When was the last time you had all your mental polarities reversed?

To mark the 5th anniversary of the passing of Robert Anton Wilson the folks over at Boing Boing are devoting a week to this great modern philosopher and comedian. Be sure and check it out.

“To make everybody less sure of themselves, that’d be great, huh?”-RAW

“Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.”

When I found her she was huddled on a bed in the basement bedroom, laughing and crying simultaneously – it was quite a peculiar spectacle. They hadn’t held anything back with her, and I should have seen it coming. She was addicted to order, which is why she made such a formidable counterpart. There are holes missing from my brain, she helped fill in the gaps while my mind constantly drifted skyward. We made perfect sense in that quintessential odd couple kind of way. But letting go in the manner necessary to enjoy a hallucinogenic frenzy was probably beyond her current capabilities. I should have known this. If you resist the wave, it beats you into the rocks, and they’d been beating her for a while now. She was sick to her stomach, and one of those people that has problems letting go enough to vomit, so it tormented her internally. But there was more going on. There’d been a level of communiqué afoot. As she stared in the basement mirror something from within forced her to contemplate her self perception, and acknowledge her own distorted self image. 

I was lost, I needed to pull her out of it, but as she spoke a force field of H.R. Geiger-ish mutations congealed around her head, and her lips sparked with a neon illumination. I stared at the ceiling and into the motion of psionic ripples – it was as if a cosmic millipede danced in circles among the plaster. It was hilarious. I started to jostle the bed. “Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat baby.” I sang joyously.

“That’s the stupidest song ever” she replied.

She was laughing again. It only took seven or eight more jokes and another twenty minutes to pull her back from the vicious cycle of logic she’d been unconsciously dragged into. I projected sigils into the ether. I’d been preparing for this and would use my pull with these weirdos to protect her in any way I could.

In no time, her stomach situation seemed to be improving. Suddenly, I realized the problem. We were in a house with a spectacular view of Mount Hood, and she was feeding the impulse to hole up in a dark corner of that particular world. Escape was imperative. I grabbed her arm and slowly coerced her toward the light. She got the captain’s chair by the living room window. I put on some Bardo Pond, and time began to gradually melt away. The transcendent beauty of the Gorge captured our spirits and things now seemed to be turning around with a slick rapidity.

The essence of the environment transformed. The light of the world had imposed its will upon our cognitive experience. The music merged with the eternal. The primary obstacle to the view’s entirety was a tree that now seemed a thousand years old. I had climbed it as a child, and yet never recognized the depth of its infinite wisdom. Right now I was seeing its true face – which included a multitude of perverse reptilian eyes, stinging my insides with boundless enchantment.

At the root of all matter of phenomenon dealing with things like divine connectivity, there lies a conjunctive telepathy – entire fields of transdimensional elation projected from one being to another. This is the future of language, and we’ve been building it all along in our recreation. Right now you can watch boundless hypothetical scenarios play themselves out for your amusement, at your demand. We call these things albums, movies, video games, books, paintings, graphic novels, etc. All attempts to replicate the higher level functioning of our wildest dreams. This tree was engaging me, and words alone couldn’t possibly do the encounter justice. So when writing about it in retrospect I was inspired for the first time in probably five years, to turn to a sketch pad to help better communicate this particularly indescribable sensational extravaganza.

Portrait of a tree:

To further the point that language alone cannot communicate the time altered headspaces that psychedelics inspire see the work of artists like Maura Holden or Robert Hardgrave for instance.

Now, I’m not much of a visual artist by all admission, but I’ve always maintained that the most accurate visual representation of my own psychedelic encounters comes from Vancouver artist Luke Brown, who conveniently considers himself a “hyperspace cartographer”. So this would ultimately be a more accurate, and yet still somehow inadequate representation of what I was trying to pull off with my drawing:

You have to feel these things, I can’t stress that enough. The similarity of Mr. Brown’s art to my own psychedelic “contact” headspaces, is beyond conspicuous to say the least. I remember the first time I saw them. I was high as fuck at a friend’s art opening and stopped dead in my tracks. “My God, he’s captured the vibe completely” I thought to myself, almost in shock. There was an eerie familiarity to put it mildly.

So what does that connection mean? How could we be seeing the same thing if it was all hallucinatory? Why have these headspaces been repressed from mass consumption? You could have access to this dementia – Christ, everyone could. All you need do, is convince yourself that it’s possible. Devise a lexicon of abstract incantations, then navigate to the source.

My fiancé sighed a breath of relief and informed me she’d just been released. Angelic spirit beings had suddenly shown up and told her that she needed to “let go of her body” and that “this is what dying is like”, then quickly descended upon her soul and pulled it from her body, which fell limp in the cushioned chair. She needed a drink, which I fetched for her promptly.

I laid back on the couch and put on an old album by the Orb. “This pleases us” my fiancé cheerfully informed me. I laid back on the couch, still peering intently out the window, straight into the heart of the prime distraction. The entire scene crackled and pixilated out of control – possessed by a boundless, laser beam intensity. The plasma bolts appeared in concentric fixtures, then extended into my being by force. I was beginning to float upward and to the north, as if being pulled out of my body by psychic demons. Normal reality wasn’t even there anymore – consumed by the transient invasion. It was getting too odd, and the terror pulled me down a few rungs back to reality.

Had I just blown it? My chance at shamanic abduction – the experience of being taken to the stars and reconfigured anew by our shape-shifting overlords? In all my years of experimenting with hallucinogens, I’d never felt the magnetic pull upward before in the manner I just had. So many stories of souls being extracted skyward, and lives transformed at the forge of the “star people” maybe best detailed most recently in the brilliant book Supernatural, by Graham Hancock – which lays out the similarities between modern tales of “Alien Abductees” and shamanic initiation rites. He even talks about having a similar encounter with Ayahuasca in this interview on Paratopia, with the same result – the innate fear response taking over and ultimately preventing heavenly ascension.

It would have to be resolved at another time, and most certainly, in another reality. I had blown it, but took consolation in the continued technicolor onslaught projected directly into my being from the infinite hive consciousness from beyond. I was going to ride this out like I always have. We were meant to be here, right now, riding the cosmic current of the multiverse. My fiancée was actually enjoying herself. My magick had worked. She wouldn’t let go. She wanted to fight the wave, but the wave wouldn’t let her. She needed to be extracted from herself by the glowing hands of the divine. Now we could enjoy ourselves.

We nursed our drinks and rode the primal current of bliss emanating from the stereo, still entranced by the mountain’s hypnotic supremacy. We listened to albums by Liars, Meat Beat Manifesto, The Future Sound of London, Failure, and Ride, (classics) using the transcendent intensity of the music to merge our souls with the limitless ecstasy of the earth.

Eventually, the kaleidoscopic visions began to recede to the periphery of consciousness, lurking in the vibrant yet understated corners of my mind tunnel. My fiancée passed out on my lap as the music continued and the sun began to set, casting pink hued hyper color patterns steadily off the mountain. I carried her downstairs and tucked her in, somewhat disappointed that I hadn’t gotten laid, but understanding the inappropriateness of that disappointment. I had no idea the chocolates were that strong, which is always a variable in underground psychopharmacological experimentation rituals such as these. Note to self, next time, take a little, wait, and then decide if you need any more. You’d think I’d have figured these things out by now, but I learned a long time ago that I have to make the same mistake roughly 11 times (if not 1,000) before I finally change my behavioral response to the stimuli. Heather was going to make a great wife. I think possibly, she might curb that number down to 7 with her meticulous nature.

It was the fourth of July (which also happened to be the first anniversary of when we started, errrrr,…….dating), and that meant there was going to be celebratory fireworks, which I could watch from the living room apparently. Oddly, I think the only time I actually get somewhat excited by fireworks is when I’m tripping. I think it stems back from an innerworldly series of visions from years prior when I was 18 or so – stoned out on my head on mushrooms, watching fireworks on a golf course in suburban Ohio with people I barely knew and didn’t really like. Strange times.

I had another hour or so to soldier through, but I’d just throw on some Hawkwind and that’d transport me to the future in thousand year intervals of thought. And there I was. I promptly threw on an album I made called, The Dislocating Flesh Repents which according to Terrascope: “walks the line between noise and music in a repetitive ritual haze, threatening to drive you crazy at any moment”. I was kind of sick of it by this point, but it seemed like an appropriate nightcap soundtrack as I had finished recording it almost exactly a year prior. I poured myself another glass of wine and sat down just as the festive explosions commenced.

It wasn’t the greatest view of the action, but something about the vibrant colors bursting forth over the tree line instigated a particularly profound dialogue within me. What had happened to Heather down in that basement bathroom? What had she seen in the mirror that terrified her so? All these obscure philosophies I’d been studying lately and applying to my interior structure – things like Chaos Magick and Shamanism, why did it all seem so much like self help obviousness? The thought that my future wife dealt with self image issues, much like most of us raised on a constant diet of perfectly chiseled sexual impulse manipulation, wasn’t a topic I’d pondered at length, but all the signs were there. She was an admitted anorexic for years. It would be naïve for me to think those demons had been completely subdued. She’d even told me outright on several occasions that she didn’t even know she was hot, until she went to graduate art school and dudes were all over her. She kept repeating: “think about pretty girls, think about pretty women” under her breath after she’d been pulled from herself by the angels. “think about pretty girls”. As if something was subconsciously imploring her to confront her own issues of self perception head on and deal with the reality that she was, in fact, a pretty girl.

And now as we begin to study these things in a supposedly “scientific manner”, we’re finding them as a potentially useful treatment for things like post traumatic stress disorder, chronic depression, and my personal favorite – chemical dependency. As a mystic and artist rather than a pure scientist, or a transdimensional psychologist if you must only respect scientific inquiry as a means to bring about wisdom, let me posit a rather obvious hypothesis: There is a cosmic intelligence beyond our understanding that wants us to pull our shit together for the best interest of everyone. It’s there for you if you want to listen, and you might not like what it has to tell you, but if what it has to tell you is unpleasant, it’s only unpleasant because you don’t want to put the work necessary into changing. A good analogy would be that it’s difficult for a lot of people to take criticism, and yet criticism is integral to the process of learning, and even more important to creative development. You need to know what you’re doing wrong to understand what you need to improve upon. Letting go of one’s ego is of paramount importance. This should be your quest – to find your relevance in what some refer to as the larger reality.

All these years and infinitely expanding bizarro psychic enclaves – what was the message lying dormant betwixt the psychotic expanse of chaos? I suppose I’d known all along, but on this particular night, it resonated spectacularly in waves of exotic sensation exploding forth amongst the fireworks: “You hate yourself, and you need to stop hating yourself.” It came in visitations from the DMT mind entities, in sigil magick astral contact messages about ancient God incarnations – and even more coherently in specified disembodied hypnagogic voices in my head: “you love you, you want us to save you”.

(continued next month)

Friday September 3, 2010 7pm at Elliott Bay Book Company Ralph Metzner will speak about the good old days of experimentation way back in the 1960′s.

Ralph Metzner, veteran (with Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, among others) of the experimentation with mind-altering substances at Harvard, speaks about his experiences in those early days, as chronicled in his new book, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about the Harvard Experiments, Leary, Millbrook and the Sixties (Synergetic Press). Ram Dass and Gary Bravo are co-authors. Co-founder of the Green Earth Foundation, Ralph Metzner also practices psychotherapy and is professor emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His many books include Alchemical Divination and MindSpace and TimeStream.

Peaking Lights are on tour but alas I will have to settle for this fascinating film as they are not traveling to my mizrable and goshforsaken burg. Perhaps you are a luckier sort. Check out the whole “Sound Builders” series though it’s pretty nice…

7/27/10 – The Crepe Place, Santa Cruz, CA w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami

7/28/10 – Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, CA, w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami+ Late Young

7/29/10 – Muddy Water’s Cafe, Santa Barbara, CA w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami

7/30/10 – The Bootleg Theater, LA, w/ Pocahaunted + Mi Ami

8/2/10 – Echo Curio, LA w/Ged Gengras, Sun Araw, Metal Rouge, Robedoor

8/3/10 – Tin Can House, San Diego, CA – w/Metal Rouge

8/4/10 – Tempe, AZ w/Metal Rouge

8/5/10 – Albuquerque, NM w/Metal Rouge

8/6/10 – Denver, CO w/Metal Rouge

8/7/10 – Kansas City, MO w/Metal Rouge

8/8/10 – The Mill, Iowa City, IA w/Metal Rouge

8/9/10 – Minneapolis, MN w/Metal Rouge

8/10/10 – Madison, WI

If you were to think of our species as united cosmically as one being, which is something that most of our religions and prominent neuronauts have been telling us since the beginning of what we perceive as time – plotlines begin to emerge that don’t necessarily involve self destruction. In not listening to these viewpoints, we’ve separated ourselves from our own eternal nature and the essence of time. We’re kind of like an idiot savant that can program the shit out of a computer but couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it. Another way of putting it is that we’re becoming increasingly and dangerously unbalanced as an individual; a work-a-holic who’s career success has blinded him to the fact that his personal life is in shambles. This unbalance has produced some hilarious and mind blowingly horrific enchantments, but we need to diversify our science now more than ever. Pleasure rather than violence. Cooperation rather than competition. Self love rather than self hatred. Biology rather than synthetics. DMT rather than prozac.

“The dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley”

The above is a classic quote from the immortal Terence Mckenna, who now thanks to the wonders of the internet, can be beamed into your consciousness whenever’s convenient to help destabilize your reality. You should try it at work. The main reason I bring this up is because recently I’ve had a few fairly clear communications congeal their way into my realm via the hypnagogic sleep state, boldly questioning the way I perceive magick. The drift I got was that while I’ve been experimenting with stretching my imagination in a context that our culture has considered magick or shamanic – conceptualizing it in this way, in this day and age is beyond retarded. Okay, so actually the drift I got was that me thinking about it in this way was exceptionally hilarious to them (and in them I mean, my Holy Guardian Angel, collective Oversoul or whatever you want to call it).

Which is a good point, but I’ll admit it hurt a bit simultaneously. Walking the spiritual path is like waging a war on your own bullshit, which is a difficult war, and why most people avoid it like the plague. It’s fun to think about these things as being mystical or sorcerous, but we only create boundaries with these esoteric avenues of thought because we haven’t yet investigated them thoroughly as a culture. It’s my contention that this area of inquiry has been intentionally repressed, but I’m not going to get into that here because it tends to get complicated. The late Harvard professor John E. Mack (also now immortal via free internet lectures) – really focused on hammering home the point that in his estimation, the most important conclusion to be taken away from his years of research with supposed “alien abductees” is that we need to come up with new models and means to study and conceive of reality – a novel kind of scientific method that incorporates subjective states of consciousness as legitimate rather than imaginary.

As I’ve said many times before, with current information technology, we’re now at a point where we have an insane amount of data regarding those who achieve transpersonal states of consciousness. The primary question raised by this information is basically: if those who attain these states consistently come back with similar stories and themes, over and over and over again, doesn’t this represent a type of objective reality beyond what we’re trained to believe? How do we study this multiverse of consciousness in a way that’s beneficial to the whole of the planet and therefore us as a species?

It’s almost a moot point because this isn’t what we’re putting our resources into, but it’s not all bad.  Millitary spending’s going through the roof. Oh wait, that is pretty bad. It’s nearly doubled since 9/11 (cue the conspiracy theorists); which is especially heinous in the midst of the current class war. This shit is really happening. This is what we’re channeling our collective energies into as a species. A couple weeks back, Aubrey forwarded me a link to this documentary about weird and in my mind somewhat creepy technological advances in fields like robotics and neuroscience called Technocalypse, which I’d recommend to anyone. There’s an essence of beauty in the way we can now seemingly cull anything out of the realm of fantasy into reality, but man, why are we doing some of this odd crap?

In a book I read by one of the military’s pay-rolled psychic’s (it was either Lyn Buchanan or Joseph McMoneagle, I can’t honestly remember), the concept that the majority of our science actually comes from science fiction was discussed at length – the idea that ultimately the science fiction that young researchers grow up reading is what drives the avenues of creation they aspire to – power of suggestion plain and simple. Now, what I find unsettling about this, is that in a lot of the sci fi that’s succeeded in western culture, our creation of robots turns out being spectacularly disastrous to put it mildly. If I were to go out on a limb and theorize as to why, I’d say that our odd compulsion to create synthetic life in the images of beings from our world, represents as far away as we can get from what many refer to as: “source” or “god”. We’re attempting to create life void of spirit, which is just kind of a sketchy concept anyway you look at it. The true purpose to most of this technology will most certainly be to kill brown people and phase the human work force into obsolescence. My friend Ryk recently turned me on to the fact that militarized robotic dogs are now in the works. Militarized robot dogs – no shit! It’s not all doom and gloom though. Video games continue to be awesome, albeit largely more violent than I’d prefer. It’s easy to forget that the military did help create the internet. These advances always have repercussions that benefit humanity if almost by accident. In a way, I think the information technology we’ve only just begun to develop, gives us new ways to shape our interior world that could potentially have wide reaching transformative effects on our society if we were to manipulate them properly. Shortly after I started working a job where I stared at a computer all day, I began to find myself awake in the middle of the night, again in a hynagogic state, with consistent visitations from cybernetic light entities who seemed to be psychically rebuilding my life essence. Seriously strange, like updates being installed on a computer driving my consciousness to move faster and faster towards infinity. This continued for quite some time, and still happens on occasion. I had a dream once where I fell asleep at my desk and a hand reached out of my computer screen and inserted a disc deep into my forehead – which lead to pretty much the same sensation – reality accelerating into a detached informational oblivion.

The concept of a transhuman as laid out in the tehnocalypse feature is completely different than what I would conceive. These dorks are talking about wanting to download their consciousness onto a hard drive as a means to achieve immortality (which is really misguided when our souls are already eternal). I’d envision telepathic sex gods who could play the shit out of the drums and create new, exotic recreational drugs with a mere thought.

In Richard Metzger’s recent two part interview with Genesis P. Orridge (which you can take in here and here) the concept of transhumans being psychick pan sexual beings is thrown out there, which is oddly in tune with what you often read about say, grey aliens. In Genesis’ opinion, anything we can do to promote and experiment with the concept of species unity is of paramount importance. Things like genetic manipulation and eugenics are concepts he supports whole heartedly. Not a popular avenue of thought I know, but just for a minute think about how we liberally tinker with the genetic lines of other species who we deem as beneath us. I personally love watching dog shows, because they’re essentially a genetic trade conference. It gives me kind of an intergalactic feeling inside. It’s pretty arrogant to think that if there was an older, more highly evolved species than us in the universe (or even say, many), it or they wouldn’t be conducting similar experiments on our populace. Just food for thought. He also talks about how he and his late wife, Lady Jane, used to keep each other continually spaced on ketamine (who they refer to as “grandmother” if I’m remembering correctly) for days at a time – even waking up before one another and going all in with some sleep dosing. You should really listen to that if you have time.

Maybe I’ve just been geeking out on Caprica a bit much as of late, but all these things make me wonder if the prime quandary presented to us in creating weirdo synthetic killbots, is truly the very nature of our existence itself. The unfortunate thing about where science has gone is that we’re starting to get a lot of results, which is making us oh so very arrogant about the legitimacy of the philosophy getting these results – hence, we are even more prone to ignore basic limitations like the fact that we don’t even know what we are or why we’re here exactly. We’re starting to understand that our brains are bio computers programmable by chemical stimulation and exterior suggestion, but we refuse to ask the larger questions. Here’s a thought: we have souls, that’s what you science geeks always seem to be missing. We are ultimately, a means to channel psionic energy from the astral plane into a particularly awe inspiring and interwoven network of plotlines, as a means to expand reality. The potentiality is limitless.

If you were to think of our species as united cosmically as one being, which is something that most of our religions and prominent neuronauts have been telling us since the beginning of what we perceive as time – plotlines begin to emerge that don’t necessarily involve self destruction. In not listening to these viewpoints, we’ve separated ourselves from our own eternal nature and the essence of time. We’re kind of like an idiot savant that can program the shit out of a computer but couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it. Another way of putting it is that we’re becoming increasingly and dangerously unbalanced as an individual; a work-a-holic who’s career success has blinded him to the fact that his personal life is in shambles. This unbalance has produced some hilarious and mind blowingly horrific enchantments, but we need to diversify our science now more than ever. Pleasure rather than violence. Cooperation rather than competition. Self love rather than self hatred. Biology rather than synthetics. DMT rather than prozac. In thinking about the concept of transhumanism and contemplating my own version of it, in conjunction with questioning my own perception of magick as commanded by internal forces, I decided I’d start a new field of psychology for my self and anyone else who might actually be prone to listen. While I’ll always refer to my particular psychosis as chaos sorcery, this is merely a reference to the ancient traditions and philosophies that have influenced my worldview. I’m really an experimental psychologist, and since we’re just throwing the prefix trans on everything these days, let’s call my particular field of inquiry transdimensional psychology. This is the field that sees the brain as a bio computer that can be reprogrammed to accept its own multi-dimensional reality and contact those other worlds of imagination in which it currently exists largely unknowingly. The primary and most difficult step to achieving meaningful contact with these unknown worlds is to eliminate the doubt as to your own expansive nature by pursuing transpersonal states of consciousness. This is done to create a behaviorally transformative ontological shock. The thing that mystics, philosophers, magickians, sorcerers and the like have been trying to tell humanity for centuries now, is that while you can’t prove the reality of these matters by conventional scientific method (well, that’s actually debatable), you can prove them to yourself. In fact, you must. A transdimensional psychologist is one who seeks to manipulate what is known as the physical world with information and abilities gained by accessing dimensions of consciousness hitherto unknown, by any means necessary. Transdimensional psychology – you heard it here first.

A good excuse to visit the Blue Moon this Sunday…

The above is something my uncle, who’s a successful corporate attorney, told me after I was arrested for possession of LSD over a decade ago. It was precisely this advice that persuaded my Dad, who at first vowed zero assistance to cough up the $3500 or so dollars it took to hire a fancy lawyer to talk the charges down to the misdemeanor “attempted possession of LSD”. If it wasn’t for this money, which is little more than a demonstration to the courts that you’re not dirt poor, I might have struggled to have continued access to things like gainful employment and the ability to vote in our society.

The entire process of being thrown in jail and jumping through the endless hoops of the legal system (not to mention being financially drained) left me lower than I’d ever been previously or have sank to since. In short, they had broken my psychologically, which is what the system is designed to do. But in the process I learned a few things. For one, most drug charges are little more than a shakedown. If you can buy your way out of them, you’re probably not going to serve any serious jail time. Secondly, despite what organizations like NORML might tell you, you don’t have any fucking rights in matters like these unless you’re wealthy. It was a blatant case of illegal search and seizure, the cop’s story made zero sense, but you know how much money it would have taken to get that shit in front of a jury? Yeah, more than I had or my Dad was willing to spend. So really it’s just the cop’s word against yours and who do you think the Judge is going to believe?

All of last week’s Halloween festivities left me in the mood to write a horror blog this month, and in my mind, there’s nothing more abjectly terrifying than the drug war. The loosening of the federal government’s persecution of medicinal marijuana and the economic collapse (not to mention having a minority president who has openly admitted to smoking pot) have lead to an increasing dialogue about the legalization of the marijuana. Which is a step in the right direction for sure, but it’s important to understand that the war on drugs is more than just a war on people, it’s also a war on our spiritual development as a species.

Of course everyone reading this is aware that we incarcerate more than twice as many people as China and that an increasingly percentage of those people are locked up on non violent drug charges (and minorities by the way) scary info. And of course we all know that we’re renting out an increasing amount of the prison labor force to private corporations, right? And of course we’re all aware that America’s unquenchable thirst for illegal inebriants has led to an ascending percentage of the third world’s populace living under the ruling arm of violent drug cartels? Right? Okay, I’m just going to assume I’m right about those things and move on because that stuffs been covered pretty heavily elsewhere. But before I do, I’m just going to flash up this little nugget of terror:

Now the reason I’m lingering on this is because I can’t count the number of pot smokers I’ve talked to that don’t seem to have any kind of awareness of this fact. Yeah, that’s right folks, despite the fact that public opinion is warming up to the wacky backy and  marijuana drug laws are slowly loosening, somehow we’re actually arresting more people for weed than ever. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more. Just another example of how we’ve become a plutocracy rather than a democracy. The people want one thing, the government does another because they don’t actually answer to us. Exactly the same kind of thing we’re currently seeing with health care reform.

But that stuff’s been covered a million fold. What hasn’t been covered nearly enough is how chemicals are the most efficient means of transforming consciousness and by transforming consciousness, reality itself. The drug war is not only a war on the underclass but a war on ideas, art, culture etc. – or as I like to call it, a vast international mind control apparatus. But John, what the fuck are you talking about? That sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory horseshit.

Well to answer that question, let’s take a moment to talk about what happens to me when I smoke pot. You see, I actually see the THC high as a quite spiritual one. And to say that I’m the first one to make this assertion would be the understatement of the century. In fact there are even established religions like rastafarianism that echo this sentiment. Even after only a few tokes, I see strange otherworldly psychic vistas unfold behind my eyes and hear music from heavenly realms cascading through my mind’s ears. One might consider this kind of thing spiritual. Granted this is an atypical response, but it isn’t unheard of by any stretch of the imagination.

Now when I take say, psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin things get even weirder. I have this experience where my entire subjective world is invaded by super sentient alien forms of intelligence from dimensions hitherto unknown. They flood my life with rapidly mutating imagery from their realm which as far as I can tell is comprised from pure art (if you have any interest in reading more about these experiences you can do that here). The best visual example I’ve ever found depicting the type of beings that I encounter in the grips of a hallucinogen frenzy is the painting Baphomet by Luke Brown:

Yeah, I see shit that looks roughly like that but even stranger somehow, everywhere, beaming bolts of psychic energy directly into the core of my eternal soul. It was the intensity of these visionary experiences that created the ontological shock necessary to break my mind free from the confines of our current scientific materialist paradigm and into the realms of magickal thought. Again, it’s an atypical reaction, but not entirely unheard of. In fact, the idea that psychedelic drugs can provide access to other forms of intelligence and realities as of yet indescribable is one that’s been around pretty much since the advent of human history.

Again, I know, this isn’t what happens to most people when they trip out on ‘shrooms. But under the influence of say, DMT, the likelihood of encountering shape shifting intergalactic emissaries is apparently fairly high. One of the greatest tragedies of the drug war is that psychedelic drugs, which were once seen as having enormous potential in scientific circles, became completely out of bounds for legitimate research when they were made illegal back in the 60’s. In fact, since then, only two major studies have managed to fight through the ridiculous layers of red tape and make it happen in the United States. That’s how hard it is. Although to look on the bright side, the general attitude does seem to be changing somewhat as of late. One of these studies was conducted by University of New Mexico professor Rick Strassman (which you can read about in this book) to investigate the effects of DMT on consciousness. To briefly summarize his research, the thing he found that most surprised him was the consistency of people’s reports of inter-dimensional contact with seemingly sentient alien beings. These often came in the form of cosmic jesters, hive mind insects, and weirdo reptilian gods.

And yet in a country that was supposedly founded on the concept of FREEDOM OF RELIGION, the substances that produce spiritual experiences such as these remain illegal. So let’s reflect on why that is exactly. When LSD first hit the scene, a less materialistic, racist, homophobic, violent, and yet more spiritual and sexually experimental counterculture began to emerge. The idea of an upturn among the amount of the populace resisting their expansionary agenda frightened the existing power structure and so they spent a fuckton of money spreading propaganda to infect the minds of Joe Sixpack with ideas that benefited their continued economic supremacy. As far as I can tell, this type of shit always works. In the end they got their way and LSD, along with psilocybin, DMT and a handful of other substances were banned to the supreme detriment of everyone.  But then they went even farther than that and infiltrated the counterculture with black ops designed to discredit their opinions and prevent them from spreading to the hoi polloi.

Now I’m not sure how you can argue that this isn’t mind control. Let’s think about the classic 60’s mantra of “better living through chemistry”. This never went out of style per se, it’s just been perverted beyond measure. Pharmaceutical companies are making more money than ever marketing Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibition pills (among other things) which, oh by the way, only work better than standard talk therapy in cases of severe depression. So basically yes, you should take drugs that help you fit into the hell society of financial exploitation that we’ve created. Take these and you won’t have to think about or confront your spiritual crisis. Did I mention that a lot of these drugs have: “certain sexual side effects”, namely, they suppress healthy sexual impulse in a lot of cases. I have a friend that was on Prozac for a while and went off because he quite legitimately couldn’t cum. This is a guy I’m talking about.

And it doesn’t end there. Somehow when the tragedy that was Michael Jackson finally ended a few months back, no one in the media bothered to turn it into a forum to discuss the fact that all the research, “even our own government’s, indicates that prescription drug abuse is skyrocketing out of control and is the hot new abuse trend among the youth of America.  The Drug companies get kick backs on all of that. So who’s the government arresting there?

No one of course, because of high paid lobbyists. In fact, the pharmaceutical companies could have prevented the meth epidemic but they stepped in and said: No, that’s bad for our profit margin. Yep, they make buck on most of the meth that’s flying around as well. And therein lies the most frightening aspect of all in regards to drug war: We’re not fighting one. We’re just controlling the populace for the means of the upper class by regulating the chemicals we’re “allowed” to use to alter our consciousness.  “cia_drug_trafficking” The CIA has been involved with the drug trade for decades. In a nutshell, they use it to funnel money into fun things like the military/prison industrial complex. Think about it, have you ever had a serious problem finding illegal drugs in America. And what about drug prices? Yeah, they’ve remained pretty much constant ever since I’ve been taking them, despite vast inflation in most other sectors of our economy.

I used to know a guy that referred to it as the military/prison/extraterrestrial industrial complex (this is but one of about a billion links to this kind of thing).  And that’s my supremely horrifying thought for the season. That forces we don’t understand, angelic, demonic, extra terrestrial, or inner dimensional as they might be, exist and have been influencing our culture, possibly exploiting us since the advent of human history.
Now I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist per se, mainly because I agree with the counter argument that people just don’t strike me as smart enough to pull off a lot off the things we want to attribute to them. But as a student of and practitioner of magick, I’m well aware that the spiritual world exists and the physical world is a reflection of it to a certain extent. The world outside is born from the universe within. So yes, our world is in fact being influenced by forces we can’t comprehend entirely. I’m not even going to try and pretend I know who these forces are, or what their agenda is, although I have my theories. Maybe the drug war actually has something to do with warring factions in the heavens. The ones who work to exploit us and those who wish to free our cosmic potential like the self transforming machine elves of the DMT flash. It’s all speculation, but I will say this: the stupidity and spiritual ignorance of mankind, especially as we enter a new age of information, certainly seems conspiratorial.

Little Claw are one of Kim and Thurston’s fave bands (he just put out there 2nd album on Ecstatic Peace) and they leave a trail of fire in their wake wherever they go. Check out some of their new tunes HERE.

Little Claw in the light of day...

Brother Raven are a local Seattle duo who deserve your undivided attention. Their analog virtuosity will take you on an awesome voyage through the pineapple portal and into interstellar space. Dig up on that shit right HERE.