........... -- Dream

Listen: www.soundcloud.com/dreamaurua

drrddrddrrdreadrEaMediafire - Download Album

Magic in the '80's - Where to Now? by The Hon. Hugo L'Estrange

(from Aquarian Arrow No. 13)

FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS

Please read these four illustrations carefully, and compare your reactions to them, before reading the rest of the article.

1. The spate of public interest in UFOs, telepathy, metal-bending, dowsing and other paranormal phenomena continues, but it has not left us with a single body of evidence that is capable of standing up to rigid scientific scrutiny.

2. A friend laments the decline of a mutual acquaintance: once the finest young ritual magician around, he has now given up all such interests and seems content with respectable bourgeois pursuits like money-making and the yacht club.

3. Crossing the street from my classroom, deep in thought: suddenly woken by a screech of tyres. A car had appeared, crazily slewed up onto the pavement. (Appeared? Had it driven by, it would never have registered on my awareness; but as it was my memory reminded me that I had seen it coming along the street.) “Are you all right?” Nobody hurt, but one front wheel sagged out at a horrible angle. “Jeez. Lucky that didn’t happen a minute earlier - we were doing 70 on the bypass” - the driver was now looking down at the wheel, while I crawled under to look. “You won’t repair that in a hurry - king pin or something has gone right through,” I said, dusting down my clothes. He was looking at me rather warily. I wondered why, until his wife pointed her hand out of the window and asked “Is this Eton College?” “Yes. I teach here, that’s why I’m dressed like this,” I looked down at my wing collar, white bow tie and tail suit, realising how odd I looked, all the more so since the fact that these clothes were working clothes rather than special occasion wear meant that I had not thought twice about crawling under a car in morning dress. “Oh, that explains it,” said the driver, looking relieved.

4. Most of the old vegetable varieties, apparently so flavoursome in the memories of sentimentalists, will soon be no more. Take peas for example: repeated tests at the Institution laboratories showed that, once they had been processed and canned, or frozen, not one of the control group was able to distinguish consistently between the different varieties. So it makes sound sense to concentrate on those vigorous varieties most profitable to the grower.

REACTIONS

If you did read these illustrations carefully as suggested, congratulations - you are a more conscientious reader than I usually am!  But how did you react to them?

Statements like the first illustration irritate me; but, more importantly, they sadden me. Why? Because I know they are true.

A lot of popular writing on the paranormal gives a very different picture, it suggests that science is crumbling under the onslaught of evidence. But the truth is that science is only crumbling at the edges: if you study the hard-core scientific reaction to the paranormal you will find little or no change. Even John Taylor has withdrawn a lot of his evidence.

Does this mean that “I don’t believe in” the paranormal?

No: as is argued in ‘Thundersqueak’ and in an earlier article in this series, what I do not believe is that scientific scrutiny is the Gateway to Ultimate Truth. Instead I believe it to be a simple but extremely effective method of banishment: the state of mind we evoke when we say “let us look at these facts again very closely” is one which forms a magic circle of certainty around us, a magic circle expressly designed to exclude all mystery and surprise. Try it next time a ghost is troubling you - it works more powerfully than the pentagram ritual.

So any attempt to produce laboratory evidence of the paranormal is analogous to trying to persuade a clergyman that God created evil, by evoking Beelzebub within the holy ground of his own church - the attempt is doomed because such evil is by convention excluded from that holy ground.
The second illustration could be depressing, especially in the wake of the first one. Together they add up to a picture of the failure of the revolutionary hippy dream now that we have woken to the harsh reality of the 80s. (In fact this illustration is not needed till later in this article)

As for the third illustration: you may not know how to react to this until it is put in context, and you know how the writer intends to use it.

So what about the fourth illustration? This type of statement annoys me. Why the hell should good vegetables be slaughtered on the altar of Economics? If processing does destroy the difference, my solution is not to give up tasty vegetables but rather to avoid processing them - let’s eat them fresh so we can enjoy the difference!

Do you agree?

REVELATIONS

To return to the third illustration and its purpose: part of the reason it was included was simply to separate the first and fourth ones with a lot of words! Having confessed that, I would like to look back at the first and fourth and put them side by side in our minds to see what happens.

Does my reaction to the first illustration overwhelm my reaction to the fourth one; so that they combine to form a dismal picture of the invincible technological Juggernaut, crushing all nature and magic in its path?

Or does gastronomic pleasure carry more weight than my regard for scientific truth?

In the latter case I might now see the first example as exactly analogous to the fourth and come to a similar iconoclastic conclusion: “if no evidence for the paranormal is ever capable of standing up to scientific scrutiny then, rather than live without evidence of the paranormal, I would choose to live without recourse to scientific scrutiny.”

In purely practical terms that conclusion is not so very revolutionary: after all, how many of us really do use the scientific method in everyday life? Even in a high technology environment it is seldom used: in fact the full weight of scientific ritual working is usually only deployed in the face of danger, for example when testing safety equipment, testing a revolutionary new hypothesis or - above all - in paranormal research.
So scrapping science should be easy - but it is not. For however seldom our ‘rational’ society actually uses the scientific method, it still treats it with slavish respect. This is even true of those of us who dislike the method and will argue against it at every opportunity.

Just imagine that a surgeon has examined your child and announced that only an immediate operation would save its life, while a clairvoyant has told you not to let the operation take place: in the fact of public opinion and conditioning how many of us would dare to refuse the surgeon?

Of course I would not suggest “scrapping” science, I would only suggest that we could remove the scientific method from its pedestal and put it carefully away as a useful tool in case of real need. (If the pedestal now looks a bit bare let’s put ‘Fun’ in the place of honour.)

However, the very fact that this resolution would be all in the mind means that it would not be easy. To show how deeply the old ideas are entrenched in our thought I will now explore a little further.

THE MAGICAL CHILD

Recently I read “The Magical Child” by Joseph Chilton Pearce (who wrote ‘the Crack in the Cosmic Egg’), and found the book full of interesting and important ideas.

If we use the word ‘education’ in the very broadest sense, to include not only the whole upbringing and psychic environment but also the conditions of birth and even the prenatal experience; then the main message of the book could be crudely stated as follows: ‘every human has a natural capacity for magic, but traditional education in our society crushes that capacity and destroys it.’

This idea is well in accord with the opinions of most occultists. For example I have heard it said that there is more magic in primitive societies than in ours because they have not cut themselves off from nature as we have. It is also often said that the best mediums or psychics are found among simpleminded or backward folk, because their very lack of intellect has saved their innate psychic abilities from being swamped by rational logic.

Recently it has also been noted that the most able metalbenders were youngsters, and it has been suggested that this is so because such children have not yet had their psychic abilities educated out of them.
All these examples carry a similar message, but how does science respond to this message?
Simple! Of course those kids produce the most puzzling results, for we all know that mischievous youngsters are more interested in fooling adults than they are in obeying the strict disciplines of scientific method in order to discover the truth. In any case, being immature, children are more likely to be carried away by their imaginations aren’t they?

What about primitive societies? Well, without their having the benefit of our superior knowledge of the universe, we can hardly blame them if they too get a little carried away by their imaginations. As for those mental defectives .... say no more!

Two different views of the same facts: let us call the first view the ‘Romantic’ one, the second view the ‘Classic’ one, and put them in the boxing ring to see which wins!

CLASSIC V. ROMANTIC

There is no doubt in my mind that the first round goes to the ‘Romantics’; for they win hands down on style.
Their argument touches on my golden nostalgic memories of childhood’s magic moments. It also links with our dreams of the Golden Age, the myth of the Noble Savage and so on. Beside that the ‘Classic’ argument seems arrogant, insensitive, tactless and boring.

So on to round two.

Good grief! After that clumsy start the ‘Classic’ argument has scored a knockout in round two! This is so surprising that it calls for some careful explanation.

Throughout the ‘Romantic’ case there is a common idea of Nature being vanquished: the natural magic of childhood being crushed by convention, the natural psychic abilities of mankind having been castrated by the dogma of rationality, and so on.

This idea appeals strongly to me as it has an obvious parallel with the picture of Nature’s destruction by technology, put forward so vividly by the ecology movement. This idea has a strong appeal to my latent mothering instincts, but it has a weak spot in that it makes absolutely no appeal to my not-quite-so-latent religious instincts. I want to worship Nature, not protect her! I look back to previous centuries when Nature was spoken of as a mighty and terrible power, when men spoke of the ‘majesty’ of Nature and the ‘forces’ of Nature - protecting butterflies feels a bit tame in comparison.

Returning to the Romantic argument, I find it hard to respect man’s Natural Potential when I am told that it has been so thoroughly defeated by reason, by convention, by education and so on.
So how do I ‘beef up’ Nature to make her worshipful?

I do so by expanding her beyond the small view of Nature as ‘all pretty flowers and furry creatures that technology is threatening’. In the larger view man is included in Nature; earthquakes, comets, supernovas and the primal big bang are also included in Nature.

On this scale there is no question of ‘Man versus Nature’ for man is just one of Nature’s little experiments: and if Nature has chosen to mold mankind (by means of technology) into a club with which to batter the flowers and butterflies to death then it is sheer impertinence on our part to suggest that this means that Nature has somehow ‘made a mistake’.

Similarly it is impertinent to suggest that man’s rational mind (another of Nature’s creations) has somehow managed to destroy the Nature in us. A Goddess may perplex us, torment us, or destroy us, but she does not make mistakes. Least of all does a Goddess depend upon us to keep her alive. (It is my Religious Spirit speaking: Rationalism would argue against that last sentence of course!)

(In practice, despite my feeling that the Ecology Movement has helped to debase Nature in our minds, I still support it like mad - and refuse to buy goods wrapped in paper bags whenever possible. Just how I reconcile religion and daily life is material for another article - better still, another lifetime - so I must return to the point without satisfying your curiosity on that topic.)

I declare that the Romantic argument lost the second round because it made the rather silly suggestion that Nature, who created us, has made the mistake of allowing us to develop ways of life, ways of thinking, etc. which have defeated Nature herself. In comparison the Classic argument does at least have the decency to suggest that Nature’s progress is right - that adults do know better than children, that advanced civilisations are an improvement on earlier ones, that clever people are not defective, and so on.

As referee I am far from impartial, I’m afraid. Despite my grudging respect for the Classic argument I do not like the company it keeps, for it is too often associated with the argument that Magic does not exist. So I feel that I must produce a new argument that is equal to the Classic argument in round two, yet which fits in better with what I want to believe.

THE THIRD APPROACH

A cheer, and Ramsey ‘The Crusher’ Dukes enters the ring!

‘Why are simpletons more psychic?’ shouts the crowd.

‘Because they are simpletons’ answers Ramsey.

A puzzled silence.

‘Why are children better at bending metal?’ shouts the crowd.

‘Because they are worse magicians’ mutters Ramsey.

Eh?

‘Why was there more magic in olden times?’ shouts the crowd.

‘Because mankind was not yet very good at magic’ sighs Ramsey.

Has he gone crazy? What is Ramsey trying to say?

If we begin with the last question which asks why there was more magic in olden times (or in primitive societies for that matter), the reply was not that primitive people are better magicians, but that they are worse.

This seems a crazy statement, but let us look at it without preconceptions, and ask ourselves what was mankind’s original incentive to do magic. Was it not inspired by the wish to control the environment and gain greater security?

But it is surely arguable that mankind’s present problems partly stem from too great a feeling of security: our environment has been tamed to the point that we feel obliged to create silly weapons and invent ideological enemies in order to put back the excitement in our lives. So a Martian observer might be forgiven for feeling that it is modern man who is the better magician, for it is a modern man who has more thoroughly tamed his reality.

If we now reconsider the first question we can imagine how the Martian observer would look upon simpleminded psychics. Instead of seeing them as people with an extra ability of their own, the Martian might see them as people who had less control of reality, as incompetent magicians whose magic circles were leaky.

If you are still not convinced, look back at the third illustration quoted at the beginning of this article. Even though I was not in that car - I was the schoolmaster - the incident scared me.

Novice drivers soon learn to come to terms with certain levels of risk - if you thought every oncoming driver was likely to go mad and ram you, driving would become impossible. They learn to trust their judgement.

At the time described my own judgement was not prepared for the possibility that, in these days of sophisticated engineering, stringent safety measures and yearly MOT tests, a car could fail in such a lethal fashion without any warning (had the car been going more than 15 mph it would certainly have rolled over).

The sight of that torn member disturbed me so deeply that, five years later, it contributed towards a rather illogical decision to trade my car for a motorcycle.(Note also that the driver was disturbed by my clothing until an explanation had been provided.)

Our modern way of life would be unbearable if we could not depend upon metal to behave itself. Sometimes when I was driving I used to think of Uri Geller and wonder whether my fears about the front wheel linkage might not create just the right mental state to cause the metal to snap by telekinesis. It never happened, but rather than accept this as evidence against telekinesis, I took it as evidence that it was my Unconscious Will to survive.

This idea is supported by the following experiment: sometimes, when feeling suicidal, I have chosen a clear stretch of road (out of consideration for other users), shut my eyes and fully opened the throttle of my 1000cc motorcycle. In a few seconds of bellowing machinery and arm-wrenching acceleration, existence begins to regain its charm: and my eyes spontaneously open to reveal that I have steered accurately while my eyes were shut (note to my disciples: this variation of Spare’s Death Posture is strictly for Ipsissimi). My Unconscious Will to live has been invoked and has overcome the Conscious Will to suicide. Indeed I have a theory that it is the Unconscious Will that is the final arbiter as to who is going to be killed on the roads - and not the Department of Transport.

Remember that in the third illustration the car did not collapse until it had slowed down: this fits my own experience that vehicles have a genius for breaking down at the most awkward or embarrassing times, yet have an equally uncanny knack for preserving life. Hence the unusually high proportion of motoring stories which end with the words: “if it had happened one minute earlier, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale”.

I had better leave this subject, for I would feel a right idiot if tomorrow saw my remains being hosed off the tarmac....

When the subatomic structure of matter is considered, it appears to be so insubstantial as to suggest that the real miracle is not the bending of metal by telekinesis, but rather that we are so ready to trust our lives to its not bending.

Observing the extent to which human belief can shape human reality, I am tempted to suggest that the strength of metal is not so much innate, as a consequence of our Unconscious Will to preserve our own security. (Study the history of metallurgy in this light and you will find that man’s inventions tend to run one step ahead of the materials needed: copper is easily mined but too soft for weapons; mix it with tin, an even softer metal, and you get bronze - which is harder!)

So the child that can apparently bend metal by telekinesis is not really displaying magical powers so much as a magical failure ascribable to immature ability - it has simply failed to keep the metal rigid.

Primitive mankind cannot have felt as secure as we do in their world - where a wolf could turn into a man or a neighbour’s curse could sour the milk - so the same argument would suggest that they witnessed more miracles not so much because of a superior magical ability as because they had not developed their magical powers as completely as we have.

Similarly the medium who sees spirits and hears voices is not displaying a special talent lost to ordinary people, only a weaker ability to banish those spirits in order to preserve everyday reality.

What of my second illustration, quoted at the beginning of the article, of the young man who ‘lost his magic’?
We now have an alternative interpretation of this story. In those glamorous days when he was apparently such a great magician, he was in fact just a young seeker, in search of his true path. Now he has found that path and found, in the accumulation of money and status, a greater certainty and security than he had before. For now his magic is really working.

IS THIS DEFENSIBLE?

So that is my argument, but I bet you don’t feel satisfied by it! It seems a denial of all the dreams and hopes of the occult revival; it makes magic sound so boring.

‘That cannot be the truth about magic,’ you say, ‘because if we really were such brilliant magicians, we would surely not be feeling dissatisfied, and be searching for more of what we call “magic”.

Really? Is this not just what one should expect? Is this not just the well-worn story of the success that turns sour?

Have we not all heard of the self-made millionaire who ends his life in dreams of the good old days when he shared a flat in the slums, or of the simple country girl who married an international tycoon and spent her life dreaming of the folks back home, or again of the pop star who committed suicide?
Johnstone always stated that the deepest rut of all is success. Now the war is over we spend a hell of a lot of time reminiscing about it: the peculiar yearning for a return to insecurity has been aptly described in French as nostalgie de la boue.

When I finished my training and was going to teach at Eton my fellow student teachers tended to think I had copped out: “doesn’t your conscience tell you that you should really be teaching in a deprived area?” they asked. This question made little sense to me unless the asker really believed that money solved all problems - that rich people never needed help. As it was, the difficulties I encountered at Eton were no more superficial than problems I had previously encountered in my more humble existence.

In fact I sometimes felt a special calling to try to tackle the miseries that beset, for example, rich Californians because I feel these problems are not as trivial as some people claim. What, I ask, is the point of trying to raise the rest of mankind towards affluence when we have not yet tackled the problems of affluence itself?
This then I propose as the problem of our age. It is not that we have developed abilities which have cut us off from our natural magical inheritance and left us high and dry in a technological desert; instead it is that our very magic has become too good.

Encapsulated in the Victorian Scientific world view we have a model of reality rather too perfect and secure for our own highly developed magical ability. We have shaped the world too successfully and mankind is now looking back wistfully to the good old days when we weren’t quite so good at holding it all together and life had more surprises.

Nature has not made a mistake, she has merely, as ever, striven to excellence.

THE OCCULT DREAM

Could this be the reason why the occult dream of the 60s has been so slow to realise itself? In those heady days many would have predicted a parascientific revolution before 1982 - what became of it?

I referred above to the “Victorian scientific worldview”: although the leading edge of scientific theory has long since moved into much more mysterious territory, I feel it is the Victorian idea which still dominates popular thought. People have heard of the uncertainties of subatomic physics, but basically assume that it is all going to be nailed down sooner or later to present once more a nice mechanical picture.

Indeed, returning to the idea of Unconscious Will, it looks as if recent advances in science are a response to the Unconscious Will of that small section of the population who could not accept the narrow materialistic view, whilst the failure of those advances to shatter materialism is a consequence of the more widespread Unconscious Will to preserve our security.

If we had been right in believing that our present state of rational materialism was a mistake, an evolutionary sidetrack now needing to be retraced, then surely it would have been easier to bring about the occult revolution?

If we had been right in our early assumption that we only had to become as little children in order to ‘enter the Kingdom of heaven’, then surely individual enthusiasm would have carried more of us across the abyss?
Instead there are an awful lot of people still wondering where all the magic has gone, and too many people feeling disappointed that all these years have passed and we have still not seen the scientific establishment on its knees before Uri Geller, begging for forgiveness.

I suggest that the reason that the ‘mistake’ was so difficult to put right is that it never was a mistake, but rather an excess of success - and the deepest rut of all is success.

THE AQUARIAN REVOLUTION

I have heard it said that we are living through a revolution; that mankind has discovered that it has lost its balance, lost its contact with Nature, and is now turning back to the right path.

I do not believe this: when an individual makes such a fundamental discovery about his own psyche it does produce a revolution, and I would expect the same in society. But I do not see signs of revolution, instead I see signs of festering: much more reminiscent of the individual whose success has turned sour than of the individual who has seen the light. The revolution has not failed - it simply has not begun.

True, there have been changes in public opinion, but they are only the slow undramatic changes that accord with the slow evolution of the Unconscious Will: although many of us want the paranormal, we still need the security of materialism.

So if I can now talk about the Aquarian Revolution in the future tense, rather than in the past tense, what will it demand of us? Will it require that we turn back and abandon our left-hemisphere, rationalist stance?
To return to the analogy of the individual, the question is this: should the miserable rich man abandon his wealth to become happy?”

Traditionally the answer is ‘yes’ - but I disagree (except in cases when the wealth is abandoned in my direction). That affirmative answer is based on two popular myths:

a) ‘He gave up all his money and spent the rest of his life happily helping the poor’;
b) ‘He gave up all his money and devoted himself to spiritual progress’.

Really these are two versions of the same story: the ‘spiritual’ version is based on the duality of material goods versus spirit, the ‘political’ version is based on the duality of wealth versus poverty.
In each case the erroneous idea is to believe that misery at one end of the scale implies happiness at the other end. Anyone who tries this as a formula is liable to remain imprisoned in the duality: for example the rich man who ‘drops out’ in search of enlightenment, yet ends up chasing spiritual progress in just the same way as he used to chase purchasable goods.

The falsehood of these two myths depends upon a subtle shift of emphasis.
Consider the man who supposedly became happy by abandoning his wealth, then helping the poor: I suggest that the truth was that the rich man, while still rich, became very interested in helping the needy; so much so that he happened to lose his money in the process simply because it no longer concerned him greatly - for he had expanded from the duality of poverty versus wealth.

However, to the rest of mankind, who are still trapped in that duality, the first thing they notice is the lost of money and so the story goes out that the rich man found happiness by giving away his money and helping the poor, rather than the truer story that happiness was found by helping the needy - with the loss of wealth as an incidental effect.

The same applies to the spiritual case: although it is easy to find quotes about rich men not getting to heaven and the need to abandon wealth and so on, I would guess that this is very much a test of the faint-hearted. The loss of wealth should be incidental; if it is done too soon and too deliberately you are liable to retain a hang-up about the act, and become the sort of spiritual disciple who thinks ‘I’m bloody well going to get my Nirvana before Brother Fred, because his Daddy paid for him while I gave up my Lamborghini to follow Mahatma Kote’.

Applying this free moral lesson to the problem discussed earlier: I feel the need for a revolution, but I do not feel that it will come about by looking back along our evolutionary path. It is tempting to discourage early literacy in children (because literacy represses ‘right brain’ thinking) and so try to make the children more ‘magical’, but I do not feel this is the answer.

What is needed is a new direction rather than an undoing of past mistakes.

THE NEW DIRECTION

The true revolution comes when you break out of an old duality, not when you simply change direction within it.

What we need is a new philosophy rather than an attempt to recapture lost magic by resorting to wholefoods, real education, restoring earth-contact and so on. Such admirable pursuits are best adopted in their own right rather than for ulterior motives or for theoretical reasons.

I, for example, am keen on whole foods: I choose wholemeal bread because nine times out of ten I enjoy it more than white bread; thus I am happier. If I had chosen wholemeal bread on grounds of health, I would become a victim of medical debate and those researches sponsored by the Bread Board to prove that sliced white bread is the only safe food on the market.

If I had chosen wholemeal as a gesture toward ‘small is beautiful’ economic theory, I would remain forever trapped in economic debate. (As it is, I remain for ever trapped in my pursuit of sensual pleasure ... you cannot win!)

That is why, in Thundersqueak, and in this series of articles for Arrow, I have put emphasis on new forms of belief. Those articles on Johnstone’s Paradox were not so much an attempt to present a new Truth as to find a new Hope.

The first illustration at the beginning of this article suggested that none of the evidence for the paranormal could withstand scientific scrutiny. Two typical reactions to such a statement are:

a) ‘I always knew this occult stuff was nonsense’, or
b) to react angrily and take an anti-science stance.

Neither reaction offers any escape from the science versus occultism duality. Instead I suggested a change of attitude which amounted to saying ‘GREAT! At last we have a choice before us! No longer the victims of ‘magical’ forces, no longer (at last!) the slaves of scientific dogma: this illustration informs us that inconvenient paranormal phenomena can be safely banished by adopting a scientific attitude! The future of mankind can include a higher form of magic now that we have learned to banish properly.’

In this way the dualistic tension is released, science is removed from its pedestal and put aside as a useful tool; we are free and better armed to explore the future.

CONCLUSIONS

I have here and elsewhere in this article tended to use the word magic in two senses: in a popular sense to refer to the primitive, insecure state that is the opposite of ‘science’, and in a higher sense which sees science as a tool in the service of a greater magic. This is the same distinction that Crowley intended when he adopted the word ‘magick’ for the greater sense.

So I will summarise my theory thus: ‘as long as we chase after magic, Magick cannot progress.’ And I present this prediction for the coming Aquarian Revolution: ‘In the sixties we became disillusioned with science. In the seventies we devised an “alternative” - but it proved too weak to topple the monolith. In the eighties we shall call rationalism/science an “alternative’ and it will be its turn to fight for survival.’

POSTSCRIPT

If a diabolist is a person who reverses the fundamental symbols of the age - saying the Lord’s Prayer backward and inverting the crucifix in times past - what does that make me?

In this essay I began by proposing that we elevate ‘fun’ above ‘scientific method’; went on to suggest that the ecology movement might be debasing Nature; dared to put forward the idea that primitive peoples and children are inferior; outraged decency by hinting that Oxfam might better devote its care to the wealthy; and finally suggested that the Aquarian revolution had never begun.

So appalled am I by this revelation of mine own wickedness, and such is the momentum of my sinfulness, that I feel impelled to commit yet one more atrocity: an act so base that the very editors of Arrow, nay Hugo l’Estrange himself, would shrink back in horror from its witness.

For I feel bounden to fall meekly to my knees, clutching the Good Book to my breast and raising my eyes to heaven to pray for forgiveness for my evil deeds; and to surrender this most perfidious essay to the tender loving mercy of the Lamb of God by placing it naked before my readers that it may be stoned to death as is most fitting for the redemption of its fallen soul.

(to every artist. super respecto! we just kinda grabbed from random collections on blogspot just to decorate it. if anyone wants their name attached or beautiful inspiring picture taken down. get ahold of us! same goes with you Mr. Snell!)

Flint - Live at the Undermoutain Sled Island 2012

Here are all the videos from Flint's set at the Pint-Sized Records Showcase Friday June 22nd at the Undermountain as part of Sled Island Music Festival 2012 in Calgary, AB.  All the videos were shot by Paul DuLong. Make sure you check out all the other videos on his Youtube Channel PNTMusicStation, including videos of our good friend If I Look Strong; You Look Strong, who we all drummed for that show.

Setlist:


Cold Eggs
Hot Leather Piss
Lorraine Outside of Work 
Gruberghof
My Head Don't Fit
Mouser
The News
The Screaming Lucy's
Sorry About That Punctured Lung, Boris
Clubhouse
Urethra Franklin

Kendama Lama??!

- The Number 2 Collective Presents: - 

Dama Dance & Art Party

 Live Performances by: 

                                                                        

Prism the Static Face

                                                                       

Anzu

                                                                       
 

 Boosh!
www.soundcloud.com/booshaok

                                                                       

Dreamaurua
www.soundcloud.com/dreamaurua

                                                                       
 

Boogie Howser
www.soundcloud.com/cptnkirk

                                                                        

As some of you may know, #2 is teaming up with the one and only "Kendama Edmonton" to create a unqiue event June 30th. Be sure to arrive early as the Kendama Competition will start at 7 p.m, with the Music starting shortly after. We will be transforming the top floor into a makeshift art gallery for all those who wish to display. ( if you are interested in displaying, contact matt 5879875766 ) a Live Art Jam can be enjoyed whilst the Music is being Performed. Everyone is encouraged to bring their own ''writing utensil(s)'' [think felts and paint markers] and/or a white shirt for admission. We want YOU to also take part in our art jam!



If you plan on participating in said art jam, please no aerosol cans or anything else pressurized. we will be indoors, and anything that contaminates airspace could be dangerous. we appreciate this!

NOW #2..... ATTACK!

                                                                       

look forward to updates on the facebook page, you might find some fun stuff to get your ears in the groove!

.

2000: An Inner Space Odyssey by R.odebrecht A.n-Ton W.ilyson

THAT WHICH IS ALLOWED, EXISTS. IN  ALLOWING NO LIMITS, THERE ARE NO LIMITS... THAT WHICH IS ALLOWED, EXISTS. THAT WHICH EXISTS IS ALLOWED. TO ALLOW NO LIMITS, THERE ARE NO LIMITS. NO LIMITS ALLOWED, NO LIMITS EXIST... IN THERE PROVINCE OF THE MIND THERE ARE NO LIMITS. IN THE PROVINCE OF THE MIND, WHAT IS BELIEVED TO BE TRUE IS TRUE OR BECOMES TRUE. THERE ARE NO LIMITS.
 - A hyno-tape used by Dr. John Lilly to prepare experimental subjects to transcend their previous possibilities, as quoted in The Center of the Cyclone


Jane had heard exaggerated reports of the successes achieved by the English psychiatrists Ling and Buckman in curing frigidity with LSD. It seems that, in her case, what was believed to be true came true. This "Christian Science" aspect of self-programming with LSD is often reported in underground lore and need not overly amaze us. After all, Jane was born, like all females, with a capacity for orgasm, and the blocks against it, whatever muscles may have been involved, resided primarily in her mind. When LSD temporarily broke down the historically given structure of her mind, her faith was that the "miracle" of orgasm would be included when the mind came back together again. Her faith obviously made this possible.

The religious aspects of the Drug Revolution & the earlier Drug Revolution (circa 15,000 BC) laid the visionary groundwork within a shamanistic context for the later religious history of our species. It seems evident that, as Weston LaBarre, Ph.D, argues in his monumental study The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, the religious ideas common to Greeks, Jews, Hindus, Romans and Christians (among others) would not be quite what they are without the influence of several thousand years of drug tripping by our Stone Age ancestors, in which they discovered the internal world of psychic processes that they classified in such categories as supernatural energies (mana, prana, Kundalini, wakan, etc.) and as supernatural places (heaven,hell, etc.) and as supernatural beings (the father-god, mother-goddess, etc.). It remains to be explained why the modern drug trippers often find themselves confronting the same archetypal internal powers, places and beings.

As Dr. LaBarre also points out, there are chronic and seemingly inescapable revivals of this "vision quest" whenever society undergoes prolong stress in ways that the cultural traditions cannot explain. Ordinary stress will not trigger this response; Dr. LaBarre chronicles calamities that give birth to no religious upheaval. But when the agony is such that it conflicts with cultural beliefs concerning those events that the god should not and could not allow, bewilderment sets in. Many are driven to the vision quest, to direct experience of the "supernatural" or psychic world, as they attempt to find out what the gods really want and why previous revelations cannot account for current sufferings. This happened to the Plains Indians in the late 19th Century when constant betrayals by the white man, constant defeats by the white cavalry, the vanishing of the buffalo herds, and the presence of Christian missionaries belittling their ancient religion combined to destroy their faith in everything that had once given life meaning and promise. Not unexpectedly, the vision quest appeared in dozens of forms among them, most notably in the famous ghost dance (which promised that if all tribes united to perform this rite, the buffalo would reappear and the hated whites would go back to Europe) and in the cult of psychedelic cactus-peyote-which became the Native American Church.

Entirely similar religious upheavals occur in all conquered peoples. Two well-known examples are the Cargo cults in the South Pacific-which worship airplanes-and the Johnson Cult in the same area-which involved the belief, by thousands of natives, that Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom they had seen in the newsreels, was the promised Messiah. More bizarre is a sect mentioned by Dr. LaBarre, which worshiped a photograph of King George V of England, which their prophet ( who had once attended Christian missionary classes, but evidently hadn't listened too closely) told them was "Jehovah, son of Jesus."

Christian culture appeared after several centuries of such social chaos and religious upheaval, beginning when the Dionysian and similar cults in Greece brought amanita muscaria mushrooms and solanaceae  to Athens, and introduced to Greece the myths of the mother goddess, her dying-and-resurrected divine son, and the drug experience in which the cult member underwent "death" and "rebirth" and learned that he, too, was a God and would never truly die. John Allegro, the English philologist, attempts to show, in his The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, that the similarity of these cults to Christianity is more than a shared heritage of religious symbols (mother and son) or of ideas (resurrection) but was actually chemical. The early Christians, he claims, also used the hallucinogenic mushroom.

Whether of not this is true, Christianity is certainly a cult of the crisis-oriented variety we have been discussing, and one of the most bizarre of them. An American Indian messiah, mentioned by LaBarre, told his followers to destroy all livestock and burn their property; many Christian saints gave the same odd advice, and Christ himself urged taking no though of the morrow. One Polynesian messiah told his followers that the gods were angry because they had sex in the dark, and that the time of troubles would end if they would have sex in the daytime instead; Christ and his follower Pual had even more peculiar sexual ideas and many of their followers gave up sex entirely. (In this they were probably influenced by the earlier cult of Attis, whose priests castrated themselves and wore women's clothing. To this day, Catholic priests psychologically castrate themselves by vowing perpetual celibacy and, in some countries, wear feminized gowns.)

After their vision quests have been successful, most messiahs come back and announce that part of the old tribal tradition was true and should be maintained in spite of the contempt of the conquerors. (This is especially notable in American Indian crisis cults, which always stress certain archaic values, especially ecological ones.) So, too, Christ tried to preserve much of the Jewish tradition that was crumbling in his time under the yoke of Roman conquest. But the messiah is always responding, consciously or unconsciously, to some form of calamity, and he argues that if the old tradition had been entirely valid, the gods would not have sent such sufferings; therefore, every messiah offers new revelations and abrogates part of the old law. Christ did this and so has every Indian, Aboriginal, African, Polynesian or Micronesian messiah that Dr. LaBarre studied. The Native American Church, for instance, together with its Aboriginal elements (Peyote Woman herself, Road Chief, the midcien bundles) introduced the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament and Jesus Christ as a god equally strong as Peyote Woman.

It seems plausible that the new Drug Revolution of our time is part of this age-old religious pattern. But there are two important differences. The first and most important concerns the strange sexual context provided by Christian society that will be discussed below. The second is that we are living in an age of science. Many of the most experienced trippers and vision questers were men of science who began with a thoroughly scientific and skeptical orientation.  When they saw gods and heavens and experienced "occult" energies, they did not take these dramatic events at face value. They sought a scientific explanation. Thus, Dr. Leary talked originally of sets, settings, games, role playing; Dr. Osmund, of Jung's collective unconscious and its archetypes; Dr. Lilly, of programming the human biocomputer with new information; others of the Freudian id and the return of the repressed.

This scientific skepticism did not last long when the drugs moved out of the laboratories and into the streets. (Even in the labs, some researchers could be caught barefacedly using the noun "God" or at least the adjective "divine", although they would usually protect themselves from professional ridicule by placing them in dubious quotation marks, as I have done. Leary, typically, was the first to take off the quotes and set up shop frankly as a new messiah.) In the streets, there were no such hesitations. The average acidhead, and quite a few pot smokers, were not shy at all about telling you they had found "some kind of truth" in all that religion stuff. Even so, the failure of the old tradition and the typical crisis cult pattern was visible: Few accepted traditional Christianity. Almost all added new elements- at first, from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the Orient in general. Later, elements were taken from the Western occult tradition and Crowley's sexual magic. (IN some circles, this sex-occult aspect of the new Drug Revolution appeared as early as 1962.)

This tend was fated inevitably to conflict with the values of our still largely Christian culture. Too much in the new drug mystique was like the old solanceae cults of Greece and Rome that the fathers of Christianity had hated bitterly and much of the drug kulch even repeated; and sometimes revived, parts of these cults which the church had condemned as witchcraft and persecuted with fanatic cruelty for eight long centuries. It is not surprising that some who had gone far down this "verboten" path eventually became frightened and retreated into the most pig-headed variety of Christian fundamentalism. You will find a lot of former hippies in the "Jesus Freak" cadres.

There is something profoundly frightening to the orthodoxies of higher civilization about the shamistically originated vision quest with drugs. The shaman assumes, and even transmits, certain values that are tribal and ecological, and are tinged, almost inevitably, with anarchy. (Hasan i Sabbah's "Nothing is True / Everything is Permitted", Crowley's notorious "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law / Love is the Law, Love under Will", Abbie Hoffman's "You can't do good unless you feel good" etc.) The tribe is decentralized and radically individualistic (cf., the Cherokee Indian maxim, "no man should be compelled to do that which goes against his heart"). Civilization is centralized and, even in alleged democracies, radically authoritarian. It assumes that every man, every day, should do which goes against his heart, for the benefit of the harmony of the whole. In civilized religions, a confused man goes to a priest for religious advice; what he gets, always, is a messages telling him, one way or another, to conform, to sacrifice his own longings, to be "mature", to adjust. In the tribe, a confused man goes alone to the woods and suffers "sensory deprivation" to induce a peak experience, or just takes a drug, and has his own encounter with the gods, who often tell him the tribal ways have to be changed.

No; we cannot tolerate that. The individualist shaman or vision-quester has no place in a civilized state or a civilized church. The Catholic Church, shrewder than most, handles this potential troublemaker by guiding him to a monastery where his weird notions will not infect the rest of the faithful. The state has its own monasteries, called jails (or mental institutions, rehabilitation centres etc.) and this is where the messiah usually lands, if he isn't killed outright. Dr. LaBarre's book is full of cases of messiahs who were jailed by the state even though they used no drugs and their doctrines, on the surface, posed no direct threat. it won't do to have new revelations upsetting the equilibrium. For instance, some Polynesians began to believe that hey wouldn't have to work if they became more like Englishmen (who, in their experience, never worked). Logically, then, they acquired some chairs and held afternoon teas. When the English learned about this cult, they suppressed it. Similarly, the American Indian Ghost Dance posed no direct insurrectionary threat, but when the whites learned of it, they destroyed it in a fashion so bloody that even today the name of Wounded Knee, where the last massacre occurred, is still the most bitter phrase in the Indian vocabulary.

Sex & Sin

   
If the Drug Revolution has one strike against it in its implicit, and then explicit, tribal nature in the highly civilized and centralized American state, it has a second strike against it in that there seems no plausible way of reconciling it with Christianity. Even if Martin Luther can be considered, in a sense, a tribal shaman, recreating the tradition in modified form through vehement personal vision quest (Professer LaBarre considers him as such), Christianity and even Protestant Christianity has remained, willy-nilly, the most authoritarian and bigoted of all world religions.

(editors note: this was written before much of the rise of the current repressive Muslim regimes, which, in this humble editors opinion, sits on the same level if not a little bit more strict & brutal (Orthodox Monotheism breeds Authoritarianism just look at Israel) ....still we are watching the modern Crusades go on right now....but you must understand that those movements were fostered by very Orthodox Christians in NATO countries who thought that those movements would stifle the Soviet Union....well they certainly succeeded but when they realized they were merely being used..... well you get the big picture....on with the program)

 He who attempts to question or modify any of its dogmas quickly gets into very hot water in any Christian country. There has been one "revelation" and it is enough. He who has new ideas is probably inspired by the Devil, or has been out in the woods taking strange drugs with the witch women.

if such a heretic admits that he has, indeed, been taking strange drugs, the Christian response is even more vehement, quick and hostile. And, of course, if his teaching involves sexual liberty at all, the historical pattern is reactivated at once, and a new witch hunt is sure to follow.

This is a peculiarly Christian reaction. The Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Taoists, all the major religions have had their sexual mystics and have honored them. Every Hindu knows that the Tantrists achieve their mystical visions through sexual intercourse with a beloved partner; the Buddhists, Muslims and Taoists all have similar sects. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had highly developed cults of hierogamy: ritualized sex magic. Christianity is alone (ed:again i would more accurately say The Orthodox Monotheistic Abrahamic Sects) in thinking that sex is entirely the Devil's business and an offense to God.

This is a strange doctrine, and almost implies that God and the Devil must have collaborated on the creation of humanity, God working above the belly button and the Devil below. The consequences of the doctrine are even more bizarre than the belief itself. If a man writes a poem to his beloved in a Christian nation, and is too frank about expressing that love, he is in danger of being called "obscene"; throughout most of Christian history, he could be jailed, tortured or even killed. As William Blake wrote in horror:

Children of the future age

Reading this indignant page

Know that in a former time

Love, sweet love, was called a crime

One hundred and fifty years later, in the democratic, allegedly secular, United States of America, Stanley Kubrick's movie A Clockwork Orange has its X-rating (adults only) removed after 30 seconds of nudity are cut out. All the brutalities remain in gory detail. Hating, kicking, stabbing, and all manner of sadism are allowed in movies for Christian (ed: remember use Orthodox Monotheistic Abrahamic Religious Sects/Cults....it's the difference between using the terms global warming or global climate de-stabilization in debate) Only love is vile . It can hardly be a coincidence that such a nation has the odd distinction of being the only country to have dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations, twice, and has surpassed all others in the use of napalm, which reaches 1000 Degrees centigrade on contact with human skin (ed: We can even talk about Radiation Tips & Drones.....among other things....look it up!). Only love is vile. Anything else can be justified by finding a purpose (justice, national honor, the greater good of the greater number), since, evidently, like the Marxists, we now believe that "the end justifies the means". But sex, whatever its purpose, even if used in a religious visionary quest, can ever be justified. Only love is vile- only love is too "obscene" to be treated as an art by people who have turned even Scrabble and crossword puzzles, not to mention skiing or surfing, (ed. see what others you can think of) into arts so complex as to border on religious rites. Only sex remains so dark a matter as to be rushed and fumbled (Kinsey discovered, a generation ago (ed. i guess two or three now), that the average American male reaches orgasm one and one-half minutes after intromission in the vagina) and usually performed in a dark room, so that i can be finished furtively before the sex-hating Jehovah has time to notice what's going on.

In such a context, psychedelic drugs that slow and magnify the sex act are not going to be greeted with the fervor that Arabs have long had for their beloved hashish. Hardly. The reaction is directly opposite; the users are thrown in jail on the thin pretext that they pose some metaphysical threat to the community, or that they might become so charged up some night that they will charge out of the boudoirs and commit rape on a mass scale. It doesn't matter that such crimes by users of these drugs are virtually impossible to document from police records. (When cases are alleged, as Dr. Fort shows in his book, The Pleasure Seekers, it almost turns out that the perpetrators were not on these drugs but, rather, on cocaine or amphetamines.)

Of course, the Christian sexual lunacy is not unique. all crisis cults, without exception, contain bizarre elements, the reflection of the time of stress and calamity in which they were born. Consider the South Pacific imitation English tea ceremony mentioned earlier, or the prayer wheels of the Tibetans, or the snake-handling cults in the American South; man  is a strange animal when he seeks to attract the attention of his gods, and has tried every eccentricity (except possibly, praying in pig-Latin while standing on his head (ed. tis been done)) to convince them that his plight is terrible and merits their urgent attention. The early Christian denial of sexual needs was such a heroic attempt to find a gimmick that would bemuse or bamboozle the deity, and its closest parallel, probably, is the Plains Indian habit of cutting off a finger when a beloved person dies. Little children do equally peculiar things to attract their earthly father's attention for a while.

The Heart of the Matter

But let us, as the Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and examine what we've been talking about.

Man needs dreams, as recent sleep research has well-documented. If you wake people up each time they start to dream (which is revealed by their rapid eye movements, which has led scientists to speak of REM sleep, meaning sleep with rapid eye movements and dreams) they will, within a few nights, become neurotic, irritable and slightly paranoid. No reputable researcher has continued this experiment for more than a few nights, because the evidence indicates real risk that the subjects might actually go totally mad. It doesn't matter how much sleep they have had; if they aren't able to dream, the same neurotic and near-psychotic behavior will appear.

By the same token, it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps people really do need religious/spiritual experiences, whatever such experiences consist of. It is well-established, in LaBarre's Ghost Dance, that a large number of people think they need such experiences, and actively seek after them, whenever society faces a crisis that it cannot rationally understand. An earthquake alone will not necessarily trigger such a response, because an earthquake can be explained, more or less, within some traditional framework of ideas. But when the gods are mocked by missionaries of false and foreign gods, and take no revenge; when the sacred taboos are violated on all sides, and the gods still do not respond; when military defeats and other disasters occur in this perplexing context; when a man's children are sold into slavery or his wife forcibly enwhored by the conquerors- then, some extraordinary explanation is needed, and it is at this point in time that the vision quest begins.

Whether induced by drugs or by fasting, by sensory deprivation or by self-torture, by yoga or by ritual dancing. A marvelous energy is tapped-the Mana of the Polynesians, Wakan of the Aboriginals, Prana of the Hindus, Kundalini of the Tantrists, Lung of the Tibetans,  Ch'i of the Daoists (Aristotle's "Energia"?, Ibn Sina's "Anima Mundi"? Galvani's " Life Force"?Goethe's "Gestaltung"? Von Reichenbach's "Odic Force"? Steiner's "Aetheric Force"? McDougall's "Hormic Energy"? Bergson's "Elan Vital"? Gurtwitsch's "Mitogenetic Ray"?  Mesmer's "animal magnetism"? Freud's "libido"? Reich's "orgone"? Grischenko's "Bioplasma"? Margenau's "Quasi-Electrostatic Field"? Sheldrake's "Morphic Resonance"?  Puharich's "Psi Plasma"? Muses' "Noetic Energy"? Bio-Electricity? The Force?) The tribal spirits appear- sometimes the Father God, sometimes the Mother Goddess. And in the majority of cases, the subject undergoes a strange experience of death/rebirth in which he discovers that he is not only himself but also God (or, in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition, that he is the whole universe). Finally, and most distressingly, some verbal formulas are communicated to him, and he brings these back- to start a new cult, to become enshrined as dogma, to blind and cripple the minds of generations to come. Fortunately, this last and most negative result is conspicuously missing in a few religions, such as Zen Buddhism; and many of the heretics within our own religions, such as Sufis within the Muslim tradition, The Kabbalists within the Jewish tradition and figures like Boehme and Blake in the Christian world, also lack this characteristic. Such men, mercifully, did not establish new dogmas and even actively encouraged others to seek their own visions and find their own truths.

What is going on in such highly unusual "unification experiences"? Is it all a mental spasm, a kind of temporary lunacy? This is a tempting answer, and it is what most people assume about all messiahs.....except the one that they themselves worship. It is hardly the whole answer, however. As R.M. Bucke documents in his Cosmic Consciousness, many of the visionaries were not insane; some even managed to look at the experience with scientific skepticism, while admitting that it had altered and enlarged their consciousness. (Conspicuous modern examples of a rationalistic attitude preserved even after such a mystic experience are Bucke himself and Dr. John Lilly.)

The explanation- or an explanation- probably lie in cybernetics.

Life is one, but consciousness is divided. That is, all of our unconscious bodily functions, such as breathing, digestion, the beating of our hearts, the biochemistry of our metabolism, and so on, are part of a seamless web that does, indeed, include the whole universe. More locally, we are celles in an explosion of protoplasm on this planet that began 3 billion years ago. (this is the key to Dr. Leary's cryptic epigram, "Your body is 3 billion years old.") The "body of Buddha", as Buddhists call it, is, at any moment, in cybernetic contact with each of it parts. This does not involve anything spooky or metaphysical; what I have in mind can be illustrated by the experience of Dr. William Ross Ashby, who tried to build an analog computer that would be a model of a generalized animal organism. Dr. Ashby found that such a machine could no more be designed than one could divide by zero in mathematics. it cannot be designed because the feedbacks, the information flow channels, are not all inside the animal; many are in "the environment". Dr. Ashby ended by designing his "homeostat", widely used in biology and cybernetics classes. This is not a model of an animal; it is a model of an-animal-in-an-environment.

It seems that there is no unit-animal-which can be scientifically used to account for the facts known to modern cyberneticists. The only unit that can be used is animal-in-environment. (This is entirely parallel to Einstein's discovery that there is no "time" or "space" that physicist can measure, but only a "space-time event" which is the unit in modern physics.)

What I am suggesting is that the mystics got there before Dr. Ashby, that the "unification" with God or the universe mentioned in all religious literature and in reports of acid trippers and some pot or hashish smokers, is precisely the shift of attention from the conscious ego to the previously unconscious organism-environment feedback network. Does this seem an extravagant thought? All mystics have talked about the "unreality" of the ego; are they not trying to say exactly what Dr. Ashby has said? Many speak also, for that matter, of the unreality of space and time, and Einstein was modest enough to acknowledge that they seemed to be talking about the same facts he had noted mathematically. You are part of something larger than yourself, something which space and time do not restrict is what every mystic, in essence, tries to tell us, and this is just what Dr. Ashby's homeostat illustrates.

Why should this discovery be made by men under stress? The answer is obvious. Life is one, but consciousness is divided. It is the stress of the divided consciousness that every visionary is seeking to heal; what bothers him is not an individual earthquake or plague but a failure of traditional ideas, held by his conscious mind, to account for his tragic experience and observations. If the answer existed within the conscious ego, the quest would never have begun. The answer is found in those areas that were previously unconscious, those areas where the body links and joins other bodies and the total energy continuum of life and ecology.

In this connection, the singular drug experience of the Russian mystic Ouspensky is interesting. Aware that William James and others who had explored the mystic trance through nitrous oxide could not find words for their trip when they go back, Ouspensky kept a pencil and pad with him as he sniffed the gas. In ecstasy, as he whirled through the cosmos of his inner space, he scribbled desperately on the paper, trying to tie down what he was learning. When he came back to normal, the paper said, "Think in other categories". The experience of beyond ego was still unspeakable, but he at least had the key to why it is unspeakable. Our usual categories of thought- animal separate from environment, space separate from time, etc.- keep us from being able to talk about the unification experience in which all are "one".(0?=2!)

This is not a reification of the "one": I do not dare assert that the "one" is actually a conscious mind in the same way that each of us is a conscious mind. It is found through the unconscious, and unconscious it probably is in essence. I can understand why many, bowled over by this experience, call it "God", but I still feel that all ideas of God are only symbols of the experience itself. Certainly, this is true in the more anthropomorphic and less transcendental visions, when a very man-like god or woman-like goddess appears.

Since the crisis in Christian (ed. go back & say it with me, Orthodox Monotheistic Abrahamic Sects/Cults) culture is mainly sexual, we should not be surprised that sexual elements are very prominent in the unconscious channels opened by the Drug Revolution. These channels are a traditional part of religion outside Christianity*, anyways; but inside Christianity they were inevitable fissures, fated to erupt whenever the taboos of ego and superego became sufficiently weakened to allow unconscious material to flow into consciousness.

*(Ed. Aside: This was written in the early 70's (although tis quite surprising how relevant it still is).....& of course as we will see in the text there is a certain naivete in regards to the Future which happens when you read any Optimistic Futurist from previous bygone eras so be prepared for some insight & a chuckle......but before that I must make another pertinent point. Of course we still see much of this stigma against Sex in our era but with the passing of a generation, we now see the general loosening up & relaxation of these taboos in the Western World.....However the Sexual Revolution has hit another snag.....The commodification of Sex itself into another Consumerist function of our modern State Capitalism. Not that sex hasn't been used for advertising titillation for quite some time, in at least some form or another; it's now become an end in & of itself, a commodity to be bought & sold (quantity over quality), or even an addictive drug based solely on the Physical aspect (Am I fuckable? Are my Cock/Tits/Ass proper? How do I work it? etc.) & Culture Status orientated Shlock Romantics. These high unreasonable expectations start imposing idealized images/roles onto oneself & others totally disrupting the spontaneity which leads to whole new Inhibitions (& neurosis) of the Sexual Instinct focused primarily on these very Fundamental Materialist goals, typically void of any substantial meaning. Instead one should make it one of the most beautiful magical art forms that it really IS. Sex should be one of the most essential tools for rapture (stop waiting for the damn thing, it's right in front of you, just reach out & grab it!) on the integrative path to making closer richer connections & seeking greater realizations for the highest individuation & liberation .....Not that this critique applies across the board. But eh, with every revolution, you gotta expect some snags & counter revolutions.....nothing ever ends.... still put down the porn (or find some fucking good pornography (remember it is an artform)....not that by the numbers revamped stereotype bullshit) loosen up, drop the forced  awkward "ethics", open up &explore this wide world of individuals with yr. heart open (& some head smarts) & truly.... GO FORTH & FIND LOVE (you might be surprised who or what you find.......love is the law, love under will....don't lust for results......don't forget to have fun....time to play)

The Last Straw

None of these paradoxes and perplexities are going to go away. The Drug Revolution is still escalating and accelerating; the future will be much wilder and hairier than in the immediate past.

In the Evans-Kline anthology of scientific papers, Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000, Nathan S. Kline, M.D., proposes that within 30 years we will almost certainly have drugs that will:

1. Prolong childhood and shorten adolescence
2. Reduce the need for sleep
3. Provide safe, short acting intoxicants
4. Regulate sexual responses
5. Control aggression
6. Mediate nutrition, metabolism and physical growth
7. Increase or decrease alertness or relaxation
8. Prolong or shorten memory
9. Induce or prevent learning
10. Produce or discontinue transference (the patient's emotional involvement with the therapist in psychiatry)
11. Provoke or relieve guilt
12. Foster or terminate mothering behavior 
13. Shorten or extend experienced time
14. Create conditions novelty or familiarity
15. Deepen our awareness of beauty and our sense of awe

None of these predictions are irresponsible moonshine. Today's researchers have sufficient knowledge about the physiology of each of these responses to understand what sort o chemical changes in the brain will cause these changes in behavior. Some responses-for instance, fear and orgasm- have already been created in animals by electrical stimulation of the brain.

In the same book, Wayne O. Evans indicates that real aphrodisiacs will probably be available by the year 2000, also. That is, it will not only be possible to enhance a sexual experience, but to provoke one (as many already claim is sometimes done by cannabis or LSD). It finally appeared by 1998 and was called Viagra.

How  will these drugs be handled when they appear? Recent history gives us little cause to hope that our society will treat them rationally. The sex drugs, almost certainly, will be declared illegal after a few years of research (like LSD) and reappear immediately in diluted and unsafe form on the black market. I cannot conceive of a time within 30 years when Americans will be allowed to buy sexually stimulating drugs legally, which means that I can only conceive of them appearing in the underground, with every user wondering if he or she is getting the product advertised or just the reject from some entrepreneur's bathtub mescaline distillery. There probably will be some memorably bad trips in those years.

And what of the drugs that "foster or terminate mothering behavior"? We can imagine how the Reverend Jerry Falwell would like to see them used, and the far different ways that the Radical Feminist movement would prefer to use them; can we imagine a reasonable compromise that would reconcile this conflict? Or do we have to admit that one drug (fostering maternal impulses) would be legal and the other, again, would be on the black market, like the abortifacient of yore?

The drugs that provoke guilt....will the police in some countries slip them to suspects, as they have already done with scopolamine? If, perchance, such drugs turn out to be, like LSD, tasteless, colorless, and odorless. will any suspect in custody ever dare to eat a meal? (This is not science fiction; these are very real possibilities.)

And what government office do we trust enough to give sole custody of drugs that control aggression, decrease alertness, prevent learning or prolong childhood?

Dr. Timothy Leary made the second most important scientific-political decision of the 20th century  (the first was Einstein's decision to help the United States acquire an atomic bomb) (the third, arguably, was the making the World Wide Web Public). Whether Leary's decision was right or wrong (it can be debated as endlessly as Einstein's), it has markedly changed the emotional and intellectual climate of our time. he decided that LSD was too important to be monopolized by any government, or any scientific committee, or any other elite; that it should be available to all. Ten years later, we all know the risks involved in that libertarian choice (and Leary also undoubtedly knows the personal risk to himself better than he did when he started). With some of the desiderata of a showman, and some of a shaman, with great good humor and occasional flares of grandiosity, Leary set out to guarantee that, whatever action the government took, a black market would be created where acid would be available to all. (The same underworld or underground networks later helped him get out of the country when he broke jail.)

It is doubtful that Leary will be the only scientist to make such a decision and take the consequences. his famous Two Commandments apply to virtually all the new drugs we are discussing

1. Thou shalt not force thy neighbor to alter his consciousness
2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his consciousness

The government, which violates the second of these commandments every day, is now beginning to violate the first, forcing students in some grammar schools to take Ritalin (among other things....), an amphetamine-like drug that quiets unruly children but may have side effects not yet known. It is likely, given the general character of governments, that similar violations will multiply beyond all our guesses when bureaucrats discover that they have such delightful new toys as drugs that will reduce whole populations to perpetual childhood, decrease their aggressive rebelliousness, stunt their alertness and generally turn them into the drones described by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World. The heretic of the 21st Century might be, not a man who takes a drug the government forbids, but a man who refuses a drug the government commands. 

Robert Anton Wilson - 1973
Edited by Moo'Ahh'Doo