Namaste!
Soon to be 6 years since that fateful NY & DC day. Was it actually destiny?
Will the truth out before the cheerleaders for war drop the big one on Iran?
Or will the rapidly unwinding global casino economy trump or pump them both?
And what has 2012 got to do with it all anyway? Almost 6 years away as well.
Is it all a coincidence or a co-incidence? Synchronicity tickles doesn't it!
Will be interesting to see if the 911 anniversary has much of an impact on the MSM as far as being able to generate m/any large 'actions' that are deemed worthy enough to cover on the evening TV news or morning paper press.
Here in Aotearoa/NZ i have received an email from a 'nz911truth' person, who it seems is associated with uncensored.org -
http://uncensored.co.nz/archives/2007/08/25/911-truth-protest/
i have the 2nd half of the day off, but 11am clashes...guess i have to decide if my priorities are my studies or supporting an important 'truth movement'. I already missed class today to look after our son, as his caregiver wasn't available... Diagnosis II is difficult enough without cutting too many classes!!!
I'll keep you all, my non-existant readers out there, posted as to what i do & also what happens on the 911 day in Auckland.
As far as philerosophi is concerned, i am obviously(?) currently undergoing the tail end of the 'individuation' process according to classical Jungian psychology, as somewhat haphazardly documented over my 12(?) posts so far.
My next entry will attempt to give a concisely detailed summary of philerosophi, as much for myself as anything, as its been several years since the 1,2,3-->4/1 stuck me originally.
Initially it arose as an 'unconscious' spontaneous semi-illustrative diary entry on 17/02/05 including unity, duality - $1 coin &/or $2(yin/yang)coin - & a 'list of opposites' wordplay (eg 1/2, alone/together, light/dark, harmonius/musical, passive/active, unity/diversity, order/chaos, ratioanl/emotional - 8 pairs!), followed by the 'Om symbol' flanked with the word 'trinity' with 3x $3(a non-existant coin) birthing off the $2 coin picture, adjoined by 4 4's birthing off the 3 x $3, but with no '$' notation, followed by a crucifix mingled with the words 'all free'. Below covering the bottom 1/4 of the page was pictured an eye peering out over the edge at you...
The next day(?) i heard a radio show talking about how the human brain can only recognise 3 objects before beginning to count...i.e. it sees the trinity as a unity, until the 4th item & then begins to count.
Shortly after this that i decided to analyse it - & all this before i became consciously aware of the 4 fold individuation process, although i had read & got a lot from 2 books on/by Jung beforehand, & had just begun reading the 3rd - "Synchronicity - An Acausal Connecting Principle"!!
Trippy dippy huh!!
However, even though i could see myself going through it in my diary & mind earlier, especially with lists & lists of opposites, & trinity issue's it was all tied up in the jargon Jung used, & it wasn't until it registered as the super simple, basic numeric...
1,2,3-->4/1
...that it really 'clicked in' with me, in my own mind, reflecting my own spiritual situation & progress thereof.
So that's the next entry, a potted history of the origins of philerosophi, courtesy of trawling my diary's from the last few years...to be continued...!!!!!
i'll see if i can scan the diary entry, described above, onto this blog to more clearly illustrate.
peace!
pSi :-)
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
The internet is psychedelic...
...not the first time this statement has been made, yet so very true in many ways.
An activity such as blogging is as 'mind-manifesting' as one can get, however there are major differences between this & the various family's of psychedelic drugs we are comparing to here.
The major, obvious, difference is the aspect of control.
This - control - can hardly be more precisely defined than in the activity of sitting @ a keyboard & typing out the widely recognised patterns of combined, abstracted symbolic squigggles, called words. These are quickly (hopefully!) arranged into descriptive ideations that we hope will creatively illustrate such & such a mind-concept that is struggling to be sourced, then released, from the interior of our hearts desire...
...pseudo-psychedelia can indeed be transcibed if one hits the 'zone' or 'flow', or whatever 'squiggle' one wishes to inflict on the creative genius that is to be tapped, before restricting its expression into the feeble, trapped, limitations that are the mere words we are all largely 'forced' to commune with. English in this case, yet any written language will do, & i am speaking of the written word here - the spoken word has of course been thoroughly re-invigorated with such phenomenon as vlogging via Youtube & its ilk...beyond my budget for now...
So while the process of creativity is indeed psychedelic, how much is retained when we set ourselves the task of recording it??
With a hearty dose of imbibed natural or synthetic psychedelic chemical, the aspect of control, its qualities & quantities distorted almost/entirely beyond recognition, is left behind at the door.
You will only ever know the truth of this statement if you can answer in the positive to Jimi's eternal question: "Are you experienced?"
And while i am currently enjoying the creation of this post, a part of me harks back to last night entry, & i consider the fact that part of the reason i am blogging myself, is due to isolation & loneliness. Indeed some of that isolation & lonliness is at least partly linked to my history of imbibing said sacrements, which, although my dosage frequency has been cut to near zero in recent times, have definately contributed to the semi-fugue state i have found myself in over the last 3-4 years or so...
SO IT WAS WITH a profound sense of synchronicity (thanks Carl!) that i read this, below, today, considering last night's blog entry. I have been reading the earlier 25 chapters of this 'in progress online book' by the excellent author, James L Kent, slowly over the last few months, & the timing for the reading of this specific chapter today seemed quite intensely co-incidental, to say the least...!
This is a bit long, but very definately an OUTSTANDINGLY colourful decription of this state of being, although i say this with the bias of having been within it, more or less, for so long now. However, i have been feeling that my personal 'Dark Night of the Soul' has been diminishing slowly of late, actually for a while now - and none too soon, i might add. Finally! in fact!
(i recommend reading all that is available of 'Psychedelic Information Theory', by the way - an excellent creative analysis of tripping the light fantastic)
http://tripzine.com/listing.php?id=pit26
Isolation, Despair, & Alienation
Chapter 26: Psychedelic Information Theory
It is not fun to discuss the alienating aspects of psychedelics, and many advocates within the psychedelic community conveniently forget that some trips are not warm and fuzzy romps through a candy-colored wonderland, but are more like forced marches through the darkest depths of hell. The human existential melodrama of being constantly alone -- trapped in the walled-off corridors of our own minds for the duration of our lives -- is quite sad when you really start to think about it. And then, after a lifetime of living in our own unique mental prisons, we die (sigh). These notions of isolation and mortality take a bit of getting used to, but they are inescapable truths. You are the only one who inhabits your own body and headspace; you are the only one with your unique life experiences; you are the only one who can even hope to understand what’s going on in your own mind. We are designed to be prisoners of our own skulls from birth to death, and it is difficult to avoid staring this existential isolation square in the face while tripping balls on a few good hits of blotter.
Now some of you will no doubt argue that psychedelics are a cure for alienation, that they dissolve the boundaries of self and provide a unity experience which is joyous, comforting, and spiritually rewarding. I do not disagree with this, but the unity experience is only one possible outcome of a psychedelic trip. One person’s unity experience may be another person’s alienating experience, and finding your way between the two is not as easy as it sounds. For example, suppose you have the most mind-blowing unity experience of your life, and believe you have been embraced by God, kissed by the angels, and blessed by the great ancient forces of creation. Now that you have confirmed for yourself that God thinks you are a special snowflake in the vast storm of the universe, who do you share that experience with? Who could understand the mind-blowing enormity of what you felt in the same exact way you felt it? How do you share those feelings with another person without being frustrated by the limitations of language? Wouldn’t most people simply think you were high and crazy? And, to make things worse, the stranger and more profound the psychedelic experience becomes, the harder it is to share and thus the more frustrating the sense of isolation becomes. This is what I refer to glibly as “The Trap of Enlightenment”: Once you are enlightened, who do you hang out with? It’s not like there are social clubs for special snowflakes who have been soul-kissed by the logos of the universe, and if you find one they are always run by really creepy guys on a guru power trip. As cool as it might sound, being a special snowflake in a sea of semi-conscious dirt clods is a hard place to find yourself, no matter who you are.
For example, I have had many incredible psychedelic experiences, so incredible that the only thing I could think was, “Holy cow! I wish someone else could see this!” It is a common tripper’s frustration, I think. I have also had moments of pure joy and gratitude that I desperately wanted to share with every sad and lonely person on the planets, and especially my parents, just so they could see that their greatest wish for me (to be happy) had strangely come true beyond their wildest imaginings. But I could not teleport the suffering people of the world (or my parents) into my mind to share that joyous experience, so all I took away from the experience is a sadly impotent anecdote that rings hollow even as I recount it. Funny how all important moments simply fade with time. I have had extremely “far out” experiences that were so strange and bizarre I don’t even know how to explain them, or who would even want to hear them. I have had mystical experiences where God or some other alien force spoke directly through me and revealed the hidden secrets of the universe in great detail, none of which make perfect sense in retrospect, but sounded damn good at the time.
The elation of such paranormal events is beyond description, but upon returning to sobriety all I felt was depressed and confused, because who in their right mind could ever be expected to understand what I just went through? Who could I tell who would even care? The psychedelic trip was some kind of sick in-joke I played on myself, a paradoxical wormhole of timeless enlightenment that exists only in my own mind for a very limited duration of time, and then fades almost instantly. This feeling is particularly typical of my smoked DMT experiences; it happens so fast and the event itself is so bizarre beyond imagination, in the aftermath it is hard to come to terms with the explanation that it was “just a drug” that made all that crazy stuff happen in the middle part. Something far weirder than a drug-trip just went down, though I can’t quite put my finger on it…
I refer to the sense of isolation that follows intense psychedelic trips as “paradigm shock,” and the transformational impact of paradigm shock is typically strongest on first-time or novice explorers on their first big session. Seasoned veterans of psychedelic use have already undergone paradigm shock or they would have given up psychedelics long ago. Paradigm shock is very much like erasing all your beliefs, identity constructs, and social programming, and re-inventing your entire belief system and sense of self out of whatever you take away from that first big transformational trip. Paradigm shock is an essential part of all classic brainwashing and mind-control techniques, which is why psychedelics are particularly useful in brainwashing and cult-induction exercises. Cult leaders and born gurus know that if there is a ready made support group on the “other side” of your transformational trip — a group of groovy people eager to take you in and reinforce that memory of touching the big bliss in the sky — then welcome aboard baby, we own you now.
Dealing with the fallout of paradigm shock is hard enough, but there is another intensely isolating factor of the psychedelic journey, and that is what I refer to as the “introspective spiral.” The introspective spiral is an essential part of any shamanic journey, and involves an exhaustive, winding, hard look at the nature and substance of your deepest self. You must wallow in all of your weaknesses and imperfections; feel disgust at your most callous and primitive behaviors; and feel shame for neglecting all the unique and special things you take for granted. It is a messy business being human, and our personal messes inevitably creep into the lives of others, affect society, affect culture, affect nature, and have complex ripple effects which stretch throughout time. In the psychedelic state the mind becomes too astute to ignore all the messy details of organic life, and a person caught in the introspective spiral actively digs through repressed and suppressed memories looking for personal “dirt” to mine. The introspective spiral opened by clinical LSD use was a gold-rush for classic Freudian psychotherapists looking for the embedded roots of personal neurosis, which is why LSD was embraced so quickly by the psychiatric community in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. This kind of psychic/neurotic housecleaning is the stock-and-trade of shamen and psychologists alike, and the only way to confront these issues is through reflexive self-analysis and obsessively digging for deeper motivations driving personal behavior.
Although picked at in modern times by Freud and others in the psychoanalytic vein, the introspective spiral is actually a far older meditation, and was canonized by Saint John of the Cross in the classic work, The Dark Night of the Soul, which describes how the imperfections of novices on the path towards wisdom my be cleansed through the act of sacred ritual. The dark night of the soul is literally a kind of purgatory where beginners must renounce the seven deadly sins of pride, avarice, luxury, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth, at least according to St. John. This reflexive act of piety is very much like the spontaneous introspection produced by heavy psychedelic trips; the profound and sometimes painful meditation on how we constantly and thoughtlessly succumb to the cravings of human frailty. This cleansing of the soul through a painful, clinical, ritual experience is a common practice in most world religions, including Scientology, which uses a crude lie detector (E-meter) and basic trance-induction techniques to get newcomers to “spill their darkest secrets” before moving onto to higher levels of indoctrination. The process of “digging through the dirt” or “airing out the dirty laundry” can be looked at in two ways: As a means to cleansing the psyche of past trauma, guilt, and transgression; or as a means of destroying the old self and creating a “blank slate” from which to forge a new identity structure. Cleansing and re-birth are two sides of the same coin, and the metaphor of a snake shedding old skin seems apropos to this discussion: the process may be slow, painful, uncomfortable, and messy, but at the end of it you emerge shiny and new, re-forged in a more perfect form by the spiritual trial-by-fire.
Of course, psychedelics do not always work this way. If the context of the psychedelic ritual or clinical therapy is appropriately set, then a dark, introspective session may come out very nicely on the other side. But it should be noted that withdrawal, isolation, and obsessive introspection over one’s imperfections are all inherently anti-social behaviors and signs of a deeper, underlying chronic depression. Depressed people tend to isolate themselves and wallow in self-pity, often convincing themselves that they are worthless, unloved, and in fact are not worthy of feeling happiness, love, and contentment. People who are chronically depressed may benefit immensely from a psychedelic session, but only if it helps them connect with other people and start building a full and rewarding life again. If the depressed individual takes psychedelics all alone, with no one else around and no one available to reach out to when things get bad, then things will almost certainly go sour and just get far worse from there. Getting high is traditionally supposed to make you forget how depressed and lonely you are, but psychedelics do not work like narcotics. Depressed and lonely people who take a lot of psychedelics all alone either get more depressed and stop doing it, or they slowly start to build their own delusional universe around the tripping experience that bears very little resemblance to the world we actually live in. You may already know some people who fit that description, but at least we all know that withdrawing and becoming obsessed with the inner self is a psychedelic trap now. Don’t we?
From a pharmacological perspective, depression and anti-social behaviors like withdrawal, isolation, and self-loathing are considered to be serotonin production or uptake disorders, and are treated with drugs which promote an increase in the production, supply, or uptake of serotonin to the neocortical network. SSRIs like Prozac and Paxil are the most famous for treating depression, but MAOi drugs and even certain types of stimulants (like MDMA) can increase the supply of serotonin in the brain. However, the most important point I want to stress in this discussion is that there is a direct relationship between social activity and serotonin levels in the brain, and the amount of social activity you have is intimately related to the levels of serotonin in your brain. For example, people in leadership positions who command many people under them will generally have more available serotonin than people who work on the night shift and go for days without speaking to anyone. This is a somewhat intuitive correlation when you think about it; communication with other humans requires a sense of security and confidence in the way you express yourself. If you are confident and relaxed — as a person with a head full of serotonin would be — you feel free to speak your mind and people intuitively give more weight to your opinions. If you are insecure and unsure about how to express yourself, or reflexively over-analyze everything you say, you will be less inclined to say anything at all, and people will instinctively give your opinions less weight. Thus, people with more seratonin seek to be at the center of social situations, people with less serotonin tend to withdraw.
The above characterization may seem oversimplified, and I agree that it sounds too easy to be true, but as an extreme example let’s take a hypothetical room full of shy, introspective brooding types and put them all in a room together on about 150mg of MDMA for three hours and see what happens. As the MDMA causes seratonin to flood into their brains, these chronically retreating introverts will suddenly blossom into the most articulate and effusive extroverts you have ever seen, and may even wind up cuddling in a large sweaty pile on the floor with each other. There is no better demonstration of serotonin’s power to inhibit social anxiety than the extreme social bonding and spontaneous eruption of group cuddle piles found at “E parties” around the globe. And the cuddle-pile is not necessarily a sexual thing, it is an extreme desire for as much human contact as possible, all over the body, all at once. Social interaction at a visceral level, and a ton of it, now! With the serotonin flood there is a sense of warmth, safety, and comfort found nowhere else in time and space, and the act of lying in a pile with a bunch of other mammals is extremely sensual no matter what the context. I expect this particular sensation can be traced directly back to the mammalian litter mind, when all the freshly nursed pups with full bellies of milk all nuzzle in a warm and dozy heap around mom and take a little nap. It should be no surprise that mammalian milk contains tryptophan, a direct metabolic precursor of seratonin, so this luxurious feeling of piling up on one another is a kind of familial safety and satiety, the state when everyone is good and fed, and it is safe to doze off and drift in reverie for a while.
That would be a classic MDMA experiment, but classic psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin effect serotonin uptake quite differently. Hallucinogenic tryptamines active at the 5-HT2A receptor act as partial serotonin blockades, which means they decrease the uptake of serotonin and thus increase the amount of social anxiety. This is especially true during the first stages of the psychedelic trip when the body seems shaky, nervous, anxious, and the tongue and mouth have difficulty formulating fully articulated sentences. Stuttering, slowed speech, and rhythmically altered speech patterns are typical of the early-stage hallucinogenic voyage, so social interaction and confidence in the way you are communicating can take a drastic plummet early on. Paranoia may also be a social factor at this point, but these awkward and anti-social feelings indicate (to me, at least) a cyclical drop in the uptake efficacy of serotonin, an pharmacological effect which can ultimately lead to complete and total social withdrawal, such as curling up into a frightened ball in the corner, depending on dose and context.
Adventurous psychedelic explorers have found that mixing MDMA with tryptamine psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin mushrooms — a practice known as “flipping” — can help smooth out the rough edges felt while coming up on a psychedelic trip. The most common method is the “candyflip,” which is a combination of MDMA and LSD, but there is also the “hippie flip,” which is a combination of MDMA and mushrooms, and many other very creative flip techniques I will not go into here. Needless to say, the addition of mild dose of MDMA taken before or during the early portion of a tryptamine session can provide a small rush of seratonin that lubricates social interaction during the trip, like chatting, hugging, dancing, flirting, and so on.
Although using MDMA to balance out the serotonergic blockade felt during tryptamine sessions is a somewhat common practice in the underground dance culture, it is certainly not a sure-fire remedy for social-anxiety disorders caused by chronic serotonin uptake problems. In fact, people who are chronically socially-anxious and depressed should be very careful about using MDMA at all, ever. Although the MDMA will certainly make a depressed person feel better temporarily, the backlash (or hangover) caused by a total serotonin depletion will almost certainly make them even more depressed and prone to withdrawal in the days following the trip. This “bottoming-out” of serotonin supply can be mediated with certain pharmacological tricks, such as dosing with an SSRI (like Prozac) towards the end of an MDMA trip, or taking melatonin or 5-HTP supplements after the trip to help the body relax, sleep, and metabolize more 5-HT (serotonin) in the aftermath. However, for the chronically depressed person these gambits do not always work, and it is important to understand this fact up front, before you try MDMA, or the hangover may lead chronically depressed people to try even more MDMA so they can get back to that “perfect feeling,” which tends to deliver only diminishing returns upon repeated use over the course of lifetime, leading people who are chronically depressed to do more and more MDMA while achieving less and less of the positive results they hoped for. Once again, another trap to watch out for. This one is called the “Diminishing Returns” trap, and it is particularly bad with MDMA.
In the proper setting or with the right group of people, the introspective spiral of alienation and despair may never even enter into a psychedelic trip, but for people who experiment frequently with psychedelics it is bound to happen sooner or later. Seasoned psychonoauts often make elaborate plans to hike off into the wilderness or find some kind of mountain refuge where they can trip in perfect solitude, possibly for days on end. This practice mirrors the classic hermitage of religious monks and prophets who spend weeks or months at a time in total solitude so that they may seek wisdom undisturbed and in total peace. I can’t claim to know if this monastic figure is any different from the depressed and lonely shut-in who cannot figure out how to confidently interact with others, but the need for self-imposed isolation crosses the realms of both healthy introspection and pathological depression, and it is always good to check and see which side you fall on. For busy people who rarely take the time to examine their own lives, a few hours trapped in the introspective spiral of reflexive self-analysis might be the slap on the face that wakes them up to invaluable insights about the self, but in terms of treating chronic depression the jury is still out on the impact psychedelics actually have.
From the personal and anecdotal evidence I’ve collected, it appears that psychedelics can have a profound impact on depression the first time they are used, but the anti-depressant effect typically wears off after a few weeks to a month after initial use. However, since the factors of dose and context vary greatly in all modern reporting, attempting to make any final statements on the issue would be foolish at this time. I am inclined to believe that the proper psychedelic therapy in a controlled clinical or shamanic context could actually be a very effective treatment for chronic depression, but that individual experimentation and unsupervised self-medication with psychedelics to treat depression will most probably have mixed results, and could very well make the condition much worse.
Withdrawal, Eccentricity, and Intentional Freak Communities
One last note about psychedelics, alienation, and isolation I want to convey: Since psychedelics can produce very unique experiences that are hard to share with others, it is common for people who are attracted to the psychedelic experience to withdraw into themselves for long periods of time. These people may be doing something akin to “soul searching” or “finding themselves” or “trying to figure it all out.” A particularly heady psychedelic trip may send the user on a “knowledge quest” where they begin to read and consume information on a wide variety of esoteric topics like religion, botany, philosophy, chemistry, metaphysics, etc. Some people may turn to Buddhism and eastern philosophy for guidance; others will discover that they are “plant people”; others will become “entheogenic experts” and devour all the knowledge in the field; and others still will become self-styled gurus who wrap themselves in occult philosophies and world-shattering paradigms. The point I am trying to make here is that people who use and/or study psychedelics for any length of time tend to become a bit eccentric, or what most people might call weird. This weirdness may express itself through clothing or fashion sense, through passionate issue-driven activism, through occult philosophies and metaphysical belief systems, or through downright crazy behavior like outrageous acting out, pathological social withdrawal, delusions of grandeur, etc.
This tendency towards eccentricity led the ‘60s psychedelic subculture to embrace the term “freak” used to describe underground drug users in the media, as in “acid freak” or “speed freak” or something like that. After a while the term “freak” was no longer considered pejorative within psychedelic and drug subculture, and it is often used as a term of endearment, as in, “Oh yeah, I know Kevin. He’s a total freak.” Freak culture, by and large, was what the hippie movement was all about: getting freaked-out, freaky, and letting your freak flag fly. In a safe, accepting, and tolerant community, letting your freak flag fly is very empowering and liberating experience, and this notion of freak empowerment has carried over from the days of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock to the hundreds of specialty freak festivals hosted annually worldwide today. Burning Man is a good example of many different freak subcultures coming together to celebrate the whole idea of “getting your freak on” in a community atmosphere. At Burning Man people are encouraged to be outright freaky, it is stated right in their literature. In a place like Burning Man a freak feels right at home, accepted, and happy. But take that same freak back to the city, where conformity is valued, and put them in a small, drab apartment or office cube, and you will have one depressed, alienated freak. In other words, eccentricity and the embrace of the inner freak can lead to liberation and joy in a supportive environment, or profound alienation and social withdrawal in an oppressive environment.
This dichotomy between freak liberation and freak oppression can lead a lost freak to spontaneously join a new community of supportive freaks without ever looking back, like the Acid Test community of the ‘60s, the thousands of suburban kids who went to their first Grateful Dead shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s and never came home, and the techno-rave kids who ruled the freak underground through the ‘90s and beyond. These communities happened because the freaks needed a place to fight the alienation they felt in normal society, a place where they could let their freak flag fly without being mocked or judged by people who didn’t understand them. In terms of fighting depression and withdrawal, these freak communities were a good ad-hoc alternative to isolation and despair. And while jumping into a freak community is certainly not the only answer to psychedelic alienation, it does seem better than becoming excessively withdrawn and trapped into your own internal melodramas, as enticing as that sounds.
Intentional freak communities are not always solid entities. Some stay cohesive and emotionally healthy for very long periods, but the majority tend to dissipate as the core members get older, settle down, or go their separate ways. Since sex and drugs are two of the main attractors of these underground communities, it is almost inevitable that you will find tangled interpersonal relationships, pregnancies, marriages, divorces, and all the other human drama you would find in any other close-knit social group, but with more sex and more drugs. The overload of human contact and initial rush of being accepted into a freak community can be very intoxicating, but there are also inherent dangers in any community that prides itself on experimental or risky behaviors. Well-grounded freak communities can grow and flourish for many years, but the introduction of harder drugs like heroin and methamphetamines can lead the happiest freak communities to spontaneously combust in a string of overdoses, STDs, and accidental deaths that leave everyone traumatized for the long haul. You have been warned.
While I do not want to stigmatize freak communities, I do want to point out that these subcultures are not actually a remedy for social withdrawal, they are more like a support group for people suffering from social withdrawal. Freak subcultures withdraw into their own internal melodramas just as completely as the alienated individual does, but they do so on a group level. Much like a cult, the freak subculture often limits their social interactions solely to other members of the freak tribe, making the interpersonal relationships particularly tangled and incestuous. In terms of fighting alienation and depression, jumping headlong into freak subculture may work for a while, but you may be trading one set of messy issues for a whole new set of messy issues you didn’t see coming, so be warned. The beautiful people are not always beautiful, but some of them certainly are. As with any commitment to any intentional community, your mileage may vary, so choose wisely.
And there you have it for tonights entry!!
peace!
pSi :-)
An activity such as blogging is as 'mind-manifesting' as one can get, however there are major differences between this & the various family's of psychedelic drugs we are comparing to here.
The major, obvious, difference is the aspect of control.
This - control - can hardly be more precisely defined than in the activity of sitting @ a keyboard & typing out the widely recognised patterns of combined, abstracted symbolic squigggles, called words. These are quickly (hopefully!) arranged into descriptive ideations that we hope will creatively illustrate such & such a mind-concept that is struggling to be sourced, then released, from the interior of our hearts desire...
...pseudo-psychedelia can indeed be transcibed if one hits the 'zone' or 'flow', or whatever 'squiggle' one wishes to inflict on the creative genius that is to be tapped, before restricting its expression into the feeble, trapped, limitations that are the mere words we are all largely 'forced' to commune with. English in this case, yet any written language will do, & i am speaking of the written word here - the spoken word has of course been thoroughly re-invigorated with such phenomenon as vlogging via Youtube & its ilk...beyond my budget for now...
So while the process of creativity is indeed psychedelic, how much is retained when we set ourselves the task of recording it??
With a hearty dose of imbibed natural or synthetic psychedelic chemical, the aspect of control, its qualities & quantities distorted almost/entirely beyond recognition, is left behind at the door.
You will only ever know the truth of this statement if you can answer in the positive to Jimi's eternal question: "Are you experienced?"
And while i am currently enjoying the creation of this post, a part of me harks back to last night entry, & i consider the fact that part of the reason i am blogging myself, is due to isolation & loneliness. Indeed some of that isolation & lonliness is at least partly linked to my history of imbibing said sacrements, which, although my dosage frequency has been cut to near zero in recent times, have definately contributed to the semi-fugue state i have found myself in over the last 3-4 years or so...
SO IT WAS WITH a profound sense of synchronicity (thanks Carl!) that i read this, below, today, considering last night's blog entry. I have been reading the earlier 25 chapters of this 'in progress online book' by the excellent author, James L Kent, slowly over the last few months, & the timing for the reading of this specific chapter today seemed quite intensely co-incidental, to say the least...!
This is a bit long, but very definately an OUTSTANDINGLY colourful decription of this state of being, although i say this with the bias of having been within it, more or less, for so long now. However, i have been feeling that my personal 'Dark Night of the Soul' has been diminishing slowly of late, actually for a while now - and none too soon, i might add. Finally! in fact!
(i recommend reading all that is available of 'Psychedelic Information Theory', by the way - an excellent creative analysis of tripping the light fantastic)
http://tripzine.com/listing.php?id=pit26
Isolation, Despair, & Alienation
Chapter 26: Psychedelic Information Theory
It is not fun to discuss the alienating aspects of psychedelics, and many advocates within the psychedelic community conveniently forget that some trips are not warm and fuzzy romps through a candy-colored wonderland, but are more like forced marches through the darkest depths of hell. The human existential melodrama of being constantly alone -- trapped in the walled-off corridors of our own minds for the duration of our lives -- is quite sad when you really start to think about it. And then, after a lifetime of living in our own unique mental prisons, we die (sigh). These notions of isolation and mortality take a bit of getting used to, but they are inescapable truths. You are the only one who inhabits your own body and headspace; you are the only one with your unique life experiences; you are the only one who can even hope to understand what’s going on in your own mind. We are designed to be prisoners of our own skulls from birth to death, and it is difficult to avoid staring this existential isolation square in the face while tripping balls on a few good hits of blotter.
Now some of you will no doubt argue that psychedelics are a cure for alienation, that they dissolve the boundaries of self and provide a unity experience which is joyous, comforting, and spiritually rewarding. I do not disagree with this, but the unity experience is only one possible outcome of a psychedelic trip. One person’s unity experience may be another person’s alienating experience, and finding your way between the two is not as easy as it sounds. For example, suppose you have the most mind-blowing unity experience of your life, and believe you have been embraced by God, kissed by the angels, and blessed by the great ancient forces of creation. Now that you have confirmed for yourself that God thinks you are a special snowflake in the vast storm of the universe, who do you share that experience with? Who could understand the mind-blowing enormity of what you felt in the same exact way you felt it? How do you share those feelings with another person without being frustrated by the limitations of language? Wouldn’t most people simply think you were high and crazy? And, to make things worse, the stranger and more profound the psychedelic experience becomes, the harder it is to share and thus the more frustrating the sense of isolation becomes. This is what I refer to glibly as “The Trap of Enlightenment”: Once you are enlightened, who do you hang out with? It’s not like there are social clubs for special snowflakes who have been soul-kissed by the logos of the universe, and if you find one they are always run by really creepy guys on a guru power trip. As cool as it might sound, being a special snowflake in a sea of semi-conscious dirt clods is a hard place to find yourself, no matter who you are.
For example, I have had many incredible psychedelic experiences, so incredible that the only thing I could think was, “Holy cow! I wish someone else could see this!” It is a common tripper’s frustration, I think. I have also had moments of pure joy and gratitude that I desperately wanted to share with every sad and lonely person on the planets, and especially my parents, just so they could see that their greatest wish for me (to be happy) had strangely come true beyond their wildest imaginings. But I could not teleport the suffering people of the world (or my parents) into my mind to share that joyous experience, so all I took away from the experience is a sadly impotent anecdote that rings hollow even as I recount it. Funny how all important moments simply fade with time. I have had extremely “far out” experiences that were so strange and bizarre I don’t even know how to explain them, or who would even want to hear them. I have had mystical experiences where God or some other alien force spoke directly through me and revealed the hidden secrets of the universe in great detail, none of which make perfect sense in retrospect, but sounded damn good at the time.
The elation of such paranormal events is beyond description, but upon returning to sobriety all I felt was depressed and confused, because who in their right mind could ever be expected to understand what I just went through? Who could I tell who would even care? The psychedelic trip was some kind of sick in-joke I played on myself, a paradoxical wormhole of timeless enlightenment that exists only in my own mind for a very limited duration of time, and then fades almost instantly. This feeling is particularly typical of my smoked DMT experiences; it happens so fast and the event itself is so bizarre beyond imagination, in the aftermath it is hard to come to terms with the explanation that it was “just a drug” that made all that crazy stuff happen in the middle part. Something far weirder than a drug-trip just went down, though I can’t quite put my finger on it…
I refer to the sense of isolation that follows intense psychedelic trips as “paradigm shock,” and the transformational impact of paradigm shock is typically strongest on first-time or novice explorers on their first big session. Seasoned veterans of psychedelic use have already undergone paradigm shock or they would have given up psychedelics long ago. Paradigm shock is very much like erasing all your beliefs, identity constructs, and social programming, and re-inventing your entire belief system and sense of self out of whatever you take away from that first big transformational trip. Paradigm shock is an essential part of all classic brainwashing and mind-control techniques, which is why psychedelics are particularly useful in brainwashing and cult-induction exercises. Cult leaders and born gurus know that if there is a ready made support group on the “other side” of your transformational trip — a group of groovy people eager to take you in and reinforce that memory of touching the big bliss in the sky — then welcome aboard baby, we own you now.
Dealing with the fallout of paradigm shock is hard enough, but there is another intensely isolating factor of the psychedelic journey, and that is what I refer to as the “introspective spiral.” The introspective spiral is an essential part of any shamanic journey, and involves an exhaustive, winding, hard look at the nature and substance of your deepest self. You must wallow in all of your weaknesses and imperfections; feel disgust at your most callous and primitive behaviors; and feel shame for neglecting all the unique and special things you take for granted. It is a messy business being human, and our personal messes inevitably creep into the lives of others, affect society, affect culture, affect nature, and have complex ripple effects which stretch throughout time. In the psychedelic state the mind becomes too astute to ignore all the messy details of organic life, and a person caught in the introspective spiral actively digs through repressed and suppressed memories looking for personal “dirt” to mine. The introspective spiral opened by clinical LSD use was a gold-rush for classic Freudian psychotherapists looking for the embedded roots of personal neurosis, which is why LSD was embraced so quickly by the psychiatric community in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. This kind of psychic/neurotic housecleaning is the stock-and-trade of shamen and psychologists alike, and the only way to confront these issues is through reflexive self-analysis and obsessively digging for deeper motivations driving personal behavior.
Although picked at in modern times by Freud and others in the psychoanalytic vein, the introspective spiral is actually a far older meditation, and was canonized by Saint John of the Cross in the classic work, The Dark Night of the Soul, which describes how the imperfections of novices on the path towards wisdom my be cleansed through the act of sacred ritual. The dark night of the soul is literally a kind of purgatory where beginners must renounce the seven deadly sins of pride, avarice, luxury, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth, at least according to St. John. This reflexive act of piety is very much like the spontaneous introspection produced by heavy psychedelic trips; the profound and sometimes painful meditation on how we constantly and thoughtlessly succumb to the cravings of human frailty. This cleansing of the soul through a painful, clinical, ritual experience is a common practice in most world religions, including Scientology, which uses a crude lie detector (E-meter) and basic trance-induction techniques to get newcomers to “spill their darkest secrets” before moving onto to higher levels of indoctrination. The process of “digging through the dirt” or “airing out the dirty laundry” can be looked at in two ways: As a means to cleansing the psyche of past trauma, guilt, and transgression; or as a means of destroying the old self and creating a “blank slate” from which to forge a new identity structure. Cleansing and re-birth are two sides of the same coin, and the metaphor of a snake shedding old skin seems apropos to this discussion: the process may be slow, painful, uncomfortable, and messy, but at the end of it you emerge shiny and new, re-forged in a more perfect form by the spiritual trial-by-fire.
Of course, psychedelics do not always work this way. If the context of the psychedelic ritual or clinical therapy is appropriately set, then a dark, introspective session may come out very nicely on the other side. But it should be noted that withdrawal, isolation, and obsessive introspection over one’s imperfections are all inherently anti-social behaviors and signs of a deeper, underlying chronic depression. Depressed people tend to isolate themselves and wallow in self-pity, often convincing themselves that they are worthless, unloved, and in fact are not worthy of feeling happiness, love, and contentment. People who are chronically depressed may benefit immensely from a psychedelic session, but only if it helps them connect with other people and start building a full and rewarding life again. If the depressed individual takes psychedelics all alone, with no one else around and no one available to reach out to when things get bad, then things will almost certainly go sour and just get far worse from there. Getting high is traditionally supposed to make you forget how depressed and lonely you are, but psychedelics do not work like narcotics. Depressed and lonely people who take a lot of psychedelics all alone either get more depressed and stop doing it, or they slowly start to build their own delusional universe around the tripping experience that bears very little resemblance to the world we actually live in. You may already know some people who fit that description, but at least we all know that withdrawing and becoming obsessed with the inner self is a psychedelic trap now. Don’t we?
From a pharmacological perspective, depression and anti-social behaviors like withdrawal, isolation, and self-loathing are considered to be serotonin production or uptake disorders, and are treated with drugs which promote an increase in the production, supply, or uptake of serotonin to the neocortical network. SSRIs like Prozac and Paxil are the most famous for treating depression, but MAOi drugs and even certain types of stimulants (like MDMA) can increase the supply of serotonin in the brain. However, the most important point I want to stress in this discussion is that there is a direct relationship between social activity and serotonin levels in the brain, and the amount of social activity you have is intimately related to the levels of serotonin in your brain. For example, people in leadership positions who command many people under them will generally have more available serotonin than people who work on the night shift and go for days without speaking to anyone. This is a somewhat intuitive correlation when you think about it; communication with other humans requires a sense of security and confidence in the way you express yourself. If you are confident and relaxed — as a person with a head full of serotonin would be — you feel free to speak your mind and people intuitively give more weight to your opinions. If you are insecure and unsure about how to express yourself, or reflexively over-analyze everything you say, you will be less inclined to say anything at all, and people will instinctively give your opinions less weight. Thus, people with more seratonin seek to be at the center of social situations, people with less serotonin tend to withdraw.
The above characterization may seem oversimplified, and I agree that it sounds too easy to be true, but as an extreme example let’s take a hypothetical room full of shy, introspective brooding types and put them all in a room together on about 150mg of MDMA for three hours and see what happens. As the MDMA causes seratonin to flood into their brains, these chronically retreating introverts will suddenly blossom into the most articulate and effusive extroverts you have ever seen, and may even wind up cuddling in a large sweaty pile on the floor with each other. There is no better demonstration of serotonin’s power to inhibit social anxiety than the extreme social bonding and spontaneous eruption of group cuddle piles found at “E parties” around the globe. And the cuddle-pile is not necessarily a sexual thing, it is an extreme desire for as much human contact as possible, all over the body, all at once. Social interaction at a visceral level, and a ton of it, now! With the serotonin flood there is a sense of warmth, safety, and comfort found nowhere else in time and space, and the act of lying in a pile with a bunch of other mammals is extremely sensual no matter what the context. I expect this particular sensation can be traced directly back to the mammalian litter mind, when all the freshly nursed pups with full bellies of milk all nuzzle in a warm and dozy heap around mom and take a little nap. It should be no surprise that mammalian milk contains tryptophan, a direct metabolic precursor of seratonin, so this luxurious feeling of piling up on one another is a kind of familial safety and satiety, the state when everyone is good and fed, and it is safe to doze off and drift in reverie for a while.
That would be a classic MDMA experiment, but classic psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin effect serotonin uptake quite differently. Hallucinogenic tryptamines active at the 5-HT2A receptor act as partial serotonin blockades, which means they decrease the uptake of serotonin and thus increase the amount of social anxiety. This is especially true during the first stages of the psychedelic trip when the body seems shaky, nervous, anxious, and the tongue and mouth have difficulty formulating fully articulated sentences. Stuttering, slowed speech, and rhythmically altered speech patterns are typical of the early-stage hallucinogenic voyage, so social interaction and confidence in the way you are communicating can take a drastic plummet early on. Paranoia may also be a social factor at this point, but these awkward and anti-social feelings indicate (to me, at least) a cyclical drop in the uptake efficacy of serotonin, an pharmacological effect which can ultimately lead to complete and total social withdrawal, such as curling up into a frightened ball in the corner, depending on dose and context.
Adventurous psychedelic explorers have found that mixing MDMA with tryptamine psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin mushrooms — a practice known as “flipping” — can help smooth out the rough edges felt while coming up on a psychedelic trip. The most common method is the “candyflip,” which is a combination of MDMA and LSD, but there is also the “hippie flip,” which is a combination of MDMA and mushrooms, and many other very creative flip techniques I will not go into here. Needless to say, the addition of mild dose of MDMA taken before or during the early portion of a tryptamine session can provide a small rush of seratonin that lubricates social interaction during the trip, like chatting, hugging, dancing, flirting, and so on.
Although using MDMA to balance out the serotonergic blockade felt during tryptamine sessions is a somewhat common practice in the underground dance culture, it is certainly not a sure-fire remedy for social-anxiety disorders caused by chronic serotonin uptake problems. In fact, people who are chronically socially-anxious and depressed should be very careful about using MDMA at all, ever. Although the MDMA will certainly make a depressed person feel better temporarily, the backlash (or hangover) caused by a total serotonin depletion will almost certainly make them even more depressed and prone to withdrawal in the days following the trip. This “bottoming-out” of serotonin supply can be mediated with certain pharmacological tricks, such as dosing with an SSRI (like Prozac) towards the end of an MDMA trip, or taking melatonin or 5-HTP supplements after the trip to help the body relax, sleep, and metabolize more 5-HT (serotonin) in the aftermath. However, for the chronically depressed person these gambits do not always work, and it is important to understand this fact up front, before you try MDMA, or the hangover may lead chronically depressed people to try even more MDMA so they can get back to that “perfect feeling,” which tends to deliver only diminishing returns upon repeated use over the course of lifetime, leading people who are chronically depressed to do more and more MDMA while achieving less and less of the positive results they hoped for. Once again, another trap to watch out for. This one is called the “Diminishing Returns” trap, and it is particularly bad with MDMA.
In the proper setting or with the right group of people, the introspective spiral of alienation and despair may never even enter into a psychedelic trip, but for people who experiment frequently with psychedelics it is bound to happen sooner or later. Seasoned psychonoauts often make elaborate plans to hike off into the wilderness or find some kind of mountain refuge where they can trip in perfect solitude, possibly for days on end. This practice mirrors the classic hermitage of religious monks and prophets who spend weeks or months at a time in total solitude so that they may seek wisdom undisturbed and in total peace. I can’t claim to know if this monastic figure is any different from the depressed and lonely shut-in who cannot figure out how to confidently interact with others, but the need for self-imposed isolation crosses the realms of both healthy introspection and pathological depression, and it is always good to check and see which side you fall on. For busy people who rarely take the time to examine their own lives, a few hours trapped in the introspective spiral of reflexive self-analysis might be the slap on the face that wakes them up to invaluable insights about the self, but in terms of treating chronic depression the jury is still out on the impact psychedelics actually have.
From the personal and anecdotal evidence I’ve collected, it appears that psychedelics can have a profound impact on depression the first time they are used, but the anti-depressant effect typically wears off after a few weeks to a month after initial use. However, since the factors of dose and context vary greatly in all modern reporting, attempting to make any final statements on the issue would be foolish at this time. I am inclined to believe that the proper psychedelic therapy in a controlled clinical or shamanic context could actually be a very effective treatment for chronic depression, but that individual experimentation and unsupervised self-medication with psychedelics to treat depression will most probably have mixed results, and could very well make the condition much worse.
Withdrawal, Eccentricity, and Intentional Freak Communities
One last note about psychedelics, alienation, and isolation I want to convey: Since psychedelics can produce very unique experiences that are hard to share with others, it is common for people who are attracted to the psychedelic experience to withdraw into themselves for long periods of time. These people may be doing something akin to “soul searching” or “finding themselves” or “trying to figure it all out.” A particularly heady psychedelic trip may send the user on a “knowledge quest” where they begin to read and consume information on a wide variety of esoteric topics like religion, botany, philosophy, chemistry, metaphysics, etc. Some people may turn to Buddhism and eastern philosophy for guidance; others will discover that they are “plant people”; others will become “entheogenic experts” and devour all the knowledge in the field; and others still will become self-styled gurus who wrap themselves in occult philosophies and world-shattering paradigms. The point I am trying to make here is that people who use and/or study psychedelics for any length of time tend to become a bit eccentric, or what most people might call weird. This weirdness may express itself through clothing or fashion sense, through passionate issue-driven activism, through occult philosophies and metaphysical belief systems, or through downright crazy behavior like outrageous acting out, pathological social withdrawal, delusions of grandeur, etc.
This tendency towards eccentricity led the ‘60s psychedelic subculture to embrace the term “freak” used to describe underground drug users in the media, as in “acid freak” or “speed freak” or something like that. After a while the term “freak” was no longer considered pejorative within psychedelic and drug subculture, and it is often used as a term of endearment, as in, “Oh yeah, I know Kevin. He’s a total freak.” Freak culture, by and large, was what the hippie movement was all about: getting freaked-out, freaky, and letting your freak flag fly. In a safe, accepting, and tolerant community, letting your freak flag fly is very empowering and liberating experience, and this notion of freak empowerment has carried over from the days of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock to the hundreds of specialty freak festivals hosted annually worldwide today. Burning Man is a good example of many different freak subcultures coming together to celebrate the whole idea of “getting your freak on” in a community atmosphere. At Burning Man people are encouraged to be outright freaky, it is stated right in their literature. In a place like Burning Man a freak feels right at home, accepted, and happy. But take that same freak back to the city, where conformity is valued, and put them in a small, drab apartment or office cube, and you will have one depressed, alienated freak. In other words, eccentricity and the embrace of the inner freak can lead to liberation and joy in a supportive environment, or profound alienation and social withdrawal in an oppressive environment.
This dichotomy between freak liberation and freak oppression can lead a lost freak to spontaneously join a new community of supportive freaks without ever looking back, like the Acid Test community of the ‘60s, the thousands of suburban kids who went to their first Grateful Dead shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s and never came home, and the techno-rave kids who ruled the freak underground through the ‘90s and beyond. These communities happened because the freaks needed a place to fight the alienation they felt in normal society, a place where they could let their freak flag fly without being mocked or judged by people who didn’t understand them. In terms of fighting depression and withdrawal, these freak communities were a good ad-hoc alternative to isolation and despair. And while jumping into a freak community is certainly not the only answer to psychedelic alienation, it does seem better than becoming excessively withdrawn and trapped into your own internal melodramas, as enticing as that sounds.
Intentional freak communities are not always solid entities. Some stay cohesive and emotionally healthy for very long periods, but the majority tend to dissipate as the core members get older, settle down, or go their separate ways. Since sex and drugs are two of the main attractors of these underground communities, it is almost inevitable that you will find tangled interpersonal relationships, pregnancies, marriages, divorces, and all the other human drama you would find in any other close-knit social group, but with more sex and more drugs. The overload of human contact and initial rush of being accepted into a freak community can be very intoxicating, but there are also inherent dangers in any community that prides itself on experimental or risky behaviors. Well-grounded freak communities can grow and flourish for many years, but the introduction of harder drugs like heroin and methamphetamines can lead the happiest freak communities to spontaneously combust in a string of overdoses, STDs, and accidental deaths that leave everyone traumatized for the long haul. You have been warned.
While I do not want to stigmatize freak communities, I do want to point out that these subcultures are not actually a remedy for social withdrawal, they are more like a support group for people suffering from social withdrawal. Freak subcultures withdraw into their own internal melodramas just as completely as the alienated individual does, but they do so on a group level. Much like a cult, the freak subculture often limits their social interactions solely to other members of the freak tribe, making the interpersonal relationships particularly tangled and incestuous. In terms of fighting alienation and depression, jumping headlong into freak subculture may work for a while, but you may be trading one set of messy issues for a whole new set of messy issues you didn’t see coming, so be warned. The beautiful people are not always beautiful, but some of them certainly are. As with any commitment to any intentional community, your mileage may vary, so choose wisely.
And there you have it for tonights entry!!
peace!
pSi :-)
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Still here...however...
...life is just 'busy', or @ least i hasn't been prioritizing this ole blogging thang, a zing a wing a ding dong dang clang bang bang, chitty, chitty...
Our son is wonder full & i loves him to bits & back together again.
tis true, tis true that the young'uns bring out the child once more in us crusty cynics, @ least to the extent that i can say as much, & @ most by i being to busy playing together to partake in any such abstratedly detached activity that is the isolation that i feels probably many bloggers live within.
i only says that cause after viewing many, many, many blogs from the 'blogroll' on the blogger.com homepage, it seems that there is a lot of attempts to pseudo-reach out from a cocoon of an individuals own making, into this cyberspace to find this 'safe place' where there is very little chance that much of any real emotional connection can occur, as there is always something missing when you can't touch 'the other' that this one is attempting to communicate to...
...however one can make genuine inspirational advances to bring the message home, that we have to touch each other physically to make that 'final' connection on the personal level of beingness...like this wickedly awesome movement from some months ago that started with one person, & went viral via Youtube & email...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4&eurl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Mann
...my thanx to my great friend I-Ching for forwarding that link to me many months ago (jeepers creepers jesus was it really in November 06? Christ!), to which i is ashamed to say that i doesn't believe i has replied to...better do that soon...maybe tomorrow as its time for bed @ 1150pm now...fighting the isolation which i is reacting against by making mine self more isolated, by being an exceedingly poor communicator with friends oversea's via email...time to reconnect perhaps, & now - soon! - is never a better time than the present...
FINALLY...random Wikipedia link that popped into my mind earlier in this entry & is a good explanation of why i use's i, as i do, (sometimes) which i arrived @ independently of this movement, but whose ethic i can most closely relate to on many levels...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafarian
peace!
pSi :-)
Our son is wonder full & i loves him to bits & back together again.
tis true, tis true that the young'uns bring out the child once more in us crusty cynics, @ least to the extent that i can say as much, & @ most by i being to busy playing together to partake in any such abstratedly detached activity that is the isolation that i feels probably many bloggers live within.
i only says that cause after viewing many, many, many blogs from the 'blogroll' on the blogger.com homepage, it seems that there is a lot of attempts to pseudo-reach out from a cocoon of an individuals own making, into this cyberspace to find this 'safe place' where there is very little chance that much of any real emotional connection can occur, as there is always something missing when you can't touch 'the other' that this one is attempting to communicate to...
...however one can make genuine inspirational advances to bring the message home, that we have to touch each other physically to make that 'final' connection on the personal level of beingness...like this wickedly awesome movement from some months ago that started with one person, & went viral via Youtube & email...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4&eurl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Mann
...my thanx to my great friend I-Ching for forwarding that link to me many months ago (jeepers creepers jesus was it really in November 06? Christ!), to which i is ashamed to say that i doesn't believe i has replied to...better do that soon...maybe tomorrow as its time for bed @ 1150pm now...fighting the isolation which i is reacting against by making mine self more isolated, by being an exceedingly poor communicator with friends oversea's via email...time to reconnect perhaps, & now - soon! - is never a better time than the present...
FINALLY...random Wikipedia link that popped into my mind earlier in this entry & is a good explanation of why i use's i, as i do, (sometimes) which i arrived @ independently of this movement, but whose ethic i can most closely relate to on many levels...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafarian
peace!
pSi :-)
Monday, August 20, 2007
Axiom of Maria...
Namaste!...
The blog for 22/07, i only actually transcribed (essentially all on same night) from the book on either Fri 16 or Sat 17/8, & have only just now gone back & reviewed it.
And, like Jung, have found (again) an intense & intimate connection to the work of the various philosopher alchemists down thru the ages, so that it very much integrates with mine own experience of what the reality of this whole individuation experience is feeling like from the inside - the inperience of it all, if you like...
This is the essentials of it, here, from the 1st excerpt i made:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=axiom+of+Maria&go=Go
"Axiom of Maria is a mystical precept in alchemy where "one becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." It is attributed to 3rd century alchemist Maria Prophetissa.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung interpreted this concept as a metaphor for the process of total individuation of the self. One is the primal state of unconscious wholeness; two deals with the conflict between psychic opposites; three points to a possible resolution (transcendence) and the fourth is a transformed state of consciousness; relative wholeness and at peace."
SO THERE YOU GO THEN!!
1,2,3,4-->1...very much also reminds i of Lao Tsu's version from the Tao Te Ching, 42nd stanza;
"The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry yin & embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces."
...more tension of opposites in the Eastern alchemical tradition, but for now back to the Western tradition emanating from Alexandria, with more about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_the_Jewess
"Maria the Jewess[1] probably lived in the third century A.D.[2] She was one of the founders of alchemy. Several sources equate Maria the Jewess to Miriam, Moses' sister, or to Mary Magdalene. The Bain-marie is attributed to her. Also attributed to her are the invention of the alchemical apparatus known as the kerotakis and the tribikos.
The cryptic alchemical precept: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." has been attributed to Maria Prophetissa and was called the Axiom of Maria. Psychologist Carl Jung used this as a metaphor for the process of wholeness and individuation.
The most concrete mention of her name in the context of alchemy is by Zosimos of Panopolis, who wrote in the 4th century the oldest alchemy books known.[3]
She perfected the 3-armed distillation chamber or still. In her writings, she describes how to use pastry flour to seal joints on the still. She also recommends that the metal used be the thickness of a frying-pan.[citation needed]
She wrote at length about the emerald tablet and made a lot of useful chemical vessels used for distillation.[citation needed]"
...more on Maria...
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi964.htm
...& now a great dream sequence from Zosimos...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zosimos_of_Panopolis
Zosimos of Panopolis was a Greek alchemist and Gnostic Mystic from the end of the 3rd century, beginning of the 4th A.D., who was born in Panopolis, present day Akhmim in the South of Egypt, ca. 300. He wrote the oldest known books on alchemy, of which only quotations in the original Greek language or translations into Syriac or Arabic are known. He is one of about 40 authors represented in a compendium of alchemical writings that was probably put together in Byzantium (Constantinople) in the 7th or 8th century AD and that exists in manuscripts in Venice and Paris. Stephen of Alexandria is another.
Arabic translations of texts by Zosimos were discovered in 1995 in a copy of the book Keys of Mercy and Secrets of Wisdom by Ibn Al-Hassan Ibn Ali Al-Tughra'i', a Persian alchemist. Unfortunately, the translations were incomplete and seemingly non-verbatim[1] . The famous index of Arabic books, Kitab al-Fihrist by Ibn Al-Nadim, mentions earlier translations of four books by Zosimos, however due to inconsistency in transliteration, these texts were attributed to names "Thosimos", "Dosimos" and "Rimos"; also it is possible that two of them are translations of the same book.
Alchemy
In about 300 A.D., Zosimos provided one of the first definitions of alchemy:
Alchemy (330) – the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirits from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies.[2]
Visions of Zosimos
One of Zosimos' texts is about a sequence of dreams related to Alchemy, and presents the pseudo-science as a much more religious experience. In his dream he first comes to an altar and meets Ion [the Sabians consider him the founder of their religion], who calls himself "the priest of inner sanctuaries, and I submit myself to an unendourable torment." Ion then fights and impales Zosimos with a sword, dismembered him "in accorance with the rule of harmony" [referring to the division into four bodies, natures, or elements], and then pulls the skin off Zosimos' head [a reference to the Apocalypse of Elijah which mentions those who are cast "into eternal punishment": "their eyes are mixed with blood"; and of the saints who were persecuted by the ANti-Messiah: "he will draw off their skins from their heads"]. He takes the pieces of Zosimos to the altar and "burned [them] upon the fire of the art, till I perceived by the transformation of the body that I had become spirit." From there, Ion cries blood, and horribly melts into "the opposite of himself, into a mutilated anthroparion" [which, Carl Jung perceived as the first concept of the homunculus in alchemical literature.]
Zosimos wakes up, asks himself "Is not this the composition of the waters?" and returns to sleep, beginning the visions again [he constantly wakes up, ponders to himself and retuns to sleep during these visions]. Returning to the same altar, Zosimos finds a man being boiled alive, yet still alive, who says to him "The sight that you see is the entrance, and the exit, and the transformation... Those who seek to obtain the art [or moral perfection] enter here, and become spirits by escaping from the body" [which can be regarded as human distillation, just as how distilled water purifies it, distilling the body purifies it as well]. He then sees a Brazen Man [another homunculus, as Jung believed any man described as being metal is perceived as being a homunculus], a Leaden Man [named Agathodaimon and also a homunculus]. Zosimos also dreams of a "place of punishments" where all who enter immediately burst into flames and "submit theirself to an unendourable torment."
Jung believed these visions to be a sort of Alchemical allegory, with the tormented homunculi personifying transmutations [burning/boiling themselves to become something else]. The central image of the visions are the Sacrificial Act, which each Homonculus endures. In alchemy the dyophysite nature is constantly emphasized, two principles balancing one another, active and passive, masculine and feminine, which constitute the eternal cycle of birth and death. In ancient alchemy this cycle was represented by the symbol of the uroboros, the dragon that bites its own tail. Self-devouring is the same as self-destruction, but the unison of the dragon's tail and mouth was also thought of as self-fertilization. Hence the text of "Tractatus Avicennae" mentions "the dragon slays itself, weds itself, impregnates itself." In the visions, circular thinking appears in the sacrificial priest's identity with his victim and in the idea that the homunculus into whom Ion is changed devours himself [he spews fourth his own flesh and rends himself with his own teeth]. The homunculus therefore stands for the uroboros, which devours itself and gives birth to self. Sice the homonculus represents the transformation of Ion, it follows that Ion, the uroboros, and the sacrificer are essentially the same.[3]
References
^ Prof. Dr. Hassan S. El Khadem. 1996. A Translation of a Zosimos' Text in an Arabic Alchemy Book. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. Volume 84. Number 3, Pages 168-178. September 1996
^ Strathern, P. (2000). Mendeleyev’s Dream – the Quest for the Elements. New York: Berkley Books.
^ Jung, Carl (1983). Alchemical Studies. The Visions of Zosimos: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01849-9. "
Enough for tonight!
peace is love
Psi :-)
The blog for 22/07, i only actually transcribed (essentially all on same night) from the book on either Fri 16 or Sat 17/8, & have only just now gone back & reviewed it.
And, like Jung, have found (again) an intense & intimate connection to the work of the various philosopher alchemists down thru the ages, so that it very much integrates with mine own experience of what the reality of this whole individuation experience is feeling like from the inside - the inperience of it all, if you like...
This is the essentials of it, here, from the 1st excerpt i made:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=axiom+of+Maria&go=Go
"Axiom of Maria is a mystical precept in alchemy where "one becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." It is attributed to 3rd century alchemist Maria Prophetissa.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung interpreted this concept as a metaphor for the process of total individuation of the self. One is the primal state of unconscious wholeness; two deals with the conflict between psychic opposites; three points to a possible resolution (transcendence) and the fourth is a transformed state of consciousness; relative wholeness and at peace."
SO THERE YOU GO THEN!!
1,2,3,4-->1...very much also reminds i of Lao Tsu's version from the Tao Te Ching, 42nd stanza;
"The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry yin & embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces."
...more tension of opposites in the Eastern alchemical tradition, but for now back to the Western tradition emanating from Alexandria, with more about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_the_Jewess
"Maria the Jewess[1] probably lived in the third century A.D.[2] She was one of the founders of alchemy. Several sources equate Maria the Jewess to Miriam, Moses' sister, or to Mary Magdalene. The Bain-marie is attributed to her. Also attributed to her are the invention of the alchemical apparatus known as the kerotakis and the tribikos.
The cryptic alchemical precept: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." has been attributed to Maria Prophetissa and was called the Axiom of Maria. Psychologist Carl Jung used this as a metaphor for the process of wholeness and individuation.
The most concrete mention of her name in the context of alchemy is by Zosimos of Panopolis, who wrote in the 4th century the oldest alchemy books known.[3]
She perfected the 3-armed distillation chamber or still. In her writings, she describes how to use pastry flour to seal joints on the still. She also recommends that the metal used be the thickness of a frying-pan.[citation needed]
She wrote at length about the emerald tablet and made a lot of useful chemical vessels used for distillation.[citation needed]"
...more on Maria...
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi964.htm
...& now a great dream sequence from Zosimos...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zosimos_of_Panopolis
Zosimos of Panopolis was a Greek alchemist and Gnostic Mystic from the end of the 3rd century, beginning of the 4th A.D., who was born in Panopolis, present day Akhmim in the South of Egypt, ca. 300. He wrote the oldest known books on alchemy, of which only quotations in the original Greek language or translations into Syriac or Arabic are known. He is one of about 40 authors represented in a compendium of alchemical writings that was probably put together in Byzantium (Constantinople) in the 7th or 8th century AD and that exists in manuscripts in Venice and Paris. Stephen of Alexandria is another.
Arabic translations of texts by Zosimos were discovered in 1995 in a copy of the book Keys of Mercy and Secrets of Wisdom by Ibn Al-Hassan Ibn Ali Al-Tughra'i', a Persian alchemist. Unfortunately, the translations were incomplete and seemingly non-verbatim[1] . The famous index of Arabic books, Kitab al-Fihrist by Ibn Al-Nadim, mentions earlier translations of four books by Zosimos, however due to inconsistency in transliteration, these texts were attributed to names "Thosimos", "Dosimos" and "Rimos"; also it is possible that two of them are translations of the same book.
Alchemy
In about 300 A.D., Zosimos provided one of the first definitions of alchemy:
Alchemy (330) – the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirits from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies.[2]
Visions of Zosimos
One of Zosimos' texts is about a sequence of dreams related to Alchemy, and presents the pseudo-science as a much more religious experience. In his dream he first comes to an altar and meets Ion [the Sabians consider him the founder of their religion], who calls himself "the priest of inner sanctuaries, and I submit myself to an unendourable torment." Ion then fights and impales Zosimos with a sword, dismembered him "in accorance with the rule of harmony" [referring to the division into four bodies, natures, or elements], and then pulls the skin off Zosimos' head [a reference to the Apocalypse of Elijah which mentions those who are cast "into eternal punishment": "their eyes are mixed with blood"; and of the saints who were persecuted by the ANti-Messiah: "he will draw off their skins from their heads"]. He takes the pieces of Zosimos to the altar and "burned [them] upon the fire of the art, till I perceived by the transformation of the body that I had become spirit." From there, Ion cries blood, and horribly melts into "the opposite of himself, into a mutilated anthroparion" [which, Carl Jung perceived as the first concept of the homunculus in alchemical literature.]
Zosimos wakes up, asks himself "Is not this the composition of the waters?" and returns to sleep, beginning the visions again [he constantly wakes up, ponders to himself and retuns to sleep during these visions]. Returning to the same altar, Zosimos finds a man being boiled alive, yet still alive, who says to him "The sight that you see is the entrance, and the exit, and the transformation... Those who seek to obtain the art [or moral perfection] enter here, and become spirits by escaping from the body" [which can be regarded as human distillation, just as how distilled water purifies it, distilling the body purifies it as well]. He then sees a Brazen Man [another homunculus, as Jung believed any man described as being metal is perceived as being a homunculus], a Leaden Man [named Agathodaimon and also a homunculus]. Zosimos also dreams of a "place of punishments" where all who enter immediately burst into flames and "submit theirself to an unendourable torment."
Jung believed these visions to be a sort of Alchemical allegory, with the tormented homunculi personifying transmutations [burning/boiling themselves to become something else]. The central image of the visions are the Sacrificial Act, which each Homonculus endures. In alchemy the dyophysite nature is constantly emphasized, two principles balancing one another, active and passive, masculine and feminine, which constitute the eternal cycle of birth and death. In ancient alchemy this cycle was represented by the symbol of the uroboros, the dragon that bites its own tail. Self-devouring is the same as self-destruction, but the unison of the dragon's tail and mouth was also thought of as self-fertilization. Hence the text of "Tractatus Avicennae" mentions "the dragon slays itself, weds itself, impregnates itself." In the visions, circular thinking appears in the sacrificial priest's identity with his victim and in the idea that the homunculus into whom Ion is changed devours himself [he spews fourth his own flesh and rends himself with his own teeth]. The homunculus therefore stands for the uroboros, which devours itself and gives birth to self. Sice the homonculus represents the transformation of Ion, it follows that Ion, the uroboros, and the sacrificer are essentially the same.[3]
References
^ Prof. Dr. Hassan S. El Khadem. 1996. A Translation of a Zosimos' Text in an Arabic Alchemy Book. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. Volume 84. Number 3, Pages 168-178. September 1996
^ Strathern, P. (2000). Mendeleyev’s Dream – the Quest for the Elements. New York: Berkley Books.
^ Jung, Carl (1983). Alchemical Studies. The Visions of Zosimos: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01849-9. "
Enough for tonight!
peace is love
Psi :-)
Thursday, August 2, 2007
hi...
Still here, there, everywhichwhere - except present!
(the royal; 'ahem') We re-read this entry tonight:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism
...'bout sums it up. Over wordy, but covers most angles of the dangle.
(Being even more wordy than the 1st time i read the entry doesn't add to it!)
Reminds me, myself & i, YET AGAIN, that we have to, must, need to, got to begin mine meditation practice again - too long has gone without regular sittings.
3+ years??
The ego has flaggelated itself long enough now - time to re-move thyself, with singleminded determination, into the quest for that same self's extinction.
Enough of this pitiful 'dark night of the soul' crap already, etc, etc!! (wah! wah! i want my mummy! (- who's your daddy?!))
...the moment of selfless loving compassion re-emerging is upon us...
peace is the way
pSi :-)
(the royal; 'ahem') We re-read this entry tonight:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism
...'bout sums it up. Over wordy, but covers most angles of the dangle.
(Being even more wordy than the 1st time i read the entry doesn't add to it!)
Reminds me, myself & i, YET AGAIN, that we have to, must, need to, got to begin mine meditation practice again - too long has gone without regular sittings.
3+ years??
The ego has flaggelated itself long enough now - time to re-move thyself, with singleminded determination, into the quest for that same self's extinction.
Enough of this pitiful 'dark night of the soul' crap already, etc, etc!! (wah! wah! i want my mummy! (- who's your daddy?!))
...the moment of selfless loving compassion re-emerging is upon us...
peace is the way
pSi :-)
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