not strange that the UFO motif, which is part of modern imagery - perhaps, as proposed by Jung (1959), even an archetypal expression of our times - is used by shamans as a device for spiritual transportation into other worlds. The flying saucers, extraterrestrial beings, and intergalactic civilizations that appear in Pablo's paintings should not necessarily be considered unusual or extraneous to Amazonian shamanism; they may be manifestations of old motifs. Descriptions of shamanic journeys under the influence of ayahuasca and other psychotropic plants, even among culturally isolated Amazonian tribes, frequently include the idea of a shaman ascending to heaven to mingle with heavenly people or, conversely, celestial beings descending to the place of the ceremony."

"a cultural history of the magic mushroom." Cool. First impression; Andy (AL) (his blog here) wants to throw a spanner in the works. It does not appear to be a cultural history at all but a debunking of a still evolving cultural history. Whereas other recent literary contributions to the genre are cleaning up some of the more unlikely reasons why what "myths" surround the use of magic mushrooms, or add different perspectives/ speculations, Andy opts to sift through some of the earliest material and debunk it unceremoniously. It seems his intentions might be good, as in all AL is saying is that yes shrooms have a place in peoples lives, but not for any reason involving their historical use. If you're going to bother defending your involvement with them, rather spend your time proving that there are more current (health/ other) reasons why, not because they were used for millennia until the advent of Christianity. Fair enough I guess. I cant help but feel a bit hostile in my reception of this work, I hope I can warm up to it the more I read.



AL seems to take offence at the romantic musings of those that indulge where it concerns the why and how all this got started, and to be quite frank I'm not sure this book, or any other book will ever really make a difference to that. Romantic musings when it comes to just about anything is part of the territory involving those that subscribe to whatever it is - a good example is Christianity. Exactly just how many of the average church goers know the actual origin of many of the precepts that constitute the faith they claim to subscribe to? How often do you hear a romantic musing in reply to an earnest question concerning them? Often enough methinks to conclude this is not a trait exclusive to the subject at hand? Perhaps it is not the romantic musing of the general population here that AL is offended by, and it is actually those in authority on the subject that have put claims forward that AL finds offensive? Lets read.



We start off with checking out whether shrooms were available in prehistoric Europe. I caught a whiff of this discussion before in Graham Hancock's "Supernatural", where I think he took an opposite stance than the one found here, and in my mind also painted a better/ more convincing picture of who says what and why. AL goes on to claim that where plants were known to produce altered states, the reaction from the general population was one of disinterest, scorn even. There's a bunch more in the following pages that result in some mental indigestion. I try keep my eye on the ball instead of getting caught up in my biased opinion. AL is trying to say that there is no proof that our European ancestors used magic mushrooms. He says there was no desire to use them, that there are no shroom fossils and no shroom rock paintings etc. Fine, lets proceed and see where he is going with this.



A model put forward by David Lewis-Williams that might go some way to explaining what cave art drawn by our ancestors was all about gets canned in about a page and a half. If you want to know a bit more about this model and the controversies surrounding it please see Grahams book mentioned above. Next the possibility of the Eleusian Mysteries having something to do with tripping gets the axe, also in about a page worth of words. Its weird, entire books have been devoted to these subjects but dismissed here like so much confetti. I would think it would take more than a page of words to discredit something that a lot of effort went into. Carl A.P. Ruck just put another book out (Sacred Mushrooms) which is well researched and makes for a convincing argument.



What comes to mind when it comes to how AL has approached this thing is that something is missing. When you read about whether a link exists between cave art and hallucinogens there are a lot of things that give a claim like that substance, involving a wide spectrum of subjects. Its not a case of taking an isolated idea and going forward on that basis, its more like there being some kind of synergy between various ideas that culminate in an explanation worth considering. Specifically when it comes to cave art there's the question of what is being drawn, we're not talking about mundane activity being illustrated here, but something more sacred (1). That thing involves a practice that certain members of a tribe were expected to be proficient in - acting as an intermediary between here and the spirit realm (2). What cave art appears to depict seems to be synonymous with how individuals entered the spirit realm, the physical symptoms during the experience, and the beings encountered there (3) (and threes a lot of ground to cover on those three things to help make them make sense).



So far so good, where do psychedelics fit in? Its thought that acting as an intermediary between here and the spirit realm requires an altered state of consciousness = being in trance (1). Now while a certain percentage of the population are prone to enter trance without any aid it is left up to the rest of us to find our own means. Several such means exist involving sleep deprivation, hyperventilation or great physical exertion (2). Fortunately for the less (hard-work) inclined amongst us an alternative exists in the consumption of certain naturally occurring substances (3) (and there's a lot of ground to cover on those three things to help make them make sense). Now what I like about this little story is a logical progression, a bringing together of various concepts and ideas that help explain a bit of the bigger picture. There were dudes that had to speak to the spirits, they had to enter trance to do this, they took hallucinogens to enter trance, and their experiences being quite significant they were inspired to drew pictures afterwards. Sure there are holes in the story, but by putting the different pieces together those holes get smaller. What AL is tending to do is focus on the holes, and insist that any attempt at filling them is speculation and therefore not worth considering. Perhaps another approach would be to propose another theory with all the obligatory reasoning instead of basically just saying no, it wasn’t so.



AL takes a machete to any and all ideas involving the possible historic use of psychedelics. In his mind it is not possible that any of the traditional figures associated with mysterious abilities/ spiritual proficiency could not have enlisted the help of psychoactive mushrooms, indeed, could have enlisted the help of any psychoactive plants at all. AL boldly proclaims that "the history of religion is also replete with examples of mass epiphanies induced by nothing more exotic than enthusiastic fervour" and I'm thinking, it seems AL hasn't done his homework here (there are plenty books saying otherwise, complete with all the research and reasoning - see Carl Ruck again, Dan Merkur, Joseph Martos, Huston Smith, James Arthur etc.).



We move away from what there is "no evidence of" into the realm of what we do have evidence of. These are things like the evolution of mycology over the last 200 years and records of random encounters with mushrooms that produced alarming effects (things like not being able to stop grinning etc.). What is quite clear is that during the Victorian era, intoxicating shrooms were not consumed intentionally, at least not by the general population. In South America it was a little different, and can be traced at least to when the Spaniards arrived and began their "civilisation" of the local population some 500 years ago (if you can call murder, rape and plunder of a native people "civilisation"). Although he does mention that shrooms were held in very high regard by the local population, that their use was synonymous with their religion, possibly going back a couple of thousand years, AL craftily seems to avoid pointing out that if it was so then and there, that it could have been the same elsewhere, and justify maybe why it should be the same now.



That thing which I said was missing in AL's earlier treatments seeps through in his treatment of RG Wasson, I am not sure why - easy target? - or maybe because his work was quite influential (in terms of encouraging people, albeit "indirectly", to use shrooms). AL weaves a context wherein Wassons framework was fundamentally flawed (in terms of trying to discover that shrooms might be responsible for the origin of religion). Not only was his framework fundamentally flawed but his intentions ignoble. From some of the dirt that AL digs up on Wasson it might actually end up being quite embarrassing to align with his ideas. Especially embarrassing the impact of what Wasson did by exposing Maria Sabina to pop culture, like an albino bug blinded by the sun when a rock gets overturned. You know that how AL treats this specific area of the subject actually wins me over. At the same time I had my reservations about Wasson before I read this book anyway. I am also prepared to accept that all Wasson did was kick start a modern magic mushroom culture.



AL goes into some detail involving the Fly-Agaric, making obsolete any popular myths that have attached themselves to it, and to the Shaman who apparently used it. One such example involves what inspired the tradition of Christmas. Here are some examples of this being an (uncomfortable/ objectionable) read. AL says the historian Ronald Hutton points out inadequacies such as Shaman never wore red-and-white clothes - while a picture of a Shaman on the previous page is wearing a red and white spotted garment (if you cant see it in the black and white reprint you can have a look at the colour version of it in "Plants of the Gods", pg 85). Then on Santa and the chimney that Shaman never "physically climbed out of their yurts while in trance, for their spirit-journeys to upper worlds took place entirely in an otherworldly dimension.". Having a quick squizz at Astrotheology & Shamanism by Jan Irvin & Andrew Rutajit, the story about the shamanic chimney climbing had nothing to do with journeying. It had to do with shaman delivering dried amanita to members of the Siberian community during the winter solstice - at a time when their yurts were snowed over. During this time the traditional entrance/ exit was the chimney, ergo, the origin of that symbology. Like I said - just examples, it seems "Shroom" is riddled with a lot of stuff that could be similarly deconstructed.



In this case fair enough I guess that AL points out that how this myth got started (involving Robert Graves, Jonathan Ott, "presumably" Gordon Wasson and finally Rogan Taylor). So too fair enough their reasoning was flawed from the get go. But instead of looking for valid reasoning available in other resources on the same issue, AL gravitates towards discrediting the premature speculations of the founding fathers of modern magic mushroom culture. It should be noted that said culture does already contain an element of disdain for Wasson and what he did to Sabina. That since the 60's more research and more material has been produced to align the myths to more fool-proof reasoning/ tidy up some of the more incomplete ideas. I just hope that whoever reads "Shroom" does not take AL's word for it - that they are already familiar with other resources or are prepared to investigate other resources before making up their own mind (of course, amongst a larger audience this is bound to not happen, and probably wouldn’t matter anyway).



It seems to me that a large amount of interest is being generated around this subject, and a lot of homework needs to be done/ is being done. For someone like AL to step into the scene and contribute by nay-saying is fine, but if to be taken seriously really needs to counter hard work with seriously hard work. Seriously hard work seems to be missing here, its too easy to point out flaws going back to what people were saying 40 years ago. What seems to be likely to me is that Andy knows that even bad exposure is good exposure, that a generation of people into shrooming will pick up his book just to try tear it apart - so what? Its still money in the bank for him. Even if this is so, I don’t really feel ripped off with this purchase, it has definitely excited me, as this lengthy effort I am making might attest! Another theory anyway might be that shroomers are getting a bit too close to the truth, and this is some kind of exercise in disinformation, re-enforcing scepticism to keep the general public unaware of a lost piece of its historic cultural puzzle. Hmmm, maybe...



AL's shoddy attempt at proving no hallucinogen existed in the Eleusian Mysteries gets used to speculate that the Soma of the Rig Veda was possibly not hallucinogenic either. I guess it didn’t suffice to shoot holes in Wassons argument that Soma was the Fly Agaric. The feeling I had of AL merely being a protagonist to make some cash gets reinforced, surely nobody can willingly be this stupid? I also start to worry that what this book is not that clear on is merely being dismissive of the role shrooms played in a cultural or spiritual evolution. That by extension psychedelics had nothing to do with anything. There's too much here on what they could (erroneously) not be involved in, and too little of where they could actually have been influential. That their effects can be relegated to the mundane and the ordinary, certainly not transcendent enough to spur on something like religion? I wonder if AL has actually tried a psychedelic, and whether if he did he tried to use it in some kind of spiritual context? I wonder if he tried this whether he could piece so many things together, and realized that of course psychedelics are the missing link, or at the very least a part of it...



For all intents and purposes AL does not think there is a missing link, that a weekly sermon is enough to inspire spiritual ecstasy, or if there is a missing link that it could just as well be tea (no, not DMTea). In my mind that psychedelics are the the missing link is not the question, the question is how (once again) to best integrate them. I think its scratching around in the past trying to answer this question that has led to the manifestation of a lot of the stuff that AL is debunking. Maybe he has done a good thing in that perhaps it will force people to look elsewhere for answers that haven't been looked at before, but more likely they will just look harder at what they were already looking at - some of which just seems so damn fitting. One thing is for sure, that many people have been inspired to try make a case for them - often its been all or nothing. Surely it was something seriously worthwhile that inspired them? Despite probably not trying intentionally to do it, "Shroom" borders on declaring it is not possible the shroom experience is profound and able to facilitate great things. Anyway, I guess that would probably form the basis of the next good book on this subject - what that profound thing is, what great things can they facilitate, and how maybe.



I begin to gather that perhaps AL is not biased and communicating his own insecurities here concerning some of the ideas associated with the role shrooms have played in the evolution of human society. Mostly he just points out the disagreements where they existed in relation to things that were put forward. You cant really fault him for that. Because I don't like the disagreements doesn't mean they are not valid or do not exist. Creeping more into Wasson territory AL starts to build a much stronger case against why the Fly Agaric could not be the universal instigator of religion. Note: not that psychedelics in general of which there are a myriad to choose from anywhere at anytime were not responsible, that the Fly Agaric was not responsible. I think this is quite an important distinction and unfortunate for it not to be pointed out. Fair enough perhaps it is difficult to piece it all together when the emphasis is on shrooms, possibly a bit easier to achieve if the emphasis is moved to trance and the various means to achieve it, including of course the use of our plant allies. The argument might especially be more fool proof in that the necessary plants occur in abundance, everywhere and all the time. In the meantime, with our focus narrowed down to shrooms, the ideas of John Allegro are toppled next, relegated to the realm of conspiracy theory.



At this point I don’t know if its worth writing much more. The rest of the book (Part 3: Psilocybin) covers the sequence of events that led up to a magic mushroom explosion. Some of the big names get thrown in - Leary, Graves, McKenna, with all the complimentary interesting stories and their take on things. Most of this stuff is available in other "TripLit" anyway. Of course, these takes are countered with various objections, some quite well thought out. What Andy ends of with is a thought as to why shrooms managed to get so popular, involving some kind of increasing need for "enchantment" - relative to science as it reigns more and more supreme. What to say in conclusion? I guess my bias should be obvious. Its not obvious because I think there IS anything worthwhile to achieve using psychedelics, it is obvious because I do not think AL did a good job. He did not do a good job because he unpicked a lot of stuff that was too easy to unpick (it already was), and also because, mostly, he didn’t do a good job with the unpicking. I also think there are a lot of books that have been written that make very good arguments in favour of the role psychedelics have played in our evolution, cultural and other, which arent mentioned here.



It’s a pity AL isolated the shroom instead of tackling the broader subject of trance and its implications. What I think is inclined to happen here is it would be too easy for a dissenting population to latch onto what this book has to say, without bothering to read the previously mentioned books. I guess that’s not AL's fault. I think he did a good job on covering the last 40 years or so from a sequence of events perspective (only). I guess with regards all the bells and whistles I could be critical of the situation as well; there definitely is something missing. That anyone takes a psychedelic and thinks its okay because they are shamanising for a start is a little disturbing. I think shrooms are a tool but at the moment a context is missing. For most people maybe that context is recreation. You cant expect people to produce something substantial in that context. But I do think that context is evolving, and maybe one day it will be possible for something substantial to manifest from the experience, substantial enough to justify using them, substantial enough to say this more than likely produced consciousness, and substantial enough to have produced religeon. At that point maybe books like this would look all the more stupid, right now though I guess it does look kinda convincing.

Having read Dan's "2012: Return of the...", I got the idea that his previous book might have a bigger emphasis on his experiences with psychedelics. I am halfway through it and at this point there is little by way of the psychedelic experience and the impact on me has not been that big. Like 2012 though, it is an effective page turner. Similar to Graham Hancock's "Supernatural" there is a South African link thing going on. Unfortunately the local (also a Daniel) was not all that good at what he was doing - organising trips to Gabon for people to experience Iboga. The not all that good bit becomes evident in the host of the Iboga ceremony hassling the attendees for more money etc. Cant quite badmouth Daniel too much because he died in a car accident age 33 a couple of years ago.



The story of DP's run-in with Iboga gets peppered with why he is bothering with this excursion at all anyway. This involves being dogged by the "meaninglessness of existence", what kind of a world we live in, and some stuff about his parents. We also get some background on what Iboga is, how it works (maybe?) and some history of how people have used it etc. In the end it seems like the effects of it are strange indeed, with a strong link to all things metaphysical. We move on to psilocybin, how DP trekked out to where it all started, and the impact on it of it all having starting there (not too good). From a sterile experience in Huautla we move into experiences with more impact from college days. Sticking with the college theme we get a bunch of philosophy 101. W. Benjamin and his ideas get a mention, Levi-Strauss, Shakespeare, (Carlos?) Ginzburg… a bit of Shamanism gets thrown into the mix, all quite interesting.



At Burning Man, a huge party held out in the desert every so often for a few days, DP joins revellers for an exercise in mind expansion. Then how psychedelic exploration strengthened DP's dream recollection (encouraging!). The Burning Man experience is punctured by the death of DP's father and what his lot in life was. Part of what his lot was were some ideas similar to those of Georges Inavovitch Gurdjieff, the recounting of which climax in their perceived manifestation in what happened at the world trade centre or something. Almost like some kind of justification for anyone to write a book on psychedelics the influence of shamanic concepts on our more inspired contributors to the genre of creative literature get a mention, big names like Goethe and Proust get a mention. Then we briefly explore the background and works of Artaud, Michaux, Huxley, William Burroughs... DP spells out the context in which they produced their… eccentric… works, and of course where altered stated of consciousness fit in. I like how this bit was done, its interesting, it didn’t feel like I sank into a quagmire of vagueness or got bored very easily. If anything it made me feel like gee, where have I been? Looks like there's a whole bunch more reading.



We delve into the murky depths of the swamp that is Ayahuaska. We hear about DP's first encounters with the brew and some insights he received. He says of one experience seeing a "multiarmed Shiva dancing before me.". A week and a half ago while under the influence I saw the same thing. The emphasis for me though was not on the dancing, it was on the luminescent colours - kind of a bright lime/ yellow thing. At the time I was experiencing great restlessness and did not try to pursue the vision - I dismissed it to explore on another occasion. I have no doubt the energy/ being was still around though, I got the clear impression that the discomfort I was experiencing had to do with some kind of energetic cleansing. DP goes on a "Shamanic Vacation" and we get all the claustrophobic detail, except in this case it’s a good thing. The story is punctuated by musing over Jeremy Narby's book "The Cosmic Serpent" which I will review next.



There's an introduction to LSD, some history and social context. Big words like capitalism and economy get thrown in. How among other things these translated into the War on Drugs. Its weird I get the impression of that biblical story involving Moses, and to what extent the authorities went to prevent him from materialising. If you use what happened there as a metaphor, where the prophet represents the use of psychedelics, I think we are in for an interesting outcome. Its still quite sad to read how just when people were getting their heads around where psychedelics fit in, its use was unceremoniously squished. Then Tim Leary gets quoted as saying "The most efficient way to cut through the game structure of Western life is the use of drugs.". I think that is exactly why the use of psychedelics became a big no-no; the "game structure" is actually a very intentional and desirable design, at least to big business and to the authorities. Its weird how on the other side of the coin, cutting through it at least on a personal level, is the object to achieve in spiritual development.



The impact of Learies enthusiasm gets covered, and culminates in a negativism from John Lennon (big uh-oh...). DP points out that one flaw exists with cutting through the "game structure of Western Life", and that is what do you replace it with? It's a big question and the lack of an answer seems to be responsible for destroying some of the more influential public figures of our recent past (circa 1970). The subsequent passages appear amongst the most inspired. Take the next assembly of words for example: "The goal was to restore a living knowledge of the sacred to the dazed and alienated denizens of a desacralized modern world."...; yummy! Similarly inspiring the next chapter is a recollection of some pretty neat ideas that came up while DP had a "vivid dream" that he was tripping out at a psytrance party...



The wow factor continues. DP tells us about some pretty interesting people he meets at the last of an annual Entheobotany Conference; Douglas damaged by Datura, Sasha Shulgin who doesn’t really need any introduction, and Robert who almost mutated into a Heyoka. Weaving in and out are references to shamanism and encounters with mushrooms - who might be "visitors to our world" that involve themselves in human affairs when it suits them. Kathleen Harrison introduces Salvia - a divine energy that "must be approached with care and respect." (I would second that, in fact GREAT care and respect). We get treated to a discourse on the work and ideas of T. McKenna, touching on when the next world cycle begins - 21.12-2002, and the fact that the Hopi predict the destruction of the United States before that date...



An experience with DMT comes next and some interpretations on what that could be all about, and of course what would reference to DMT be without dragging the works of Dr. R. Strassman into the equation? I couldn’t help but wonder once again at the striking consistencies of what this author has experienced/ spent his time doing over the last couple of years and what Graham Hancock has also been up to at roughly the same time (reviewed previously, GH actually interviews Strassman as well). Maybe they are both subscribing to some kind of archetype? From all the common references to literature they make, authors they quote, and psychedelics they test it seems a wonder to me that these two guys never bumped into each other - it seems quite suspicious that they never quite quote each other...



When will this mind warp ever end!!!? Jim DeKorne and his ideas from "Psychedelic Shamanism" get covered - I really like that book. We delve into the ominous (Gnostic) concept of human beings being farmed like so much cattle just to feed "ultraterrestrial entities" with our emotions and beliefs. Perhaps it is their (imprisonment) of us that is responsible for our apparent spiritual malaise - a spiritually evolved human is probably of little use to them and so, they manipulate things in such a way as to keep us (spiritually) stupid (can you imagine trying to eat a cow that somehow learnt to communicate...? Maybe that’s why we make sure they can never learn...). The idea of a belief being energy that can feed another reality is not really such a strange idea, it’s the basis of "neverending story", "sharkboy and lavagirl" and probably countless other "younger viewing" movies. And finally, enter DPT. Lets just say that I think this is something I would definitely stay very, very far away from. DP takes us through how his psyche got scrambled by the stuff and the synchronicities encountered in reality (maybe drinking alcohol beforehand was not really such a good idea). I guess a good spin-off was his newfound respect of the (higher) realms. With this newfound respect DP covers the work of Crowley, Castaneda and Steiner briefly, and trots off to Nepal. In the last few pages, DP tries to piece this all Together.



All I can say is wow. What a cool book. I just got an idea from reading it (and an experience I had) that maybe what we think of as "I" is really just a small part of the experience of being human. That maybe the body is actually like some kind of machine, or corporate company, made up of a bunch of different parts that a bunch of different energies are responsible for. We might perceive these different energies as being outside of ourselves (other entities), and they probably are but they are not really, although they may have their own individuality and area of expertise at the same time we are all a part of the same thing. The part that you think of as "I", is sort of like the CEO, the commander of a spaceship that is the human body. That perhaps in an altered state of consciousness, an opportunity presents itself to encounter the "workforce" that is the rest of "yourself", to disperse with what is normally an obligatory detachment. Except, this concept is not just applicable to what your perceive as "I" and the rest of what constitutes yourself, but also applicable to the relationship between yourself and the rest of society, even more the relationship between society and the rest of nature, between nature and the world, between the world and the rest of the universe.



What makes this book a good read for me is like "2012: Return of the…", it sort of tracks the journey of someone on a path that others might be interested in following (like me!). It covers what experiences you can expect, what other resources might come in handy (books/ information), and picks away at something that we might be picking away at ourselves and that is, exactly what is the nature of reality? If there is something else out there, what is it, and how do we make it tangible…? I don’t mean tangible from a nuts and bolts perspective, unless that nuts and bolts perspective incorporates the appropriate mystical elements. There is a strong emphasis though on set and setting, or more accurately, that you recklessly abandon this aspect at your own peril. There are also hints at some kind of "westernised" framework being put together here (within which this thing can be approached with the help of psychedelics). Although it does track Daniels journey, its not to say that he managed to reach any particular destination, except maybe in that it seems clear the world is in dire need of people that can authentically act as mediators/ communicators between the here and the not here.



There have been murmurs of disapproval about this book from certain sectors including the community that are on a similar path as to what DP is on. The idea of DP being a psychedelics elitist and suffering from a prophet complex. I guess it is inevitable that this would happen - it happens with many subjects where what might be called peers exist - some of them always know better. At this moment the emphasis for me is on the book being a good read, and it was because I was able to step outside of the whole what I know and how I would do it and what kind of a person Daniel is perspective. I can also respect that Daniel has made an effort to help introduce a touchy subject to a wider audience, and that in my mind can only ever be a good thing. For the rest of us it is an opportunity to hear what impact psychedelics had on someone's life, what they learnt and how they integrated their experiences (and personally I could read a hundred more books like this by different people). We can use it to learn more ourselves and identifies landmarks that we can agree or disagree the meaning of. It’s a pity there are murmurs of disapproval amongst a community that could most benefit from this book instead of debating the landmarks in it constructively...



What might end up being particularly helpful though going forward is not the story of someone that roams the planet in search of as many different substances to try get high on, nor the combination of the effect of them with a lot of speculation concerning popular mysterious phenomena (crop circles, ufo abductions, cave art, fairies, dna etc.) or "social commentary", but the story of someone that strikes up a relationship with one or two of these power plants and uses them consistently over some period of time to evolve (spiritually or otherwise). What concepts they encountered on the way, what external sources of information they found valuable on their journey, how things progressed and what they managed to achieve. Of course putting a book like that together is just the beginning, marketing it successfully would largely count on sleeping with the enemy, making use of an established network of people strategically placed within an already very saturated and competitive industry. Sigh, why is there always so much more to it than meets the eye...?

Up until where I am now with this book, about half way, I wasn't sure whether it was worth writing about. Its getting a bunch more interesting suddenly. It seems Jeremy (JN) has stumbled across what could be a missing piece of a puzzle. When it comes to using "visionary" plants just what produces these visions, what mechanism makes them possible? I guess a logical explanation might make the more spiritually superstitious amongst us slightly more comfortable. JN takes a peek at DNA from the perspective of it being a technology that can both transmit and receive information. Perhaps it is the chemical/s in entheogens that enable the brain to tap into this information exchange. I think JN makes a pretty sound argument, he starts off with baby steps and explains things quite well. Its not difficult at all to understand how he manages to reach the conclusions he reaches. If he is right then what you can see (with a bit of training or practice maybe) is the manifestation of information, and from the perspective of being able to access this information, perhaps being able to manipulate it as well.



For me it adds another dimension to the finer workings of shamanism, exposes it from a westernised perspective. I think I like the logical explanation, dispelling some of the uncertainty. By this I don’t particularly mean removing the mystery, its all still very much a mysterious subject. This is not a dissection of what it is that you can see, it is rather a contribution to understanding how you can see. The question is whether you resign your ability to perceive a hidden universe to the will of the gods, to fate or to destiny? Or do you understand that it is a question of having the tools and the technology, that its just a question of knowing how to use them, and knowing what they do that enables you to step inside the not here. Personally, I retch when I hear of extraordinary things having to happen to people before they were able to shamanise etc. like it was so much of a prerequisite before joining an exclusive club or something (and yeah I guess nothing ever happening to me has something to do with it). In my mind it makes this crowd all the more responsible to teach the rest of us what is going on, in fact not doing so is irresponsible. That more people don’t have a clue is enough evidence for me that this responsibility is not being taken very seriously. Shame on the shamans!



An idea I got while reading the book is that the plethora of all past and present life on earth really is just an extension of the same thing. That DNA is the common thread that runs throughout everything. DNA is even found in the smallest of things. I guess you could extend this to meaning that as long as even just a microbe exists, life as we know it will remain intact, and will continue evolving. It is almost as if DNA are actually a race of beings themselves, architects of the variety of every living thing you can imagine. In a way we are just machines after all, and our "consciousness" almost just artificial intelligence. I guess this also puts a very different spin on how we are meant to perceive what we think of as all this planetary death and destruction. Until every last shred of DNA gets removed from the face of planet earth, and this does not seem to be an immediate eventuality, death and destruction is just a delusion. With enough time DNA can build advanced forms of life all over again from scratch. In a way if entheogens can help you tap into the information your DNA contains you are getting in touch with your creator. That we are not really very important in the big scheme of things was made evident in one such encounter - Michael Harner was told he was "just" a human.



Previously I mentioned a concept or speculation taken from Jim DeKornes "Psychedelic Shamanism" where human beings are being farmed like so much cattle just to feed "ultraterrestrial entities" with our emotions and beliefs. Dragging DNA back into the equation and us being "just" human maybe that’s what's happening, DNA is a race of beings building these huge machines that ultimately are geared to generate emotion and belief that might provide "power" that can be traded for in other realms. A train of thought like this freaks me out a little, because I can seriously imagine things working like that or in similar scary ways that we cant even begin to understand. Think about it; doesn’t it feel conspicuous that we are all alone out here in the universe? Doesn’t it feel like you know what, something should be there? Well maybe it is out there after all - we just cant see it. Maybe we cant see it because we are so large and what needs to be seen is so small. Maybe we cant see it because we are expecting it to look humanoid. You cant see anything with expectation clouding your vision.



Oer, how awkward. I wasn’t halfway after-all. Most of the back half of the book turns out to be notes, bibliography etc. Good thing I guess for anyone interested in reference material. From this book I am sort of in two minds whether to get some Mircea Eliade ("Shamanism: Archaic.."). JN mostly wraps his book up with a critique of our limited westernised methods of trying to understand things, how if something is not understood then it is relegated to the realms of the insignificant. There's also touching on how "civil" society is taking advantage of the natives of South America etc. Is this book worth getting? Maybe if you can get it cheap and had run out of other interesting things to read. Maybe I will change my mind but it feels a little incomplete. Personally I would like to have read some more about the authors beliefs and convictions after combining entheogens with this knowledge. Unfortunately he is quite clear that he's not comfortable doing that, at least not in this book. The next step just seems obvious - now that you understand that DNA fits into the equation, spend some time exploring it while under the influence and explain to us how to bring it all together::: You are having a vision, and in it you see this, this is what it is, this is what is happening. This is how you must respond, and this is what you can achieve with it, etc.