Sensibly Eclectic

Psychedelic drugs could heal thousands
New research into the benefits of hallucinogens alongside psychotherapy is welcome: in my experience they change lives

There is a horrible sense of meaninglessness and chaos that comes from the extreme loneliness of being cut off. Trauma, whether sustained in the family, or in the military during combat, renders millions feeling unsafe, insecure, mistrustful, and in the end isolated, lonely and desperate. Judith Lewis Herman, who wrote the definitive book on trauma and recovery, stated that all so-called mental illness and suffering could be seen as a person's misguided attempt to survive trauma. Fear separates, love unites. We all wish to grow to freedom, to belong, to participate. Hatred is like gangrene, shame is deadly. Forgiveness is but a faint hope.

Sandoz began to market LSD in 1947 as a psychiatric panacea, the cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behaviour, sexual perversions, alcoholism, and other addictions. During a 15-year period beginning in 1950, research on LSD and other hallucinogens generated over 1,000 scientific papers, several dozen books and six international conferences, and LSD was prescribed as an adjunct of psychotherapy to over 40,000 patients. The current research using psychedelics heralds a reawakening to the magnificent healing possibilities of these now prohibited substances. After over 40 years of repression or oppression, Rick Doblin of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), and others are spearheading a more enlightened, less hysterical and terrified approach to the use of these substances. I am participating in what hopefully will be Canada's first government approved clinical trials in 40 years, sponsored and organised by Maps, evaluating MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for subjects with treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder.

How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America

SE Note: Compare the rational, intellectual point-of-view, (as a World model) with the previous article here, when dreams become real.

Sad but true: Intelligence is a political liability in the US. Author of The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby explains why.

Snip ...

SJ: That's really the American paradox. For example, there is no country that has had more faith in education as an instrument of social mobility. No country in the West democratized education earlier, but no country has been more suspicious of too much education. We've always thought of education as good if it gets you a better job, but bad if it makes you think too much.

Hofstadter was writing at the dawn of video culture, so he could not talk about one of the key things in my book. The domination of culture by mass media, video and 24/7 infotainment has been added to the American mix in the last 40 years. Video culture is the worst possible means for understanding anything more complicated than a sound bite.

when dreams become real

Apocalypse can be interpreted literally - as a historical prediction of the end of the world. It can also be understood as a mythological metaphor - a symbol of the death and rebirth of the ego in the process of personal transformation.

More than mere symbol, however, Apocalypse can also be an experience. This may be induced through a variety of cultural, religious and psychotherapeutic means. Among indigenous people, it has been traditionally evoked in sacred ritual contexts by the ingestion of psychoactive plant substances associated with the ancient healing practice of shamanism. More significantly, it may also happen spontaneously, taking over one's psyche when one least expects it.

Scientific research has recently shed new light in this regard on a psychological phenomenon whose meaning has disappeared - or was made to disappear - from common knowledge with the advent of cities in Western civilisation over the past two thousand years. Targeted by the Roman Empire, declared taboo by Christianity during the Inquisition, dismissed by science in the Renaissance, rooted out by colonialism in the New World, and demoted to outlaw status by Freudian psychoanalysis, the hallucinatory experience of Apocalypse may lie dormant beneath the surface of consciousness, but it is not forever gone. Like the swallow to Capistrano in springtime, it returns in due season according to a rhythm of its inner nature.

The Forgotten Americans: Los Colonias

In America, colonias "the Spanish word for neighborhoods" has come to describe rows of "ruddy, crudely constructed shacks that are little more than a patchwork of old boards and cardboard," according to one resident. These single or double room dwellings were placed on land that was never registered with any city or county. As a result these communities exist without fundamental services such as water and electricity.

Despite a lack of basic water and sewer systems, paved roads, and safe and sanitary housing, colonias are the only housing option for more than 400,000 people in the United States. Affordable housing is difficult to come by in many border cities. This in combination with the development of new colonias that at first glance offer a cheap solution to housing needs has fueled the growth of these communities in suburban areas as well as remote rural locations. In El Paso, Texas alone, at least 20,000 additional units of affordable housing are needed, according to the Lower Valley Housing Authority. A preliminary report by the University of Texas estimates that by the year 2010, more than 700,000 additional people will need affordable housing on the Texas border if current trends continue.

RD Laing

Ronald Laing, the radical psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who profoundly altered our understanding of mental illness, was the founder of just one organisation - the Philadelphia Association.

Snip ...

At a time when psychiatry and psychology are convinced of the biological basis of mental illness and of the (largely) chemical answer to the problem, Laing's best work stands as a challenge, a voice claiming that there is another way of making sense of these matters and that there are other ways of helping people deal with them. Still valid too is Laing's insistence that there is indeed meaning in madness and that the discourse of the disturbed may well make sense if listened to in the right spirit. While it is common to hear that his ideas have been discredited or even disproved (whatever that might mean), there seems little doubt that he (among others) changed the way that mental illness is understood, and changed the ways in which those designated mentally ill are treated.

Some Quotes:

Madness

The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, ch. 5 (1967).

Madness

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, ch. 6 (1967).

Mental Illness

There is no such "condition" as "schizophrenia," but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, ch. 5 (1967).

Human Nature

We are all murderers and prostitutes- no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, Introduction (1967).

Guilt

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Self and Others, ch. 10 (1961).

Normality

Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, ch. 1 (1967).

In Loving Memory of John Cunningham Lilly, M.D

Dr. John C. Lilly died on
September 30th, 2001, in Los Angeles, of heart failure. Dr. Lilly was
best known for his work with dolphins and interspecies communication,
his development of the isolation tank, and his research into altered
states of consciousness. The main characters in two popular films,
The Day of the Dolphin and Altered States, were based on Dr. Lilly.

Snip ...

While working at the National Institutes of Health on isolation, solitude and confinement, he invented the floatation tank, a tool to maximally isolate sensory stimulation to "better understand what the mind does without exterior influence. NASA and other important organization have used his research into sensory isolation. After ten years of tank research, and while still in the employ of NIMH, he was given the responsibility to experiment with LSD in the tank. The results of that study were reported and published by that institute in his classic treatise, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. Like all his research, this was eventually made available to the public. Dr. Lilly considered this documentation his most original work. This is where he first published his famous statement, "In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits"


More Quotes:

"At the highest level of satori from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be called fusion with the Universal Mind or God. In more modern terms you have done a mathematical transformation in which your centre of consciousness has ceased to be a travelling point and has become a surface or solid of consciousness... It was in this state that I experienced 'myself' as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A 'membrane'."


Programming and Metaprogramming in THE HUMAN BIOCOMPUTER:

All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world
today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own
nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be
our programs, nothing more, nothing less.

Despite the great varieties of programs available, most of us
have a limited set of programs. Some of these are built in. In
the simpler forms of life the programs were mostly built in from
genetic codes to fully formed adultly reproducing organisms. The
patterns of function, of actionreaction were determined by necessities
of survival, of adaptation to slow environmental changes and of
passing on the code to descendants.

Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new highlevel
computer controlling the structurally lower levels of the nervous
system, the lower builtin programs. For the first time learning
and its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began
to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions
of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of
structure, a new capability emerged: learning to learn.

-John C. Lilly. M.D.

Dream Frame Over Time

Chapter 2: Exegeses in the Twilight of the Ordinary

"There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first is excellent, the second good, and the third useless."
--Niccolò Machiavelli

The sky looked overly 'shopped with some dark, ominous swirls and textures of twilight with an aura of B-movie gloom. A damp, musty breeze blew across the cracked and speckled flatlands from the jagged, gray mountains in the cloudy distance. The soft howl of the wind undulated, rising and falling against a solitary background of silence.

Jah-Free finally felt solid and as the sensation of his self image aligned with the frame below him, he fell to his knees involuntarily. They ejected small, greenish puffs of the layer of dust beneath him, from the impact. Pain! His face grimaced and his eyebrows knitted tightly. The impact on the ground felt like shrapnel piercing his kneecaps and, as the intensity of what seemed like a new form of agony shot through his nervous system, he slumped over and cupped his face as tears and snot, (was it even real?_ dribbled through his aching fingers. His mouth and throat felt like dry, desert bones, parched, stiff, and constricted as if glued together with hyperpoxy. Any effort to moan or cry out from the excruciating pain and startling circumstances where muffled and unsatisfying as any release for his highly afflicted emotional state.

This was not the landing into the Dream Frame he expected. As flashbacks of the transition ressurected in his mind's eye, he chose to ignore the intense and traumatic memories for now, preferring the pain of what seemed like a miniature crash landing into some very foreign and foreboding territory -- most likely a virutal mindscape evoked and imparted by one of the spectrum components of ElectroMind in the Dream Frame. This seemed like an ElectorMind in Blue production that rumor and research had indicated might be the Initiator deck. As Jah-Free composed himself and resorted to distracting his awareness from the intense bolts of sensation and the heavy metal feeling of incarnation, he couldn't help but recall parts of the process he had gone through after taking the lozenge. This would never lead him and he felt compelled to scan through them, avoiding the more vivid, intense, and utterly repulsive aspects and tuning in the more pleasant, transcendent and even ecstatic sense of liberation and merging. He felt he had more insight into why no Weaver or Dweller would reveal one iota of the transition itself. Maybe only Existers, (as he once was) are kept in the dark, or maybe it was considered a personal and private process and ordeal?

Warning: This transmission is a directed packet of congealed Hyperthought and various byproducts.
Running almost parallel, (with a slight angle towards a convergence point) to the current modality of our multifaceted, consensus reality and thought, is a conceptually separate stream. We can refer to this as Hyperthought. Hyperspace, (as we use the term here) is the medium, area, or realm of Hyperthought.

The definition of that terminology centers more on the transcendent aspects of the word "hyper" in contrast to the implication of speed. However, while acceleration is a potential in that stream, we will focus on the currently estranged otherness of its nature. Thought, is used to denote any of the abstract parcels of information that we process and parse with the biocomputer -- often unwittingly and without much insight or awareness of its vast and prehistoric potential.

Although intellectual prowess and the contents of one's internal database affect and color and decode the immersion into Hyperthought, our concepts of intellectual quotients and the currently dominant predisposition towards rather predatory oneupmanship of logic, reason, academic pursuits -- intellect et al -- is not the primary, determining factor in the process of absorption into Hypherthought. At this stage, you are more likely to be tugging on the conduit of Hyperthought or intuiting its advent based on the access you have to a larger scope of information -- the larger the quantity the better. This is because, in the glaring, white noise, of informationalization of objective reality, the chances of happening upon a Hyperthought node increase by exposure. The culturally induced, pragmatic prohibitions to this kind of access create the contrasting limitations to this ultimate and impending catalyst of the Natural State with its synergistic results.

FEAR MONGER 888. BE VERY AFRAID

The SE Book Club presents:

States of Consciousness
Charles T. Tart, Ph. D.

Introduction to the Web Edition at the Psychedelic Library:

I am very pleased that the Schaffer Library, through the kind efforts of Peter Webster, is now making this book available over the World Wide Web. The greatly increasing interest in the nature of consciousness in the last few years makes this material even more relevant than when it was originally published in 1975.

Unfortunately too much of the current scientific and popular interest in consciousness tends to be simplistically reductionistic, a "Consciousness is nothing but……" approach, where the particular "nothing but" may be brain functioning, language, philosophical abstractions, etc. All these approaches have valuable things to offer our understanding, but do grave injustice to the richness and complexity of our consciousness with such oversimplification. My systems approach presented in this book is not simplistic, but tries to deal with the whole, rich range of conscious functioning, particularly as it is expressed in altered states of consciousness (ASCs) like hypnosis, dreaming, meditation, drug-induced states, etc.

Excerpt:

3. Conservative and Radical Views of the Mind

An almost universal theory in Western scientific circles, sunk to the level of an implicit belief and thus controlling us effectively, is that awareness is a product of brain functioning. No brain functioning—no awareness, no consciousness. This is the conservative view of the mind. It is dangerous as an implicit belief for two reasons. First, many experiences in various altered states of consciousness are inconsistent with this theory, but implicit faith in the conservative view makes us liable to distort our perception of these phenomena. Second, parapsychological data suggest that awareness is at least partially outside brain functioning, a condition that leads to very different views of human nature. The radical view of the mind sees awareness as this something extra and postulates that physical reality can sometimes be directly affected by our belief systems. We must be openminded about the radical view to guard against maintaining too narrow and too culturally conditioned a view of the mind.

Another entry in the SE Book Club reading list:

Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan's Teachings

The following was compiled from Carlos Castaneda's books. Have you not read them, I highly recommend that you do so. I believe that I've included most of "don Juan's" teachings in this compilation. You are missing out on a most wonderful experience if you just read or listen to this compilation without having read Carlos Castaneda's books.

Nothing in the world is a gift. Whatever there is to learn has to be learned the hard way. Turn my concepts into a viable way of life by a process of repetition. Everything new in our lives, such as the sorcerers' concepts I am teaching you, must be repeated to us to the point of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it.
- DON JUAN

The basic premise of sorcery for a sorcerer is that the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.

For the sake of validating this premise I will concentrate the best of my efforts into leading you into a genuine conviction that what you hold in mind as the world at hand is merely a description of the world; a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.

Everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. We have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member . He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, perhaps, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.

The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.

For some contrast, see also:
Carlos Castaneda: ENIGMA OF A SORCERER (the movie)
And:
Did Carlos Castaneda hallucinate that stuff in the Don Juan books or make it up?
And:
Carlos Castaneda is, well, y'know, like maybe
And:
The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda

SE Comment: Having read the entire series based on the teachings of Don Jaun, I find it difficult to deny the value and insight that the tales reveal, regardless of their source. Though I might be letting the conceptual cat out of the metaphorical bag, my determination is that he, like Whitley Strieber, are literary Shamans as opposed to objective reporters of actual experiences -- merry pranksters and tricksters can be valuable in shattering our illusions. With enough insight and experience, one can easily downplay the need, or even possibility, of totally separating or distinguishing between that mental division. Don Juan may be a fictional character, but a good writer with some vision and intent can literally drag creative content from the depths and heights of the imaginative aspect of mind into the apparent solidity and cohesion of what we call objective reality. To imagine or experience a threshold across which we translate myth into meaning and even practical application has merit. Also, it makes one more curious about the actual practices and culture of the Toltecs, Native Americans, etc.

However, my perspective has not solidified into one of doubt or incredulity towards Castaneda's efforts and his seminal writings seem a bit more structured, developed and somewhat more cohesive as a possible way to view the World than Whitely's overtly contradictory and sometimes fragmented accounts of contact with a multi-faceted, bi-polar, set of alien "others". Mr. Strieber, on the other hand, has a greater gift for writing enticing and creative prose. Regardless of the fact or fiction of Castaneda's accounts, the teachings he relates are an amazing, delightful, sometimes unsettling, but always challenging and stimulating experience -- at least for a person who is intensely open and curious about consciousness and existence. To take them too literally is merely a good setup for a realization of another kind. A ripping yarn is an art form when it is convincing enough. One could look at the media and modern Western culture in the very same light.

The actuality, in this case, is not as important as the weaving of the ideas and if you feel you are being "taken for a ride" you may have been, one way or another. To believe what Carlos wrote is one thing, to find out it was a visionary, manipulative, or pragmatic, (money, power, fame) fabrication is another. Either way, you have something interesting to learn. But then, how much that you have been taught since childhood do you still believe to be true without even considering or questioning its validity?

SE Comment: Is this article self-contradicting? Can you make it all the way through it without going to a new page, changing a tab, checking some email, etc.? Can you even finish it at al?

First there was the spoken word, then the written word, then the printing press. Now we see the sound byte, the 60-second spot, the short attention span, cyber-wonders of the World Wide Web ... and now, in the process of a gradually, almost imperceptible unfolding, digital birth, (in our own, plastic brains) the Video Word Made Flesh? Does the advent of AI imply a singular consciousness of rapid data streams with greater volume but with growing superficiality revealed in a thinning shadow of meaning and depth?

Rather than pigeon-holing my current reality tunnel in the trap of the Luddite as a label, I would rather entertain prophetic visions and extrapolations of the implications of this historically dramatic and seemingly inevitable shift. As a cyber-shaman, it is the edges that fascinate me and the cracks in the surrounding structures that beckon more precise inspection lest it come like a thief in the night where one wakes up in the morning to find one's self cleaned out, hacked, and cyberpunked into an universal, compelling paradigm with nothing but nostalgia and prematurely antiquedated musings in its wake. In the end, what is sold ad progress and advancement still turns out to be yet another shuffling of atoms rife with fleeting and enticing novelty and maybe even more adept at signifying nothing like the tales told by idiots, or like my non-existent specter of a virtual flux confused with a substantial and tangible entity deemed to be, by convention, a substantial and tangible self.

The simulation now projects the virtual, but imposing collective; a unity based on conformity disguised as diversity and fleeting intimacy devoid of depth and organismic tangibility. The Global tribe that will pride itself on individual uniqueness that only mirrors a prescribed codex of acceptable boundaries, behaviors, activities, and responses. A facade of glamorous and copious trivia will supersede the internal landscape of depth and vision as if compensating for the grand exchange where the plastic mind becomes nothing more than a node in a complex, interconnected web of cyber-social insects. Kafka's Metamorphosis might have been less gradual or ubiquitous, and it may turn out to be a child's fairy story compared to the dawn of the Simulated Collective already in progress.

Is this merely about observance and acceptance, or is there a reactionary virus and instinctual reluctance that can bring to the forefront of the equation that nothing but hypnotic, exuberant participation without reflection can forestall or prevent this shift? Nothing trumps or exceeds the capacity of the stock bio-computer we come equipped with. To passively and ignorantly allow any distraction from the natural unfoldment of its innate capacities is more of a form of self-inflicted lobotomy, the reversal of freedom, and the exchange of deep, personal liberty for baubles, bangles, glass beads, mind games, and enduring, captivating slavery.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

America's Cyborg Warriors

As the costs of imperialist war skyrocket, securocrats find themselves under the gun so to speak, of corporate and Pentagon masters demanding "results."

No matter that the solutions sought are for "smart" weapons--particularly those that "think"--systems they believe capable of dominating global south and "homeland" cities. This quest for technological mastery has been dubbed by Pentagon theorists as "network-centric warfare" (Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" [RMA]) a "transformational" process that turn cities, any city, into a limitless "battlespace."

See also:

Neuroscience, National Security & the "War on Terror"

Operating with little ethical oversight, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been tapping cutting-edge advances in neuroscience, computers and robotics in a quest to build the "perfect warfighter."

Dovetailing precisely with other projects to "dominate" the urban "battlespace" of global south and "homeland" cities, DARPA researchers are stretching moral boundaries where clear distinctions between "human" and "machine" are being consciously blurred. (see "Simulating Urban Warfare" and "America's Cyborg Warriors")