The importance of determinism, entheogens, and denying the historical
Jesus in favor of a mythic-only Jesus/Christ

This particular combination of distinctive ideas holds together to
very effectively and most immediately produce a certain kind of ego
death experience.


Consider treating determinism as an optional, non-primary, non-
critical component of the model of ego death I’m formulating. What
if someone concentrated on all the ideas I put forward, but neglected
to consider determinism/fatedness, or crticially or uncritically
concentrated on a freewillist framework of thinking?

Consider treating mythic-only Christ as an optional, non-primary, non-
critical component of the model of ego death I’m formulating. What
if someone concentrated on all the ideas I put forward, but neglected
to consider mythic-only Christ, or crticially or uncritically
concentrated on a historical Jesus, or supernaturalist Jesus, or
fairy-tale debunking/anti-transcendent, materialist framework of
thinking?

Consider treating entheogens as an optional, non-primary, non-
critical component of the model of ego death I’m formulating. What
if someone concentrated on all the ideas I put forward, but neglected
to consider entheogens, or crticially or uncritically concentrated on
a “drug-free religious insight” framework of thinking?

Why don’t we ignore the mythic-only Christ theory, ignore determinism
or embrace freewillism, or ignore or dismiss entheogens? What kind
of an ego death systematic theory/model could remain? An ego death
theory:
o Without any emphasis on the mythic-only Christ theory
o With no emphasis on the freewill/determinism issue
o Paying no attention to entheogens.


A couple months ago I realized just how definitive and distinctive is
my combination of determinism (timeless single fixed-future
fatedness), mythic-only Christ theory, and entheogens. A crucial
question for a theorist is to contribute something unique. If your
theory is not unique, you’re dead as an innovator. I often fear that
someone else, in a new book, is expressing the theory I’ve hastened
and labored to pull together first.

Books come out drawing a strong connection between religion and
entheogens, or religion and determinism and freewill, or other
combinations. My job is to explain how each new book containing
higher revelations is inadequate and misses the target of an
effective ego death theory. Many books initially seem to nail my
theory, but then I realize the book fails to integrated determinism,
or entheogens, or the mythic-only Christ. Because these are all so
distinctive and controversial, and less commonly treated subjects,
the set of these 3 topics becomes a reliable and effective test for
the presence of my theory.

If a book were to cover block-universe determinism, interpretation of
the Jesus figure on a basis of the mythic-only Christ, and
entheogens, there is almost bound to be my theory. The mystic
altered state is infinitely more effectively engendered by entheogens
than other methods. Once you have the mystic altered state on tap,
you are in a position to reflect upon Christian myth truly as myth,
fully independent of needing the additional hypothesis of the
historical human Jesus: you can begin recognizing and experiencing
aspects of the stories of the crucified rebel would-be sovereign; you
can start thinking powerfully and experientially about spiritual
crucifixion, metanoia, death and spiritual resurrection.

And once you have the mystic state on tap, you are ready to begin
thinking about the ramifications of perceiving timelessness for the
dynamics of personal control across time — leading to a discovery of
the breathtakingly elegant hypothesis of determinism, or rather,
fixed-future fatedness.


Combining entheogens, the worldmodel of determinism or timeless
frozen-future fatedness, and purely mythic thinking about the meaning
of the Crucifixion, or the religious truth of the cruci-fiction, is
the fastest way to experience and rationally understand ego death in
contemporary Western culture — at least, a specific, comprehensible,
certain kind of ego death. If you focus on other topics and
approaches, that will delay any ego death realization. My goal is to
define an approach to ego death that provides the most intense and
complete kind of ego death as quickly and easily as possible — the
way to do this, given the contemporary Western culture, is to
emphasize these three most disctintive subjects: entheogens,
determinism as I define it, and purely mythic Christ. These are the
topics or perspectives most commonly omitted from spiritual or
theoretical accounts of ego death, and my solution is compensation by
putting a strong emphasis on these key points.

In spirituality, the missing key idea is entheogens, so a truly good
theory of religion now would emphasize entheogens. In Jesus studies,
the missing key idea is the purely mythic Christ/Jesus, so to redeem
the domain of Jesus studies, an emphasis is needed on the “purely
mythic Jesus” theory. Another key missing idea that provides the
framework for finally understanding the mystery religions and
Hellenistic and general religious thought is determinism. There’s
not nearly enough emphasis on entheogens, mythic-only Jesus, and
determinism (heimarmene) — and ego death is not at all forthcoming
in such a conceptual environment bereft of these emphases.

The missing ingredients that are lacking to make the mental bomb of
revelation go off successfully, the aspects of maturity that are
necessary before we can be taught to bring our minds to spiritual
climax, are these three missing domains. If you take away the study
of heimarmene or entheogens or purely mythic Jesus from this ego
death theory, the theory will fail its goal of providing an amazingly
ergonomic and convenient approach to a particular, intense kind of
ego death experience and insight.

Other subjects are necessary, but are already (I wish to suppose)
relatively common, such as semantic facility, such as is required to
talk about the way in which ego is and is not an illusion, and to
differentiate between the collapse of a probability wave versus the
collapse (resolution) of our *knowledge about* the wave’s resolution,
or to shift in concert an entire set of meanings of terms such
as ‘ego’, ‘me’, ‘movement’, ‘guilt’, ‘responsible’, and ‘decide’. I
focus on the most critically absent ideas — the difference between
what we commonly know about religious experiencing and what we must
know to most quickly bring about religious experiencing. The worst
ignorance, about the things most sorely lacking for achieving ego
death, is of the subjects of determinism (heimarmene), entheogens,
and the mythic-only Jesus theory. Now, the entheogen theory is no
longer new — and yet it is; we have really only begun publically
reintroducing entheogens into their proper central place on the
sacred meal table in the dead center of religious activity, replacing
the bunk, ego-sustaining placebo sacraments.

I have to build on the most advanced entheogen theories and make sure
I start from there and move forward far past Huston Smith’s tepid and
tentative apologies for the “religion-simulating” potential of
entheogens — I have to be the next generation after James Arthur,
Clark Heinrich, Huston Smith, R. Gordon Wasson, and Albert Hofmann.
I move into a different paradigm, in which entheogens are so taken
for granted as to almost disappear — or rather, to become merely one
of a multitude of primary domains to at last integrate, together with
determinism (heimarmene) and the mythic-only Jesus allegorical
paradigm. Entheogens are merely one of a set of crucial model-
construction tools — in this, my attitude is the same as Ken Wilber,
who centrally focusses on “altered states” instead of entheogens in
particular.

I take it for granted that entheogens are the source of religious
experiencing, that insight leads to determinism, and that the fullest
grasp of Christian religious insight is based on a mythic-only
Jesus. The problem then that I must contribute work on is showing
how these three axioms, with other domains, work together to bring
ego death immediately, effectively, and far more conveniently than
any other set of ideas and approaches. If you remove this emphasis
on determinism (fixed-future, block-universe fatedness), you
immediately lose the possibility of a convenient, direct approach to
bringing about the climax of ego death.

>in our hearts we hold the power of personal choice.

That hits upon the heart of the matter. Do we hold that power in a way that
is metaphysically free? Many mystics and mystic traditions say no. We wield
power only relatively; our hand is forced by the Ground of Being. During the
mystic state, one’s hand (heart, will) is seen to be forced. My hand is
firmly on the wheel of choice and decision, but now I see that someone is
forcing my hand. The ego is the controller of the personal will, but the ego
is secretly controlled by the Ground of Being. When that is seen as
terrifying and a dangerous state of dependence on a hidden manipulator-force,
one may pray to that manipulator force, feeling that one’s only hope is to
hope that the manipulator force is a conscious and benevolent being — God
conceived of as personal and benevolent.


I’m effectively defining a “new” goal, or one different than the goals
commonly assumed by spirituality. The goal I’m interested in is enabling and
explaining a particular kind of ego death experience.

You could say there are two entirely different kinds of ego death — that
which most spirituality is concerned with, and that which I am defining.

There is an enormous amount of tradition behind the form of ego death I am
defining. Loss of control, determinism, disempowerment, timeless fixity of
the future, cosmic failure of personal power, and cancellation of the personal
will are commonly reported in various mystic writings. My task is to pull
together *these* aspects of religious experiencing and mystic insight into a
simple, elegant explanatory system.

Theories and schools of mystic experiencing and ego transcendence are messy
and various, a forest, a chaos, and yet there are certain trends and models
that can capture and organize many of the ideas in a fully coherent way that
accords with block-universe determinism as I define it.

My goal: find some kind of ego death experience that is intense, rational, and
convenient, and package that for easy distribution. Block-universe
determinism succeeds at delivering the promised goods.

It’s about time to write an essay on the nature of belief as held by the
transcendent mind — or the mature mind, in any case. Suppose I declare that
deterministic ego death happens when you believe determinism while in the
mystic altered state, and to be rescued from these dire straits requires
contrite belief in something like a personal compassionate God or mythic
substitute sacrifice. What kind of “belief” is that, and can we say such a
mystic afterwards “believes” in a personal God, or “believes” in determinism?
No, belief becomes held at arm’s length even if it was the key to the peak
experience and the key to recovering from it.

I have no interest heart- or body-spirituality. The convenient approach to an
experience of ego death is through the mind — for me, “balance” means having
both a rational model of ego death and the entheogenic means to access the
mystic altered state on tap. Ego death happens in the mind more than the body
or heart. “Heart” in my dictionary is the center of egoic self-control, the
center of will — also represented by the liver, as in the eagle-eated liver
of Prometheus.

Jesus’ spear-pierced, thorn-crowned heart should perhaps be a liver-heart —
at the center of the crucifixion of the egoic pseudo-king is the will and its
self-sacrifice in the name of logical integrity, and then the compassionate
heart to rescue and reboot the mind back into a viable state of self-control.
Logic discovers the supreme integrity of the deterministic block universe
model of spacetime, including the future worldline of one’s thoughts. This
kills ego and belittles our accustomed assumptions that we are each a
sovereign ruler reigning over our thoughts and engendering our own acts of
will. But this Realization is packed overflowing with emotions as well, and
with strange body awareness, so it’s inaccurate to say this form of ego death
is cerebral rather than emotional or body-attuned.

I might agree it’s mind *driven* rather than feeling driven, but I still need
to define “feeling” because rational deterministic entheogenic ego death is
packed with feelings, including the feeling of dread upon encountering the
Word that kills ego — that is, the Thought of loss of control, or control
being removed as a scepter is pulled out of your hands and replaced by puppet
strings disappearing into the ominous, omen-bearing clouds.

I am prepared to have as little in common with that other ego death brand,
desired by heart- and body-spirituality, as Ramesh Balsekar has in common with
New Age thinking. The spiritual community was shocked by his outrageous
proposal of peace through accepting determinism.

The best road ahead for spirituality is to split into two explicitly defined
denominations carefully sorted out:

Freewill spirituality. Feeling-driven. Heart and body driven.
Deterministic religious experiencing. Reason-driven, cerebral, psychedelic.
Intellectual revelation. Mind-driven.

I will focus on *contrasting* the two — this is exactly what is needed. Why
does popular spirituality fail to bring ego death, whether a rational
deterministic ego death as I define it or an effective and sure ego death as
popular spirituality conceives of it (a mood of humility and undefined
self-deprecation)? The rational deterministic ego death I define immediately
delivers on its promises. If you consider block-universe determinism and use
entheogens skillfully, you will immediately encounter the ideas and
perceptions and experiences I define. My emphasis is not on enlightenment of
what the truth is, but on a revelation of a potential that resides within the
mind. The mind has the potential for convenient entheogenic deterministic ego
death! That is the gospel, the good news, for which I am an evangelist.

Popular spirituality brings bad news: enlightenment is difficult, strenuous,
and inconvenient. Ego death is only attainable rarely. Enlightenment is out
of reach, unattainable, hard, beyond the rainbow.

Rational deterministic entheogenic ego death brings good news. Enlightenment
is easy, effortless, and convenient. Ego death is immediately available for
everyone. Enlightenment is within easy reach — it is low-hanging fruit,
attainable, easy, within your own neighborhood and culture.

So I can market this as easy-path ego death versus hard-path ego death;
short-path ego death versus long-path.

You are welcome to define ego death as something vague and hard to attain, as
popular spirituality encourages. Or you can define it as something specific
and easy to attain — the way I am showing. People can talk about
conventional hard-path ego death tradition here, but it will be tough
competition in light of the system I’m packaging, tuned for ergonomic
convenience.

You are free to define ego death how you like and walk the path you have
defined. I’m intent on revealing the shortcut I have found to an unbeatably
intense and surprising ego death experience, strengthened and enabled by a
specific, tangible, mentally graspable and comprehensible model. Integral to
this model is the entheogen theory of religion, the vision of block-universe
fixed-future determinism with a pre-set future worldline for your own train of
future thoughts and movements of will, and some explanation in terms of
Christianity read purely as myth and only myth — myth which was designed to
reflect this very block-universe insight and point the way past the willing
self-crucifixion of egoic, personal self-control.

If you try to portray this as a mind-driven spirituality, remember that it is
also peak-experience-driven spirituality, so that’s one dichotomy that can’t
be used against it. This approach is not body-driven or emotion-*driven* — I
readily concede that, with the caveat that the experiencing is soaked with
intense emotion and also full of certain bodily dimensions concomitant to the
mystic altered state.

Conversely, I do not hesitate to thoroughly condemn popular spirituality and
its conception of ego death as a bogus and defective product that can’t
compete in the marketplace of ideas when a more effective contender comes
along. American Buddhism is a way of retreating into regressive emotionalism
and running away from religious concepts and of avoiding actual higher
religious experiencing. Psilocybin mushroom philosopher Terrance McKenna
asserts the latter, saying that popular spirituality is a way of avoiding real
mystic experience for a degraded substitute.

There are hundreds of forums in which freewill ego death is discussed to
death — as a rule, in the form of vague, emotional, lifestyle spirituality.
So I do not hesitate to put forth in this forum at alternative, just as the
ever-bold Andrew Cohen, editor of What Is Enlightenment, did not hesitate to
welcome the black sheep of Ramesh Balsekar into the pages of that magazine, to
the deep shock of the world of familiar spirituality.

http://www.wie.org/j14/balse.asp — “while Indian thought has long been
criticized for its deterministic inclinations, it appeared that Balsekar had
taken this fatalism to an unprecedented extreme. It was, in the end, as much a
desire to explore these troubling areas as to pursue our overall interest in
the teachings of Advaita that ultimately brought me to Bombay to speak with
him. And while I had come anticipating a challenging meeting, looking back on
it now it is clear to me that … there was no way I could ever have prepared
myself for the dialogue that was about to take place.”

How has the entire world of spirituality so forgotten the deterministic
tradition? It happened at about the same time as entheogens were forgotten.
We are rediscovering entheogens, which are the origin of religious
experiencing and thus the origin of religion. And so sooner or later we are
bound to rediscover the tradition of heimarmene, Fate, providence, election,
determinism, Necessity, including the problem that it poses and a variety of
solutions to, in some sense, transcend heimarmene (Fate).

>— BlackPepla wrote:
>> The philosophy of determinism is a very
>> hard sell…. one problem
>> is that determinists themselves can’t fully agree on
>> what determinism means.
>
>The main problem I’m having with the philosophy is
>that it seems to come from total
>head-logically-obtained-knowledge and ignores the
>different and useful kinds of knowledge that our
>bodies hold for us.
>
>For instance, I believe that in our hearts (heart
>chakra, or chest area, or whatever) we hold the power
>of personal choice.
>
>When we start to turn our attention inward, even for
>brief moments, to what different centers in our bodies
>are telling us, the mind connects up with the body and
>we become grounded and begin to feel real personal
>power.
>
>I just see this determinism theory as maybe what
>happens when you have been too much “up in your head”
>from reading and tripping, and not grounded into the
>body. Perhaps if I knew that people who participated
>in Tai Chi or Hatha Yoga *also* saw it all that way, I
>might feel differently, I don’t know.
>
>Melody

— Michael Hoffman <mhoffman> wrote:

> our hand is forced by the
> Ground of Being. During the
> mystic state, one’s hand (heart, will) is seen to be
> forced. My hand is
> firmly on the wheel of choice and decision, but now
> I see that someone is
> forcing my hand. The ego is the controller of the
> personal will, but the ego
> is secretly controlled by the Ground of Being.

OK, I can see what you are saying. But how about a
theory that is paradoxical in nature, holistic,
including the body-cell-memory-sensations as well as
rational logic combined with ethnogenetic
enlightenment? (Or have you already covered paradox
somewhere where I haven’t read about it?)

My own experience with focusing on inner body
sensations meditatively, feeling my weight “sink into”
the ground, and centering with the will center/pelvis
as center, leads me to “nature/animalistic” feelings
in which I feel close to an ego-death experience if I
were to be just able “get over the top” with it. (See
http://www.traumahealing.com for description of
somatic experiencing, animals, our genetic heritage).

In fact, once, after days of turning my focus within
and grounding myself in bodily sensation, my
6-year-old dog came up to me while I was resting on my
side, and surprised the hell out of me by resting her
whole head over my neck and *sighing* with ectasy. She
had never done this before I starting practicing
somatic awareness.

> When
> that is seen as
> terrifying and a dangerous state of dependence on a
> hidden manipulator-force,
> one may pray to that manipulator force, feeling that
> one’s only hope is to
> hope that the manipulator force is a conscious and
> benevolent being — God
> conceived of as personal and benevolent.

Isn’t that where “surrender” comes in. I’m not afraid
of the hidden-manipulator-force as I’ve experienced it
before. However, since I have had severe “psychotic
breaks,” I’d be afraid to do psychedelics ever again
— I might not come back. Once I forgot who I was. 🙂
(What’s a person to do in a situation like this one,
Michael? Sounds dangerous for me.)

Melody


=====
http://www.geocities.com/heart_dimensions/mystical_words.html
The Hidden Knowledge in Words

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail!
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Not OT per se, but most definitely meta-OT –

_______________________________________________________________________
A truly brilliant gallery of sketches of the various character types to
be found on mail groups:

http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame01.html

Hello

Have sold books for about 3 years now.

Many books for sale listings updated at

Pay pal Now Accepted

On site Search engine available.

Please book mark and visit site at:

http://norlink.net/~rgr/TC_BOOKS.html

Julia
From Canada

This text file is automatically posted to the discussion group every two
weeks, in order to provide guidelines for writers, to keep the postings
on-topic and help writers know what subjects are considered most desirable
by this audience.

It is possible to write on most any topic and have it be relevant for this
Egodeath discussion group if you show how the posting is related to the
in-scope topics for this discussion group. This group is not formally
moderated, but it is consistently focused on the defined topics, including
peripheral topics if the writer explicitly connects them to the core topics.

— Michael Hoffman

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath — describes
in-scope discussion topics, as follows.

This discussion group covers the cybernetic theory of ego death and
ego transcendence, including:

o Nonreductionistic block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, the Eleusinian mysteries and
cracking the allegorical code of the mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.

Hello group,

Yesterday I was reading the Sunday SF Chronicle, and there was an
interview with Huston Smith which mentioned “entheogens,” and defined the
term, since it can’t be found in dictionaries.

Just before retiring for the evening, I was reading B. Glassman’s
“Instructions to the Cook” (a book on Zen), and Glassman said he was
introduced to Zen by an entry in Huston Smith’s “Religions of Man.”

I love coincidences, and generally attach no significance to them. But
they are fun anyway, kind of like glazed experiential donuts.

Cheers, Pepla




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

> …kind of like glazed experiential donuts.

http://www.entheogen.com/

http://www.entheogen.st/

http://www.entheogenreview.com/

http://www.entheogen-network.f2s.com/

http://www.shrunkenbarbiehead.com/entheogenexplorer/

Black Sabbath – Master of Reality – After Forever

Have you ever thought about your soul – can it be saved?
Or perhaps you think that when you’re dead you just stay in your grave
Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you?
Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?

When you think about death do you lose your breath
or do you keep your cool?
Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope
do you think he’s a fool?
Well I have seen the truth, yes I’ve seen the light
and I’ve changed my ways
And I’ll be prepared when you’re lonely and scared
at the end of our days

Could it be you’re afraid of what your friends might say
If they knew you believe in God above?
They should realize before they criticize
that God is the only way to love

Is your mind so small that you have to fall
In with the pack wherever they run
Will you still sneer when death is near
And say they may as well worship the sun?

I think it was true it was people like you that crucified Christ
I think it is sad the opinion you had was the only one voiced
Will you be so sure when your day is near, say you don’t believe?
You had the chance but you turned it down, now you can’t retrieve

Perhaps you’ll think before you say that God is dead and gone
Open your eyes, just realize that he’s the one
The only one who can save you now from all this sin and hate
Or will you still jeer at all you hear? Yes! I think it’s too late.

=======================================================
============================================================


http://newdawnmagazine.com/articles/Cosmic_Influence_And_Your_Destiny_Attack
_of_the_Archons.html

Cosmic Influence And Your Destiny

Attack of the Archons

By Francis D. Grabau

Gnosticism and Astrology, two subjects almost equally
hard to define or
contain within clear, precise, and tidy boundaries.
And what sort of
rare
hybrid would we have if we were to crossbreed the two
and give birth to
something called ‘Gnostic Astrology’? Would it be a
hybrid form of
fate, a
kind of ouija board full of planets, signs, and
Archons leading us
toward
the dark and predetermined depths of futility?

After all, there exists in the ‘popular mind’ a notion
that astrology
predicts one’s ‘fate’ and that gnosticism posits an
‘evil’ world
brought
into being and ruled over by a ‘Demiurge’ who has
captured us all in
his
dark prison of matter. An ancient and gnostically
conceived ‘Universal
Fate’
technically referred to as the Heimarmene condemns us
to a rather
robotic
existence in matter until such time as we free
ourselves and return to
the
True Creator pictured as a Spirit of Light.

But these are ‘popular’ notions based upon the quick
labelling of ideas
and
systems of thought, and such superficial evaluations
do not take into
account the fact that both astrology and Gnosticism
once shared a
common
root, a common heretical attitude of questioning the
appearances of
what has
been called (for seemingly endless ages of historical
time) reality. In
fact, both astrology and Gnosticism are rooted in the
Spirit’s struggle
to
overcome the illusion of time as the prison which
binds us to a wheel
of
life and death popularly thought to be natural,
inevitable, and
‘normal’.
But is it? Wasn’t it James Joyce who cried out
(through one of his
literary
characters) that history was a nightmare from which he
was trying to
awaken?

If we are to take a Gnostic approach toward astrology,
one of the very
first
things we must do is to question this notion of time.
In terms of the
mythical and symbolic language of astrology, that
means we must look
closely
at Saturn-Chronos, for ‘he’ is spoken of as the Lord
of Time. He is the
principle of binding, focus, form and time, and
contemporary astrology
is
still essentially a study of time cycles based upon
the number of days
and
years required for each of the classical planets
(Luna, Sol, Mercury,
Venus,
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) to complete one full circle
around the
zodiac of
twelve signs (Aries through Pisces). Of course,
contemporary
astrologers
also study the cycles of the ‘newly discovered’
planets, Uranus,
Neptune,
and Pluto, but always and everywhere astrologers are
concerned with
tracking
the passage of time.

Now, any decent self-respecting Gnostic must sit up
and take notice of
this
practice because the very core of Gnosticism is to
question
appearances. The
Gnostic is nothing if not a person who rebels against
the norms, the
taken-for-granted ‘facts’ that reduce life to an
experience of
sleep-walking
through time. The traditional cry of the Gnostic is:
Sleepers, Awake!

The Gnostic feels that humans are caught in the
delusions and snares
woven
by the Demiurge and his appointed executive
bureaucrats known as the
Archons, said to be seven or twelve by count. These
variously seven or
twelve Archons have traditionally been associated with
the seven
ancient
planets (see above) and/or the twelve signs of the
zodiac. So, from a
certain classical Gnostic perspective, astrology is a
study of the
bureaucratic games played by the Chief Executive
Officers (CEOs) of the
false creator-god, the Demiurge known as Yaldaboath –
often understood
to be
the Yahweh of the Old Testament, or the Father of the
political
Christian’s
Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament Demiurge, Yaldaboath-Yahweh, is the
caricature of Old
Father Time making his appearance each year at
countless, global, New
Year’s
Eve parties carrying his sickle and his hourglass
announcing the death
of
the old year (time) and ushering in the child who is
the new.
Unfortunately,
each year the child is forced to age and, in turn,
becomes Old Father
Time
too. The hourglass and the sickle are the traditional
symbols of the
Lord of
Time, the planet Saturn, he who binds humankind into
the reasonable,
serious, and linear prison called time. He is the
‘elder’ among the
CEOs
appointed by the Demiurge-Father-God to run his
corporate business of
enslaving humanity to the wheel of work, suffering and
weekly paychecks
which keeps his world turning round. Doesn’t the
corporate world teach
that
money is time and time is money? And is it not
astrology that
reinforces
this ‘time equals money’ myth by teaching that Saturn,
Father Time, is
the
tester, the symbol for the ‘hard facts of life’, the
author of
‘reality’?

When Saturn is active by transit in the Horoscope of
your life,
contemporary
astrologers are the first to caution that you must
‘bite the bullet’
and
buckle down to conformity. What are we to make of the
newly arising
‘schools
of astrology’ that offer ‘accreditation’ by way of the
authority of the
established university system? What are we to think of
astrologers
teaching
‘clients’ how to adjust through contemporary
psychology to the
status-quo of
an increasingly psychotic world? To any living Gnostic
it is apparent
that
astrology itself has fallen into the grip of Saturn!

If we view Saturn through the lens of historical
Gnosticism we see this
Realist – this authority figure of Old Man Time – as
the chief warden
of the
prison earth. Saturn’s authority is precisely what
binds us to the
realistic
and linear time that begins for each of us at birth
and ends at death.
Life,
as brooded over by this nasty Archon, is a
pre-determined, cause and
effect
veil of tears, a medieval Dance Macabre. He determines
the rules, the
facts,
and the sequence of events as each of us moves from
minute to minute
through
life. He is the measurer, the statistician, the
policeman, the priest,
the
judge, the no-nonsense guy smoking the fat cigar or
drinking the
Perrier
water while basking in the pure groundedness of his
astute timing and
his
‘common sense’.

He says, ‘This is it; this is what works as time has
tested and
experience
has shown.’ He’s the one who used to write on the old
flat maps of the
world, ‘Beyond here there be Dragons’. The Rule Giver,
the jealous
bigot of
a ‘god’ who gave us his ‘Ten Commandments’, the guy
who always manages
to
pull the wool over our eyes by claiming to simply be
stating the facts.

Given the truth of all this, the first thing any
Gnostic must do is see
through the limiting external authority of Saturn to
the real authority
which resides within each of us as individuals. We
have to make up our
own
rules, define our own terms, and watch out for the
rigidity that often
comes
from self-complacent certainty. When we remain focused
exclusively upon
our
own boundaries, when we cease to question even our own

authoritativeness,
when we are fixated upon cause and effect as well as
linear time, we
cannot
sidestep this Archon who blinds us to the spark of
Spirit within
ourselves
and thereby isolates us from the Divine Light. That
‘Light’ is
characterised
by ease and flow, by joy and laughter, by directly
experiencing the
plenitude of the Pleroma.

Even scholars (much to their bewilderment) recognise
there is no
authoritative doctrine that can be said to fixedly
define Gnosticism,
but
the last thirty years has produced a growing number of
astrologers who
do
not question that a scientific and psychological study
of planets,
aspects
and statistics can produce a ‘qualified’ and
‘certified’
diploma-wielding
astrologer! A Gnostic approach to astrology cautions
us to be wary of
anything billing itself as a ‘certified astrologer’
because
certification,
in Gnostic terms, can only rise from within and cannot
be confirmed on
anyone from without. It’s that old saying that if you
meet the Buddha
on the
road you must slay him.

But the tricky Archon who speaks through the mouth of
Saturn will
always
certify uniformity and statistics because these are
the tools of his
homogenised power and pervasively blinding authority.
Saturn, in
astrological parlance, is the symbol of the lowest
common denominator
of
collectively agreed upon social-cultural reality.
Perhaps we should
view him
in the alternative shamanic sense; see him as a
‘worthy opponent’ who
does,
indeed, test us mercilessly before he yields his
limiting sceptre of
externally imposed authoritative rule to our own inner
sense of urgent
self-remembering. After all, it’s that very
self-remembering which
alone
leads us inward past the famous Threshold (whereupon
he is the fabled
‘Dweller’) through the infamous ‘Ring Pass Not’ and
out from forgetful
sleep!

Liberation from the thraldom of Saturn does not come
without
consciously
focused hard work. But this kind of ‘hard work’ is not
imposed from
without.
Instead, it rises up from within each of us as we
hearken to the voice
of
Spirit within and around ourselves, beckoning us to
join the dance of
consciousness that is the Divine. It is an invitation
to wholeness and
openness, and it does not fear or reject the Archons –
nor even
Yaldaboath
himself – for they and he alike, together with
everything else that
exists
on whatever level or ‘plane’, are but part of the
Whole which is the
Divine.

For the Gnostic there is neither Christian evil nor
sin, though there
is
ignorance, inertia, and a very human craving for some
final, ultimate
‘end’
or cessation. One can grow weary, tired and afraid of
the Dance of
Spirit as
long as one feels a need to control the dance (in any
way), but as soon
as
one learns to let the dance dance itself, one is
carried and buoyed up
on
the pulse of the rhythm that is the Light of Spirit.
Saturn’s great
teaching
is that there is a Light appearing as Darkness, a
Black Light part and
parcel of the fullness that is the Pleroma, the Whole.
But this Black
Light
that often triggers in us fear, inertia and the
entropy of despair, has
its
roots in the cells of our own bodies, which partake of
the seemingly
ignorant resistance we find in matter itself.

Though the scholars who classify systems of
philosophy, belief, and
theology
usually claim that the historical Gnostics (the
authors of the Pistis
Sophia
or the Nag Hammadi Library etc.) believed this world
to be evil, and
‘matter
‘ to be ‘fallen’ away from the Light of Spirit. they
are mistaken.
During
the twentieth century at least two self-proclaimed
Gnostics, Aurobindo
Ghose
and Mirra Alfassa, clarified this ‘error’ by pointedly
stating that
matter
is spirit, and that ‘evil’ – though phenomenally
‘real’ – is actually
nothing but the ignorant resistance of the
‘inconscient’. What we
perceive
as negation, and consequently fear, resist, and try to
flee from, is
the
very energy we cling to as ‘Death’. We wear ourselves
and each other
out by
fleeing from Death, imagining a pure life free from
the pain and
suffering
of mortal life, and we call it immortal life as
disembodied Spirit.

But the Gnostic Christ revealed the fact that
‘ultimately’ the body
itself
and all the Earth (not the World, which is a
human-Archon distortion)
are
‘destined’ to be Whole, Transfigured, Immortal. There
is no Spirit
apart
from matter or apart from the Earth; there are no
elect, all evolution
is
elected; as Mirra said, “All the splendors one can
experience by going
up,
by getting out, by leaving are nothing! They’re
nothing; they don’t
have
that concrete reality; they seem vague compared to
HERE. That is truly
why
the earth has been created. It’s in terrestrial
matter, on EARTH, that
the
SUPREME becomes perfect.” Anyone who knows these
truths has nothing to
fear
from Saturn or any other Archon!

I am writing about Saturn as an Archon because during
2001 to 2002
humanity
is collectively experiencing a thrice repeated
astrological opposition
between the planets Saturn and Pluto, respectively
expressing
themselves
through the zodiacal signs of Gemini and Sagittarius.
We are
experiencing a
‘face-off’ or ‘tug-of-war’ taking place between the
Lord of Time and
the
Dark Lord of the Underworld, between Authority and
Invisible Powers,
between
Saturn and Pluto. Of course, to the scientists among
us, it’s merely a
neighbourhood pool game taking place between billiard
balls in our
local
solar system; but this is where we live and walk
around in our human
bodies,
so it’s bound to have some kind of an affect within us
both
individually and
collectively.

What might that affect be, and how might it be related
to the dumb
Demiurge
and his puppet Archons? Well, it is said that all the
other Gods of
Olympus
felt a formidable respect for Pluto due to his
‘helmet’ which granted
him
the gift of invisibility, and his rather absolute
control over Death.
We may
suppose that we are witnessing (and participating in)
an equally
formidable
‘face off’ between Death and Time. And we may further
suppose this
struggle
has about it a certain air of invisible ‘powers’
competing with each
other
over who is the true authority in the Saturnian realm
of business and
government, and who is the covert dealer in the
Plutonian realm of
wealth
and death.

…..cont at
http://newdawnmagazine.com/articles/Cosmic_Influence_And_Your_Destiny_Attack
_of_the_Archons.html



__________________________________________________
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In a message dated 1/21/02 11:12:29 AM Pacific Standard Time,
asmodius676 writes:

> Black Sabbath – Master of Reality – After Forever
>
> Have you ever thought about your soul – can it be saved?
> Or perhaps you think that when you’re dead you just stay in your grave
> Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you?
> Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?
>
> When you think about death do you lose your breath
> or do you keep your cool?
> Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope
> do you think he’s a fool?
> Well I have seen the truth, yes I’ve seen the light
> and I’ve changed my ways
> And I’ll be prepared when you’re lonely and scared
> at the end of our days

We Zenists believe there is no going and no coming.

Cheers, Pepla


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To play with the edge of determinism and indeterminacy, start a jazz band
and attempt to play “free” jazz. You can add layers and layers of
indeterminacy (removing layers and layers of form) but the most succesful
performance/compositions often retain a sense of “familiarity” that the
completely “free” pieces lack.

One way of looking at “deterministic” qualities is that they tend to be
“ordered” whereas indeterminate, “free” qualities tend toward the chaotic.
The human mind appreciates order for many reasons, much of which is
instinctual.

Sorry I haven’t really delved into Michael’s egodeath theory too deep, so I
might be repeating something that has been said here before, but I just felt
the random urge to jump in. Just keeping up that element of indeterminacy.
😉

Peace,
Jason

Esoteric Christianity considers the canonical Bible scriptures to contain a
mythic set of stories, a set that is profoundly effective at conveying
enlightenment and reconciliation of personhood with metaphysical truth.
Esoteric Christianity is the higher part of a proposed 2-level Christianity
that is evident in the scriptures.

“Esoteric Christianity” is all the rage for me now, as opposed to Gnosticism,
which is noxious as it introduces one set of distasteful ridiculous tales to
replace those of Literalist Christianity. I want a clear explanation of
Literalist myths, not a new set of myths. The new book The Lost Goddess does
the best job of explaining the Gnostic myths, but still, it’s not an
explanation or discovery of the enlightenment that is indeed residing in the
received Literalist stories.

Watts page 54, Behold the Spirit,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394717619 — Jesus may as well not
have existed, as far as Esoteric Christianity goes.

I’m also reading Andrew Welburn’s book I mentioned —
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0863152090 – The Beginnings of
Christianity: Essene Mystery, Gnostic Revelation and the Christian Vision.

I also am looking over http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0880104368 —
Christianity As Mystical Fact, by Rudolf Steiner, Andrew Welburn (Translator).

Other books about 2-level Christianity, including a higher, esoteric level and
set of beliefs, are The Jesus Mysteries and Pagels’ The Gnostic Paul.

I’m collecting books about reading scriptures as mythic literature, including
the Old Testament.

The quality of Christianity books I’ve been adding to my shelves has
skyrocketed recently. I survey many books at Amazon and the bookstores.


I am reviewing Buddhism, to explicitly connect my core theory to it, at least
a little bit. Buddhism explainers are inept at semantic subtleties — I’m
constantly noting sloppy wordings that fall short of the ideals of clarity of
expression that are held in the field of Philosophy. So I may need to best
address Buddhism by showing how to tighten up the explanatory statements made
about it.


The main problem in Christianity books is Literalism instead of esoteric
reading. The angel HBWR explained this to me, so I realized that being
rescued from control-death by some thought about Christ said alot about mental
construct dynamics in my mind but was wholly independent from the actual
existence of Jesus; if some Christ thought caused mental stability to return,
credit the Christ thought, or Christ consciousness, not some supposed
2000-year removed, rumored historical man. Eliminating the actual-Jesus
hypothesis makes it so much easier to construct a comprehensible model of
spiritual resurrection from ego death.

Introducing a historical Jesus adds immense confusion, difficulties, and
philosophical problems. But if it’s all purely myth, that’s *easy* to explain
(about as easy as Buddhism); there are no longer conundrums like “how could
Jesus have done x, what did he mean by saying y and yet z? How can Jesus be
the only incarnation?”


The main problem in Buddhism books is clumsy, inept, incompetent handling of
semantic subtleties. That’s been my conclusion since I first broke through in
making sense of Alan Watts’ book The Way of Zen on December 12, 1987.

Both religions as studied by scholars sorely lack entheogen-theory awareness.

Esoteric Christianity avoids Gnostic dualism, which says that the material
world is bad. Esoteric Christianity integrates lower and higher thinking in a
harmonious relationship. It in some way embraces, accepts, and affirms, even
loves, the Literalist fairy tales, loving lower-level Christianity while
rejecting it without condemning it as evil. The higher makes peace with the
lower — not *believing* the lower, but perhaps accommodating it as adults do
children.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>Not OT per se, but most definitely meta-OT – A truly brilliant gallery of

sketches of the various character types to be found on mail groups:

>http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html
>http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame01.html

Looking up Philosopher, it fits me quite well!
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame17.html

>Philosopher differs from Profundus Maximus in that he actually does know

something.
Yes

>While somewhat humorless

Yes.

>and slightly aloof,

Yes.

>he is also slow to anger.

Yes.

>When he does deign

Yes

>to engage in battle he is considerate of other opinions,

Yes

> but his ponderous and lengthy cogitations

Yes

> effectively smother the opposition.

Yes. A point by point rational refutation of a flamer’s spouting increases
exponentially in length. The flamer responds by hurling ever more nonsense
back, then all that must be refuted calmly and reasonably, point by point.
This is not feasible, and is solved by accepting the principle of selective
response, including letting the flamer’s nonsense be unrefuted.


I’m surprised you know how much I’m interested in online communication styles.
I’m looking forward to reading more of these characterizations. I have
written many postings about the universally on-topic meta-topic of flaming and
what it really is and how to deal with it. It’s a fairly complex subject that
hasn’t been studied but is greatly needed. I was disappointed that Mark
Dery’s book Flame Wars didn’t cover it.

The #1 technique is selective response, at the level of a posting or within a
posting. It’s also important to recognize the great divide between
information and social noise – discussion online starts with mostly
information, and quickly becomes mostly social noise. Most flaming and
chatting has little information content, just social noise. Flaming and
chatting are equivalent: social noise. Information content is not rare, but
it normally loses out eventually to social noise unless the forum has
something to keep conversation secured to the goal of being info-driven.

I’ve seen a lot of hosts make a lot of basic mistakes. The entheogen host has
a terrible Nanny streak — his panties get in a bunch every time anyone is
impolite in conversation. I like hosts to be no-nonsense. The hardest
hosting job must be for the JesusMysteries discussion group, debating whether
or not Jesus existed — they even have to try to deal with me, a creative
rule-bender set on contributing too much value to be casually kicked off for
severely criticizing the “scientifically” restricted scope of the discussion
group as being a dead end, as it fails to permit even investigating the
possible positive value of mysticism and esoteric Christianity.

I have strongly advocated an automatic 2-week mailing to help people remember
the stated goals for postings. Few hosts listen to my advice, then they pay
the price when chaos reigns and especially when the most valuable contributors
leave.

I fear this group is already too big for me to commit to being a good host. I
can see why Earl Doherty (JesusMysteries group, Jesus Puzzle author) welcomes
helper hosts, so he can go away often and do research.

— A Philosopher

>http://newdawnmagazine.com/articles/Cosmic_Influence_And_Your_Destiny_Attack
>_of_the_Archons.html
>
>Cosmic Influence And Your Destiny — Attack of the Archons, by Francis D.

Grabau

My commentary:


Mithra rules over the celestial cross. He is ruler over the sun which rules
the cosmos. He shifts the planets (precession of constellations/equinox),
thus doing the impossible: altering fate.

The Fates ruled the gods, but later Zeus ruled over the fates.

Per Luther Martin in Hellenistic Religions, there are many contending
religions in late antiquity, but the contention orbits around the conflict
between fate and personhood. Is there, or is there not, a way to transcend
fate, and gain some power that can alter my fate, so that I can rule over my
future as the creator of my own future? Notice that the Gnostics affirmed
that the cosmos is a prisoner of fate — cosmic astrological determinism.
They were interested in a way to transcend that imprisoned state, so that one
as an agent can nab the scepter from the one who rules the cosmos. These
starting assumptions and goals are all-important in understanding the Gnostic
programme, the problem they fought against, and their strategy.

Before the Cross symbol was adopted, the XP symbol, the Chi-Rho, was a
flattened X with a tall sword-like P, on coins surrended by a victory wreath.
I propose that the Cross is the same celestial cross — the astrological
cosmic determinism over which Christ is the ruler. Then “Jesus is Lord” would
mean that Christ is the ruler not only “of” the universe, but *over* cosmic
determinism, though such a position of control may be considered impossible
action on the part of a person who is stuck inside the determined
block-universe.

Gnosticism is the affirmation that I can somehow transcend and in some sense
step out of the determined block-universe, that I can become master of my own
fate and alter my destiny, and in some sense change my future and thus become
the author, creator, and controller of my own future, rather than Fate or a
God above Fate being the author of my future.

Fate was a problem for the Gnostics — something to be conquered, resisted,
rejected, denigrated, demonized, transcended.

Eventually, as late antiquity debated about our relation to Fate, the
responsible individual was born.


I propose that the fabrication of a compelling virtually free ego required
suppressing entheogen use. Our apparent collective psychological development
is actually largely driven by the use, then avoidance, then rediscovery of
entheogens.

> …his ponderous and lengthy cogitations effectively smother the

opposition.

Yes Michael, that describes you well.

> We Zenists believe there is no going and no coming.

I would consider this to be true from a perspective. However,
consider the following hermeneutic example:

“Last night, a woman came (coming) over to my apartment. I went in
(going) unto her and we both came (coming). Then she went (going)
home.”

You Zenists believe in using semantic trickery (kohan) to liberate
the deluded from their prison of rationality. I wish you all the best
in this endeavor.

In a message dated 1/22/02 12:40:46 PM Pacific Standard Time,
asmodius676 writes:

> You Zenists believe in using semantic trickery (kohan) to liberate
> the deluded from their prison of rationality. I wish you all the best
> in this endeavor

Do you mean “koan”?? Anyway, there are no tricks involved. Just sit,
and you will see.

Cheers, Pepla


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

> Do you mean “koan”??

Yes, that is exactly what I meant. Thank you for correcting me. I
don’t think that I have ever seen that word spelt until just now.

> Anyway, there are no tricks involved.

Well, its more like a con game or a clown job, but it does get the
job done on those who “buy” into it. I’m not saying it’s wrong or
anything. As a matter of fact, it works IMO. It just doesn’t work on
me anymore. You wanna know why? ‘Cause I’m there, dude. I am so
there. *hits joint*

> Just sit, and you will see.

Do you mean to say that I should just sit and the answer will present
itself, or that I should sit here and wait for you to enlighten me? I
guess I don’t see what you mean. At any rate, I can’t sit for too
long or my butt will fall asleep.

In a message dated 1/23/02 6:39:02 PM Pacific Standard Time,
asmodius676 writes:

> > Anyway, there are no tricks involved.
>
> Well, its more like a con game or a clown job, but it does get the
> job done on those who “buy” into it. I’m not saying it’s wrong or
> anything. As a matter of fact, it works IMO. It just doesn’t work on
> me anymore. You wanna know why? ‘Cause I’m there, dude. I am so
> there. *hits joint*
>

There is nothing to buy into, because Zen has nothing to sell.
Official members of Zen sects do little or no proselytizing… there is none
of that door-to-door selling that other religions do.

Zen is there for those who are ready for it, for those who can make
use of it. There are many ways to participate. I am a lay Zenist, for
example, and go to the local temple only for classes, not for services.

Also, I might mention that Zen is an all-inclusive doctrine, even if
your are “out”, you are “in”. No saved, no lost.

Cheers, Pepla


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

In a message dated 1/23/02 6:39:02 PM Pacific Standard Time,
asmodius676 writes:

> > Just sit, and you will see.
>
> Do you mean to say that I should just sit and the answer will present
> itself, or that I should sit here and wait for you to enlighten me? I
> guess I don’t see what you mean. At any rate, I can’t sit for too
> long or my butt will fall asleep.
>

I must say I feel the same way about long sessions of zazen (sitting
meditation). And that is why I go to temple only for classes, and the short
zazen period that precedes the class. But even short periods are beneficial.
Try it at home and you will see.

Cheers, Pepla


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

> There is nothing to buy into, because Zen has nothing to sell.
> Official members of Zen sects do little or no proselytizing…
> there is none of that door-to-door selling that other religions do.

Stupendous!

> Zen is there for those who are ready for it, for those who can make
> use of it. There are many ways to participate. I am a lay Zenist,
> for example, and go to the local temple only for classes, not for
> services.

Most awesome!

> Also, I might mention that Zen is an all-inclusive doctrine, even
> if your are “out”, you are “in”. No saved, no lost.

Here, here! Well, I hope you know that you are going to hell for
persisting in this ritualistic paganism <joking>. I’m happy for you.
It sounds like you’ve found your niche. Godspeed, my brother.

Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath – A National Acrobat

I am the world that hides
The universal secret of all time
Destruction of the empty spaces
Is my one and only crime
I’ve lived a thousand times
I found out what it means to be believed
The thoughts and images
The unborn child that never was conceived

When little worlds collide
I’m trapped inside my embryonic cell
And flashing memories
Are cast into the never ending well
The name that scorns the face
The child that never sees the cause of man
The deathly darkness that
Belies the fate of those who never ran

Well I know its hard for you
To know the reason why
And I know you’ll understand
More when it’s time to die
Don’t believe the life you have
Will be the only one
You have to let your body sleep
To let your soul live on

Love has given life to you
And now it’s your concern
Unseen eyes of inner life
Will make your soul return
Still I look but not to touch
The seeds of life are sown
Curtain of the future falls
The secret stays unknown

Just remember love is life
And hate is living death
Treat your life for what it’s worth
And live for every breath
Looking back I’ve lived and learned
But now I’m wondering
Here I wait and only guess
What this next life will bring

Roots of stability leading to prismal prisons of the
Mind

Concentrating further

Enfolding a position

the Tragic perception Bind

Ever Seeking TrUtH

The focusing of the Philter of the False

Grasping the Construct of tradition

Console With The Interpretation Of LAW


~~~Ed = 9

—
***DISCLAIMER***
~~~We may not necessarily still believe the opinions
expressed by our previous selves…~~~

“The analogy of opposites is the relation of light to
shadow, peak to abyss, fullness to void. Allegory, mother of all dogmas, is
the replacement of the seal by the hallmark, of reality by shadow; it is the
falsehood of truth, and the truth of falsehood.” — Eliphas Levi, Dogme de
la haute magie

“For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the
hated. I am the saint and the prostitute.” — Fragment of Nag Hammadi 6, 2
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AMU-Outer/
http://www.topica.com/lists/amu/
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/2695



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

After much effort and upgrading, I created a high-fidelity MP3 CDR disc packed
with a couple hundred good rare psychedelic songs, with a high-resolution
adhesive label. I like to play it on Random — never know what insanity will
come up next.

I am driven like a lemming toward such time-consuming projects — this one is
really the holy grail: a library of good rare psych tracks on a single
attractive CD. Another CDR I created, for example, has high-fi MP3s of some
seven albums by the creative rock group Pavement.

This music involvement very often pushes its way in front of philosophy
research, which I consider far more important. This super-rich, colorful rock
music is electric atmospheric — it’s easy to see the allure of rock for
creating an audio synesthesia mood environment.

On synesthesia and music:
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v3/psyche-3-06-vancampen.html — “By the
mid-nineteenth century synesthesia had intrigued an art movement that sought
sensory fusion, according to Cytowic (1995, section 3.7; 1993, pp. 54 ff). The
union of the senses appeared more and more frequently in the writings of
musicians and visual artists. Multimodal concerts of music and light became
popular. Cytowic argues that “such deliberate contrivances are qualitatively
different from the involuntary experiences that I am calling synesthesia in
this review” (Cytowic, 1995, section 3.7). He defines synesthesia as the
involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the
stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or
more different senses. He sharply distinguishes its phenomenology from
“metaphor, literary tropes, sound symbolism, and deliberate artistic
contrivances that sometimes employ the term ‘synesthesia’ to describe their
multisensory joinings” (Cytowic, 1995, abstract). … Cytowic sketches a
nineteenth-century art movement that sought sensory fusion. As one takes a
closer look at that, one can see that it was mainly a movement of inventors of
color-organs (Peacock, 1988; Gage, 1993). The most elaborate experiments with
sensory fusion of color and music were carried out by inventors, not by
artists. One of the reasons was that the art of color-music required the use
of specific instruments. After the first designs of the “clavecin oculaire” by
the eighteenth century French Jesuit Castel, the nineteenth century showed a
large number of attempts to develop a device that could produce music and
color simultaneously on the basis of tone-color correspondence schemes.
Inventors like Jameson, Kastner, Bainbridge Bishop and Rimington sought such
devices. Rimington patented the name “color-organ” in 1893, and had
considerable success in concert halls with his color- music performances of
compositions of Wagner, Chopin, Bach and Dvorak (Peacock, 1988).”

It’s good to say why a posting is relevant to a discussion group. I have
often wondered why I am so drawn toward electric, rock music, and whether this
really is inherently relevant to egodeath theorizing and experience. My gut
feeling says yes, rock music is even more relevant to entheogenic experiencing
and insights than non-electric music. My intellect is skeptical of any
especial, innate relevance of electric music to the realm of the mystic
altered state. Computers, electric and electronic music, and entheogens are
very commonly related in the hi-tech world, including major corporate
marketing of technology. “Buy our computers and you will trip out.” Our
natural desire for entheogenic experience leads us to pay money for a
substitute instead in the form of a computer — computers are sold as a
stand-in substitute for entheogens.

Psychedelic Rock marks the start of modern popular awareness of entheogens.
In Western history, psychedelic music and entheogenic direct religious
experiencing thus arose in conjunction. I am against reading all entheogens
strictly in terms of the psychedelic 60s — a mistake made even by such greats
as Ram Dass, who overemphasized the “new” class of drugs as an “alternate” way
of attaining some “limited glimpse” of “authentic” religious experiencing. We
live both in the psychedelic recent era, and after studying history, we can
also mentally live in Terrance McKenna’s ancient world of plant gnosis as
well. Like many, I cherish the psychedelic 60s but, given the drug-war
culture, I am also wary of associating modern psychedelics with ancient
entheogens.

A deeper investigation must lie somewhere in Trip zine —
http://www.tripzine.com — and in Erik Davis’ book TechGnosis (
http://www.net22.com/dreamtime/index.shtml ,
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9905/reviews/reilly.html ).

>After much effort and upgrading, I created a high-fidelity MP3 CDR
>disc packed with a couple hundred good rare psychedelic songs, with
>a high-resolution adhesive label. I like to play it on Random —
>never know what insanity will come up next.

— Out Of Time

http://www.freakemporium.com – probably the best starting point for 60s
psychedelic albums and compilations. By Freakbeat zine. See their links
page.
http://www.cdnow.com – to buy albums
http://www.allmusic.com – rock reviews/discography database
http://www.rollingstone.com took over tunes.com
http://www.amazon.com — search Books for “psychedelic” or “entheogen”

http://www.phinnweb.com/retro/garage/index2.html — links section lists
psych-rock sites
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/sig/htmlsig/pisites.htm — list of psychedelic music
sites

Styles covered: Freakbeat, flower power, pop sike, acid rock, progressive
psych. Pop music history supports my assertion that Rush, the 70s progressive
philosophy-oriented Rock group, is specifically Acid Rock. It is unfortunate
and clueless that the category of Acid Rock is defined so narrowly that only
about 3 bands are included (Blue Cheer, Hendrix, Captain Beyond).
Smashmouth’s popularity shows the potential to discover more of the richness
of freakbeat era — what it was really all about; I similarly anticipate a
rediscovery of the psychedelic roots of Heavy Rock.

We need to go back to the late 60s-early 70s transition and take another look
to recognize the era of Acid Rock and recognize the Acid Rock background of
groups that are not at all recognized as such. It wouldn’t surprise me to see
the psychedelic mushroom aspect of Led Zeppelin denied and pushed out of
awareness. Obviously, Psychedelic Rock uses psychedelic drugs, but it’s
terrible the way that the existence of the category “Psychedelic Rock” tends
to be used as a safety bin to whisk away the psychedelic drugs from all the
other genres that are based largely on psychedelics. People don’t understand
the concept of “Acid Rock”.

Our picture of 70s Heavy Rock is completely inaccurate and out of touch with
reality, as we have forgotten that “Heavy” is practically synonymous with
acid-soaked. Classic Rock *is* LSD-influenced Rock, to a large extent. In
the electric guitar industry, however, together with the popularity of
Smashmouth, the fuzz type of distortion sound has become mainstream and trendy
again, rediscovered. The death of Grunge and popularity of Smashmouth, and
the abovegrounding of 1980s psych-rock 1-man band Bevis Frond, have led to a
resurgence of Acid Rock. Heavy Metal is almost synonymous with Acid Rock, and
some of the best, most influential Metal is LSD-oriented.


(I have not heard the following albums so cannot vouch for them)

Fed to Your Head — by Scorched Earth: “Bevis Frond under a psuedonym with
help from the Alchemysts and the Lucky Bishops. A “heavy metal” record in the
vein of the early 70’s style.” — Amazon.com

Amazon: “On their sophomore effort, the Wellwater Conspiracy create a
multifaceted sound that lurks somewhere between the sonic realms of Seattle
grunge and psychedelic garage. Showcasing the talents of ex-Monster Magnet
guitarist John McBain and former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, the
Wellwater Conspiracy exist as an adventurous studio project steeped in ’60s
psychedelia. Besides playing a number of instruments, Cameron is an able
singer who occasionally echoes the style of his old bandmate from Soundgarden,
Chris Cornell. McBain exhibits an expansive guitar vocabulary, creating
several acid-flashback moments amid the band’s hard-rock haze. Using vintage
electronic keyboards, fuzz-ridden guitars, tribal drumbeats, and melodic
songwriting, the Wellwater Conspiracy hark back to a cosmic time when rock
music was simpler, more mysterious, and plenty of fun.” –Mitch Myers


How can we have an authentically contemporary form of mystic experiencing?
Rock artists and lyricists creating psychedelics-oriented music. It is often
uncontaminated by dogmas and false notions of religious history, resulting in
direct trip reports in lyric and musically expressive form. I smell more
Truth coming from a fuzzed-out electric guitar with runaway tape-echo feedback
freakout than from spiritual books that supposedly cover mystic experiencing.
But such contemporary and direct-from-the-Source artistic reports still need
systematic explanation.

Why exactly is the fuzzed-out psychedelic freakout today’s authentic
expression of Dionysus’ religion, and why does that religion penetrate the
heart of really religious religion? Why, conversely, does pop spirituality
lack authentic religion? “Religion” is Truth, “spirituality” is delusion that
knows nothing of religious experiencing. In the battle of Spirituality
against Religious Experience, I side with the latter. Everything about the
pop conception of Spirituality smells entirely fake and ignorant to me — it’s
ersatz, a substitute.

Such Spirituality is indeed the Devil to me. Spirituality is even more evil
than Prohibition, but the two go hand in hand. Because of Drug Prohibition,
which is completely a sham, fake, ersatz, we have ended up with the
concomitantly ersatz, sham, fake form of religion. Spirituality is fake
religion for the fake Prohibition era. Spirituality is the religion of the
Prohibition era. “Spirituality” and Prohibition are the same thing; I hate
them as a single oppressor.


After Prohibition, the public will be able to have religious experiencing
again (direct, primary mystic experience) rather than Spirituality, which
lacks religious experiencing. Spirituality is uninformed by the Holy Spirit,
uninformed by *experiencing*. Spirituality lacks experience. The Boomers
hated Religion and created Spirituality but did so largely by rejecting and
putting down entheogens at every opportunity, condemning entheogens to hell
with a mountain of faint praise.

Some scholars are calling for “Back to non-liberal Religion”. I agree that to
gain real religion we need to avoid today’s liberal religion and
“spirituality”. However, the thing we must return to is not literalist
religion, but rather, truly religious experiencing, which goes with neither
Literalist conservative religion *nor* liberalized conservative religion such
as Boomer Spirituality or the paradigm of Historical Jesus scholarship, but
rather, esoteric religion led first of all by the Holy Spirit of Dionysus
residing in entheogens. We may meditate but first of all we are lost from the
presence of religious knowledge, unless we are led by the Holy Spirit residing
in the flesh of entheogenic molecules, where spiritual and material planes
intersect, joining God and Jesus in Christ-consciousness *in us*.

There is no way meditation can so lead us. Entheogenic molecules are our only
practical hope for salvation into religious awareness and knowledge on a
significant scale. Buddhism tells us that now is the time when Buddhism
utterly fails to enlighten. If you believe Buddhism, you believe that
Buddhism is spiritually bankrupt as it claims to be.

I agree with Buddhism, that Buddhism now has no hope of giving us saving
Knowledge and really religious experiencing. At this point in the cosmic
cycle, Buddhism is supposed to practically utterly lack the Holy Spirit of
enlightenment, as it indeed does. In every religion, look to the mystics.
Then look closer at the mystics, and you will find a concentration of
entheogen use.

Religious experiencing, being led by the Holy Spirit, proceeds from entheogens
mainly and directly, and from meditation only incidentally as a weak and
indirect echo. Entheogens are a mainline injection of the Holy Spirit;
meditation is a mere subcutaneous injection. Prohibition has been directly
obstructing direct religious experiencing. Prohibition is the Devil which
provides a fake substitute for direct religious experiencing, called
“spirituality and meditation”, which is designed to *prevent* and shut out the
Holy Spirit and thus prop up ego-delusion. Prohibition, spirituality, and
ego-delusion are three in one, the unholy trinity.


Tomorrow, $3.2 million taxpayer dollars will be used by the U.S. government to
buy two 30-second Superbowl television advertisements to whip up support for
the failing, obviously fake “War on Drugs” by asserting ludicrously that drugs
should be stopped by prohibition because they support terrorists. Given that
Prohibition is in power (albeit a rapidly collapsing power that clearly has no
persuasive future), must we give up on really religious experiencing and
settle for a substitute which is exactly as fake as the sham, bogus “War on
Drugs”? That spirituality is the official established religion proferred by
the same government/corporate machine that uses taxpayer money to oppress
taxpayers and other countries. Offered the spirituality that is endorsed by
the Prohibition Establishment, we might as well refuse spirituality
altogether.

Better to have no spirituality than a spirituality that is designed to be
fully accepted by the empowered rulers during the dark ages of Prohibition.
Pop spirituality only allows a bit of entheogenism, and to that extent is led
by the Holy Spirit, but only to that slight extent which is not sufficient to
break through to enlightenment and revelation. “Because you are neither hot
nor cold, I spit you out of my mouth.” Spirituality is half-religion,
dabbling so as to avoid that which it claims to seek. The greatest risk is
that the half-developed substitute becomes so popular and dominant that it is
taken for fulness and thus ends up blocking the way, like a guitar-amp
simulator that produces Tone of such sterling mediocrity that the young
guitarist never moves on to the glorious richness of the real thing.

This same logic drives Bruce Ehrlich to demonize any LSD that is not the
purest, most first-rate; he lies awake at night worrying about the popularity
of, say, 90% pure LSD because its popularity prevents people from having the
vastly superior pure LSD experience. As much as the Boomers hated “plastic
religion”, so do I hate “plastic mysticism” or “plastic spirituality”.
“Religion” (as supernaturalist Literalism) is indeed bogus — the great
majority of people including most Christians agree; very few Usans (Jonathan
Ott’s correction of “Americans”) believe in supernaturalist Literalism. But
I’m declaring the answer, “spirituality”, also bogus.

Religion is the thesis, Spirituality is the antithesis; the mystic altered
state is the synthesis. There are really three contenders within
Christianity: Supernaturalist Literalism, Historical-Jesus Liberalism, and
Esoteric Mysticism. As Alan Watts points out in the book Behold the Spirit,
there are many theological studies of God, and Jesus/Christ, but next,
clearly, we need coverage of the Holy Spirit — the missing ingredient. That
book was written before LSD, and it’s remarkable how Watts’ prediction of a
Holy-Spirit phase was fulfilled most clearly by the psychedelics revolution.
The Holy Spirit lives in the entheogen molecule, flesh of Christ.

In a message dated 2/2/02 10:23:55 AM Pacific Standard Time,
mhoffman writes:

> Tomorrow, $3.2 million taxpayer dollars will be used by the U.S. government
> to
> buy two 30-second Superbowl television advertisements to whip up support for
> the failing, obviously fake “War on Drugs” by asserting ludicrously that
> drugs
>

Here, here. It is time for our government to realize that the “war on
drugs” is an abysmal failure that has unfortunately produced a large social
class that depends on the restrictive polices (prison guards, DEA officers,
etc.).

Perhaps the only way to change course is to assure these classes that
depend on official “drug money” that they will have jobs, but jobs related to
treatment of drug addiction as an illness, not a crime.

Cheers, Pepla



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Transforming & Transcending : The Dance of the Neuron (AKA The
Neurocognitive Roots of Materialism and Idealism) – C.J. Lofting
—————————————————–

INTRODUCTION
————
When we zoom-in to identify the structure and function of the neuron, the
cell many species use to manage information and as such forms our brain, we
can identity two fundamental ‘goals’ of neural behaviour where these ‘goals’
reflect the notions of transcendence (aka transmutation) and transformation.
The development of the neuron has led to a dynamic reflected in rhythms and
arhythms of neural process that is reflected at all levels of neural
expression, from neuron to human society in general.

At the level of collectives, the transcendence/transformation ‘drives’ are
reflected in the concepts of Idealism (transcendence) and Materialism
(Transform). These concepts are more often interpreted as opposing one
another whereas they in fact serve one another in that oscillations across
the neurocognitive areas of our brain reflect the characteristics of
transcend/transform and are summed to produce ‘mind’, with different degrees
of oscillations emerging as noticeable biases in individual as well as
collective behaviours.

Thus the apparent differences regarding the ‘source’ of individual
expression in the socio-political emphasis of Karl Marx (sociological roots,
even distribution of energy) or J.S. Mill (psychological roots, hierarchic
distribution of energy) are in fact hard-coded into the human brain – they
are rooted in the neurocognitive processes that generally function
unconsciously in us all and as such are recruited and abstracted to serve as
‘mind’.

Through combinations of nature and nurture ‘biases’ in perspectives can
emerge due to misinterpretations as well as failure to recognise the
distinct ‘differences’ in goals where the transcendence function serves to
differentiate and exploit to achieve transcendence, whereas the
transformation function is more attuned to integration and so to ‘fit in’
with the local context (and so protect the species) rather than assert its
own context (a trait of transcending); thus the transformation emphasis is
on developing ‘good’ habits to conserve energy as compared to the
transcendence emphasis on expending energy, to reach the ‘top’ and then
‘transcend’.


FORMAL DANCE : TRANSFORMING
—————————
The flow of data through the dendrites of a neuron (dendrites are the
primary input area of a neuron) is not just ‘pure’ input but more so
*filtered* input in that within the ‘cloud’ of dendrites are encoded
species-level instincts and local level habits.

The encoding of habits and instincts in the immediate input areas of the
neuron allows for immediate, ‘mindless’ processing of data and so response
to stimulus where the stimulus is ‘in’ the context; there is no need to
‘think’ once something has been identified and habituated, we just ‘react’
to the stimulus.

As such, context is the root of change, e.g. weather conditions, can affect
hormone productions that affect the filtering processes of neurons and
members of the species start to grow winter coats or molt for summer and
this is all done on autopilot.

This reactive emphasis reflects the PUSH nature of context; often
experienced by the individual where circumstances put them in an ‘unknown’
context and they start to behaviour in ways their conscious self does not
understand, it is “why am I thinking/behaving like this!?”. These sorts of
situations reflect ‘instinctive’ or ‘habit’ behaviours which are, or appear
to be, uncontrollable, the person feels as if ‘something’ is pushing them.

We can speculate that thousands of years ago this combination of
consciousness plus ‘mindless’ context-derived ‘push’ could easily elicit the
notion of being manipulated by ‘spirits’ in that lack of clearly identified
concepts such as instincts, habits, and the general principles of evolution
would force an anthropomorphic perspective.

At the neuron level we associate this processing of data, where habits can
be created/refined to maintain the ‘push’ emphasis, with the concept of
transformation. In transformation the core does not change, the outer self
does in response to a context.

This transformation process reflects direct input-output of data, ‘mindless’
stimulus/response and the encoding of instincts/habits at the input level
favours their use as forms of protection in that they ensure conservation of
energy through their efficiency as well as immediate ‘intergration’ with a
context. Furthermore, the ‘collection’ of local habits would be reflected in
the development of identity, both personal and collective, and so beyond
that of being a ‘species member’. As such a hierarchy of identities emerge
all dependent on context as their instigator of expression and so with the
concept of transformation comes the socio-psychological temperaments of
security seeking as well as identity seeking (and so individuals as well as
collectives can develop these temperament biases.)

FREEFORM DANCE: TRANSCENDING
—————————-
In the process of survival it is necessary to avoid becoming too dependent
upon habits and a method to deal with this is in the neuron’s link with
synchronisation. This process, besides ensuring groups of neurons work ‘as
one’ also has the property of ‘slicing and dicing’ habit data where the
synchronisation links, in the form of excitory and inhibitory controls
applied to the neuron’s cell body, the source of neural firing, can be
‘re-sequenced’ and so instinct/habit behaviours can be presented ‘out of
context’. This process allows for the experience of ‘insights’, new
perspectives that can be useful in survival, in escaping ‘habits’ where the
specific context requires a non-habitual response.

This process of developing a ‘different’ perspective can be a source of
error but also a source of sudden insight – the ‘ah-HA’ experience. We
associate this concept with the term of ‘transcendence’ where the insight
elicits such a different perspective that it can change all future
behaviours and as such ‘break’ habits. (At the mindless level this process
also reflects mutation). Thus we establish a tie of transcendence to the
temperaments of problem-solving as well as sensation-seeking (all examples
of more proactive behaviours when compared to the temperaments that reflect
transforming).

The concept of transcendence reflects the introduction of core difference
just as the concept of transformation reflects the maintaining of core
sameness and as such, just as transformation serves to protect, so
transcendence serves to exploit where resources – energy – is needed for the
transcendence process; note that one primary difference is that just as the
transformation aims to conserve energy, the transcendence experience is
associated with the over-expression of energy. Furthermore there is a sense
of preservation of the species in the transforming, a tie to history, as
compared to transcendence which reflects an ‘attraction’ to the new as well
as abstraction, to move from the local to the universal and so the
manifestation of a hierarchic emphasis rooted in species behaviours of
‘pecking’ orders etc.

As such we can identify increasingly complex behaviours stemming from the
entanglement of transcending and transforming.


VARIATIONS IN STEP : RECRUIT & ABSTRACT
—————————————
A set of common traits within the nervous system is that of recruitement and
abstraction, where neuron will recruit another, or a brain lobe another, or
brain hemisphere *the* other, in the processing of data. Together with this
recruitment comes abstraction where old categories are recruited and given
new labels and applied at the level of the universal rather than the local.

If we ‘zoom’ up to the level of the hemispheres of the neocortex we seem to
witness the same transform(protect)/transcend(exploit) functions we witness
at the level of the single neuron and as such any collective of neurons will
develop the transform/transcend biases to a degree where specialised
‘nuclei’ can develop, all nuclei then intergrated as a single brain, and at
the level of the collective personas can develop with distinct biases to
seeking transforming and/or transcending and as such introduce variations on
the general themes.

SELECT YOUR PARTNER : PERSONAS & COLLECTIVES
——————————————–
The development of different perspectives at the personal and collective
levels seems to reflect the transcendence/transform ‘goals’ of the neuron
such that the whole of our neurology, psychology, and sociology acts like a
huge neuron, ready to recruit other ‘neurons’ to solve problems as well as
convert concrete perspectives rooted in the local to abstract perspectives
rooted in the universal.

The transcend/transform concepts, being tied to the neuron, will be
expressed not just in humans but in ANY lifeform that uses the neuron to
process information. The difference between humans and other lifeforms is in
the complexity of neural development that has allowed for a developed
awareness of ‘moment-to-moment’ spanning the lifetime of the individual and
as such a refined sense of consciousness. This sense of connectivity is
reflected in memory processing where the continuity is further refined
through awareness of personal and collective history through external
sources (language expressed in family communications, books, videos etc
etc).

From the perspective of the human species we can identify two fundamental
‘differences’ in personal and social expression that reflect the core
expressions of transcendence/transformation – that of the idealist
(transcendence seeking) and that of the materialist (transformation
seeking). Genetic as well as environmental diversities will introduce
variations on these themes but despite these variations the general
idealist/materialist roots will shine through.


LEADING AND FOLLOWING – IDEALISM & MATERIALISM
———————————————-
A materialist perspective reflects a more transformist approach to life, the
emphasis is on conservation of energy, the identification of algorithms and
formulas for the sake of efficient function within this thermodynamically
dominated universe; time is recognised as an integral part of our being and
is included in all assessments.

An idealist perspective reflects a more transcendentalist approach to life,
the emphasis is on the expression of energy, huge amounts if need be, to
achieve the ‘transcendence’, the escape from the current, sometimes
perceived-to-be sterile, existence as in ‘there must be more..’; with the
idealist perspective time is treated more as a sense of the ‘eternal’ and
free of its thermodynamic links.

As such, in idealism, the formulas and algorithms are more used to emphasise
alchemy. We must be careful here with words in that traditionally the
conversion of ‘lead’ into ‘gold’ is often expressed as ‘transforming’ but in
fact, from the qualitative perspective we all work from as a species, the
emphasis is on ‘transcending’ which incorporates the notion of
‘transmutation’.

KEEPING STEP : TIME DISTORTION
——————————
Analysis of the idealist/materialist perspectives indicates a need to
‘zoom-in’ to these perspectives in that the manner in which they process
data reflects differences in the notion of Time.

The brain reflects the exploit/protect emphasis through the process of
analyising data in high detail, allowing for a ‘clear’ perspective of the
form of whatever it is that is under analysis.

This analytical processing requires the isolation, the encapsulation, of
‘something’ to enable us to focus all of our analytical skills on that
‘something’. As such, the isolation process is combined with a distortion of
attention focus where we zoom-in to get more details of what has been
encapsulated.

The zoom-in is not ‘free’, the act requires physiological expending of
energy and a consequence of this, due to the identified reciprocal
relationship of energy/subjective_time_experience, is that there is a
distortion of time where it ‘slows’ to become, qualitatively, impoverished
where it is ignored (and so a sense of the ‘eternal’ presents itself) or it
is treated in a mechanistic manner, ‘cut off’ from its thermodynamical roots
expressed as begin-end time as as such even interpreted as reversible.

Thus an idealist perspective, recorded over centuries, will reflect this
time distortion in the form of the notion of the ‘eternal’, the ‘one’ moment
of ‘clarity’ where the physiological intent IS clarity in that the drive for
details will ‘suspend’ time or else give it a more mechanistic aire; the
recruitment and abstraction of this sense of ‘clarity’ means it is projected
into the universal realm of our theories about ourselves and the universe.

The recording of the sense of the ‘eternal’ will act as feedback to
perpetuate the notion and as such, due to the ‘natural’ drive to transcend
(and so exaggerate, reflecting the analysis process), extend interpretations
of the notion into the realm of the ‘spiritual’.

The role of Religion has always been to be a ‘keeper of the scrolls’ and as
such maintain old terms, and this sense of ‘oneness’ of the experience of
the eternal, in new times. As such Science is more materialist in general
than Religion in that it demonstrates a lack of faith in Religious concepts
by asking questions and seeking to look ‘behind’ expressions. (Within
Science are the same patterns where idealist Scientists reflect
fundamentalism as compared to the more materialist Scientists reflecting a
more relativist bias. Thus at all scales we see the same patterns reflecting
the entanglement of transcending and transforming. See my texts on
dichotomisations and their properties when used recursively ( and so the use
of self-referencing when we seek details –
http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting/dicho.html ).


REFLECTIONS UPON THE DANCE
————————–
(1)Since the synchronisation processes identified as part of transcending
suggest some degree of imposed order, the more ‘habitual’ perspective, being
more reactive, stimulus/response, would seem to be the older. In other
words, within the bounds of neuron development, the materialist perspective
preceded the idealist perspective; spirit developed from matter, just as the
sense of the individual has emerged from the collective and the sense of the
collective (reducible to immediate family – kin) has emerged from the
species. An example at the level of the collective is in ‘instinctive’ group
behaviours in such lifeforms as schools of fish or troops of baboons where
local distinction making can cause ‘crowd’ patterns not sourcable in the
individual but feedback can elicit ‘preferred’ behaviours and as such
formalise a ‘dance’ that emerges as a pattern of group behaviour unique to
the species/genus.
——————
(2)The idealist perspective, with its drive to transcend and differentiate
is the source of social and technical development as well as the source of
charismatic leaderships etc. However this can be delusional in that the
exploitation of resources can take place in a manner when the idealist
perspective reflects the mind of a child in that it reflects behaviours that
lack consideration of consequences of actions.

The original development of part of the brain to deal with high precision
seems to have been as an aid to ‘everyday’ living of the species but its
success has led to the development of idealist perspectives being encoding
at the level of collectives and as such the development of ‘belief’ systems
that although highly charismatic, in the long term of the universe reflect
delusions that although ‘fun’ can also serve as the instigator of the death
of a species through excessive exploitations of contexts to aid in asserting
the ‘ideal’.
—————–
(3)The materialist perspective, although ‘closer’ to general species-nature
as a whole, in that it attempts to ‘fit in’ with the context by recognising
non-reversible time as an integral part of our being, can lack ‘dot’
precision when compared to the idealist. However, the materialist
perspective seems to be better at pattern detection and as such identifying
the implications of events. As such the materialist perspective is more
biased to processing/asserting of illusions as compared to the idealist
perspective that is more biased to processing/asserting of delusions.
Materialist adapts to context, integrates with it, idealist would rather
assert its own context and as such reflects integration within itself – a
focus on purity rather than on mixing.

As such the materialist perspective can be too ‘constraining’ and as such
fail to support excessive energy usage that could in fact benefit in
conserving energy in the long run, or else attempt to perform large scale
developments without employing the idealist perspective and so ‘lack’ the
necessary precision required in such large scale developments.

The benefit of the materialist is its sensitivity to historical contexts and
so consequences of actions upon the whole species etc. The benefit of the
idealist is the intense focus of purpose and the ability to move above
conditions, but this needs to be analysed from a historical perspective to
identify possible problems for the species occurring many generations into
the future. As such we see an oscillation between the poles of
exploit/protect.

This oscillation will inevitably lead to the development of mediation as a
property of development and this is reflected in Mind through the
use/interpretations of Laws/Beliefs (and has its mindless roots in the form
of genetics as expression of mediation between lifeform and context). Of
interest is the casual observation that ‘developed’ collectives focus on
laws that ensure the survival of the future of the species – the children
and as such this correlates with a general ‘childmindedness’ in developed
collectives where ‘struggle’ gives way to ‘fun’.
—————
(4)The idealist/materialist perspectives, reflected in Kant’s concepts of
the analytical and the synthetical, as well as Hegel’s concepts of the
analytical and dialectical, demonstrate different perspectives on
integration. The idealist perspective, due to the strong encapsulation bias
in analysis, reflects more of a sense of integration WITHIN a ‘box’ as
compared to the materialist perspective that focuses more on integration
BETWEEN boxes (the latter is vital in habit formations where many implied
relationships across many ‘boxes’ trigger a general response such as
instinctive preparation for winter/summer etc)

The ‘within’ emphasis identifies a focus on very clear identification of a
particular, on purity, and as such a development of a ‘parts list’ – the
details – of whatever is under analysis. The drive to ‘transcend’ emerges in
that it is the only way in which to step out of the ‘box’ in that once all
parts have been identified a sense of sterility can seep-in; the archetypal
realm, which is what the idealism reflects, needs ‘new blood’ to move on.
The logical solution is to MIX, to recruit other boxes but this defeats the
purpose of analysis, to emphasise clear, ‘pure’ identifications and as such
there is an ‘attraction’ to stay in one’s box to maintain ‘purity’ with the
belief that ‘intense’ focus on the contents of the box will lead to
‘transcendence’.

Overall this transcendence focus emphasises a strong hierarchic emphasis and
a ‘goal’ to reach the ‘top’ emerging from a ‘goal’ to escape the sterility.
(see (5) for more on this at the level of the collective) This transcendence
can also be achieved through the ‘selling’ of the parts-list as ‘THE’
parts-list, “THE” ultimate interpretation. This is reflected in the
fundamentalism possible in idealism where the single context emphasis acts
to assert the sense of ‘the one’.

The ‘between’ emphasis identifies a stronger focus on relationships between
boxes and as such their integration into a ‘whole’ system but more often
this is by implication where the skill in pattern matching can be destroyed
through increase in ‘dot’ precision (and too much entanglement with the
different boxes could ‘upset’ their degree of autonomous function)

As such energy is conserved through allowing dynamics across boxes, avoiding
too much focus within a box – thus energy is distributed across a network
and as such reflects ‘percolation’, a bubbling of activities in the dynamic
of the materialist world but as such lacking the high energy precision of
the idealist world.

Visually we can image this dynamic as being expressed in the form of a
Mandala – where links of different boxes, some specialised and so reflecting
different energy levels, is reflected in patterns of energy that can be
visualised as mandala patterns such that different collectives etc can
maintain different mandalas that aid in giving the whole group an ‘identity’
and as such meditations on the mandalas serve to aid in experiencing the
collective ‘mindset’.

The collective mandala can experience subtle changes due to local conditions
but in general should maintain its structure unless the collective is ‘off
balanced’ to start with (See refs for (5) below).

—————-
(5)The transcend/transform emphasis is expressed at the level of collectives
where the differences in energy management (transcend – expend, transform –
conserve) are reflected in the differences between what sociologist Ray
Bradley and neuroscientist Karl Pribram call ‘control’ collectives (high
energy, charismatic, emphasis) and ‘flux’ collectives (energy conserving) –
where the more ‘functional’ collectives reflect the entanglement of these
distinctions.

(
Bradley, R.T. (1987) “Charisma and Social Structure : A Study of Love and
Power, Wholeness and Transformation” New York : Paragon House
Bradley, R.T., & Pribram, K.(1998) “Communication and Stability in Social
Collectives” IN Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 21(1):29-81
)

—————-
(6)The support for the development of mental ‘biases’ in expression related
to transcend/transform is reflected in such work as Prof., J. Peddigrew’s
experiments in identifying bi-polar disorders through analysis of rhythmic
differences in the standard oscillations across the neocortex that reflect
‘mind’ at work. Based on this work as well as others covering neocortical
structure and function, depression/neurosis is more linked to
transformation, mania/psychosis to transcendence. (For Peddigrew see
http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/procroysoc.html )

As such, resolving ‘simple’ forms of depression can be achieved through a
change in context whereas the more transcending disorders, the psychoses,
can in fact be made worse by context change.
—————
(7) The identification of the processing of ‘clear’ perspectives is possible
through analysis of various research material covering neural processes to
hemisphere processes. Together with a ‘drive’ to interpret, the ‘clarity’
emphasis is a theme common in more idealist mindsets (the analytical
emphasis is driven by exaggerations of stimulus to aid in identifying
details. Exploit/Protect biases emerge in the intent of the analysis).

At all levels there is an FM (frequency modulation) vs AM (amplitude
modulation) perspective mappable to transcendence (FM) vs transformation
(AM) with an overall emphasis on “AS IS” processing reflected in
transformations and “AS INTERPRETED” processing reflected in transcendence.

Due to the development of feedback loops and interneurons as well as
sensory/motor neurons, the basic threads of transcend/transform has been
woven into a ‘carpet’ where patterns in the carpet reflect differences in
perspectives.
——————–

The conversion of AM to FM, continuity to discrete, general to specific, is
sourced in the firing of a neuron/neurons/lobes/brain/collective etc and for
additional references/further reading covering neuron to hemispheres see for
example some of the works mentioned below, noting that in general the
‘opposition’ of idealist/materialist perspectives is illusion and needs to
be understood as such.

The intensity of idealism reflects its roots in using self-referencing
methods to get details on whatever we have focused upon, but once that job
is done to withdraw since the energy in maintaining continued ‘focus’ can be
extreme and so costly, not only to the individual but to the collectives and
in fact the whole species; the recognition of such excess can easily go
unnoticed since we are talking hundreds of years and so well outside of the
experiential range of the individual (or even collective).

The intensity of materialism reflects its roots in conservation/protection
of the species but this can be perceived as ‘lacking in precision’ when
compared to what the idealism can achieve and as such can be readily ignored
and declared ‘alarmist’ in collectives where idealism ‘rules’.

The work in the neurosciences is aiding us in understanding our selves as a
species and as such forcing the focus of our concerns at that level – the
level of the species rather than collective/individual.

The isolationism that can emerge from idealism needs to have its border
‘expanded’ to encapsulate the whole species and in doing so bring the
idealism talents to the fore in ensuring species survival rather than the
maintaining of ‘false’ boundaries around collectives and so the ‘us’ vs
‘them’ becomes an eternal problem to us all.

The interplay of idealism/materialism is vital for the continued development
as well as survival of the species and better for this to be cooperative
than oppositional or more so for us to KNOW when we need to adopt one or the
other where oppositional focus is for differentiation – details analysis –
and cooperation for integration but at all times recognising that all is
dynamic and as such part of the dance of life.

———————–
Some material sources & further readings:

Ivry, R.B., & Robertson, L.C.,(1998) “The Two Sides of Perception” MITP
Hasselmo, M.E., (1999) “Neuromodulation : acetylcholine and memory
consolidation” Trends Cognit. Sci (1999) 3, 351-359
Hutcheon, B., & Yarom, Y., (2000) “Resonance, oscillation and the intrinsic
frequency preferences of neurons” Trends Neurosci. (2000) 23, 216-222
Perry, E., et al (1999) “Acetylcholine in mind: a neurotransmitter correlate
of consciousness?” Trends Neurosci. (1999) 22, 273-280
Tallon-Baudry, C. and Bertrand, O., (1999) “Oscillatory gamma activity in
humans and its role in object representation” Trends Cogniti. Sci (1999) 3,
151-161
Tomaselco, M., (2000) “The item-based nature of children’s early syntactic
development” Trends Cognit. Sci. (2000) 4, 156-163
Hoffman, D.D., (1998) “Visual Intelligence: How we create what we see”
Norton
McAdams, S., and Bigand, E., (Eds) (1993) “Thinking in Sound” OUP
Levarie, S., (1980) “Music as a Structural Model” p236-239 IN Journal of
Social Biol. Structure. 3)
Goldman-Rakic, P.S., (1984) “Modular organization of the prefrontal cortex”
IN Trends in Neurosciences Nove 1984 pp 419-424
Grinvald, A., et al (1991)”Optical Imaging of Architecture and Function in
the Living Brain” IN Squire, L.R., et al (Eds)(1991)”Memory :Organisation
and Locus of Change” OUP.)
Stein, B.E., and Meredith, M.A., (1993) “The Merging of the Senses” MITP
Posner,M.I., Raichle, M.E., (1994) “Images of Mind” Scientific American
Library
Gainotti, G., and Caltagirone, C., (eds) (1989) “Emotions and the Dual
Brain” Springer-Verlag
Doty, R.W., (1989) “Some anatomical substrates of emotion, and their
bihemispheric coordination” IN “Emotions and the Dual Brain” p57-82
Springer, S.P., & Deutsch, G., (1998) “Left Brain, Right Brain :
Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience (5th Edition)” Freeman
Koch, C., and Segev, I., (1998)”Methods in Neural Modeling” MITP
Cirrincione, G., Cirrinocione, M., & Van Huffel, S., (1999)”Neural Geometry
for Constrained Optimization” (copy of the paper is on my website —
http://www.eisa.net.au/~lofting/neuralprism.pdf )
Hoppensteadt, F.C., (1997)”An Introduction to the Mathematics of Neurons 2nd
Ed” Cambridge UP
Norris, J.R.,(1997) “Markov Chains” CUP
Chaitin, G.L., (1999) “The Unknowable” Springer
Constantine-Paton, M., and Law, M.I.,(1982) “The Development of Maps and
Stripes in the Brain” IN “The Workings of the Brain” A.H. Freeman.

(full list at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ddiamond/brefs.html )

Chris.
——————
Chris Lofting
websites:
http://pages.prodigy.net/lofting
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ddiamond
http://www.eisa.net.au/~lofting
Lists:
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/semiosis
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/ichingplus

>It is time for the U.S. government to realize that the “war on drugs” is an

abysmal failure that has produced a large social class that depends for its
income on the restrictive polices, such as prison guards and DEA officers.
Perhaps the only way to change course is to assure these classes that depend
on official “drug money” that they will have jobs, but jobs related to
treatment of drug addiction as an illness, not a crime.


That way of speaking uses the paradigm of the prohibitionists and the
expressions of the prohibitionists. Such inadvertent conceptual acquiescence
plays right into the prohibitionist scheme. I would never say simply “The
drug war is a failure”, because that totally misses the point. The drug war
is a great success at its actual, covert goals.

The main point that now must be hammered into the heads of the reformers is
that the drug war is *fake*. It claims to have one goal, but it actually has
an entirely different set of goals. It is, most of all, dishonest — it’s a
*racket* that has *never* had anything at all to do with reducing drug use.
It was never intended to work towards its stated goal.

One of the actual goals of prohibition is to dramatically increase drug use,
to make the whole system profitable. Drug-policy reformers, being all too
much the ordinary propagandized obedient teevee viewers they are, are too
stupid and gullible — or, more accurately, conceptually brainwashed — to
grasp this obvious fact, unless it is hammered repeatedly into their thinking.
Reading a stack of Jonathan Ott and Dan Russell books, and Drug Warriors &
Their Prey, is the only hope. Every reformer should be required to read these
books, along with whatever other information sources they want to use.

There is a paradigm war here, and reformers *think* they are in a different
paradigm than prohibitionists, *but they’re not*. The concept “the drug war
is a failure” *is* the prohibitionists’ paradigm. The concept “addition is an
illness, not a crime” *is* the prohibitionists’ paradigm; it’s merely a
conventional objection that can never kill the fetid heart of the beast, the
sham “drug war”.


The reformers are utterly doomed to failure until they adopt a *truly*
different paradigm, and truly break out of the paradigm fastened over their
head by the prohibitionist paradigm. It’s like Ken Wilber’s idea of inferior
religion as being mere “translation” — moving furniture about — versus
superior religion as profound *transformation*. The ordinary “drug problem”
battling is conducted within a single uniform paradigm, “the drug war and
those who are against it”. But reformers have only one hope of winning: by
providing a truly alternative paradigm.

Reformers are living in delusion, blindly believing that the drug war intends
to reduce drug use, and that the drug war is about addiction or illness. The
drug war has *nothing at all* to do with reducing drug use and it never has.
The drug war has *nothing at all* to do with addiction or illness and it never
has. It is only about money and power, and always has been. The only real
way to wake up and get others to wake up to reality, the reality of power and
propaganda, is *follow the money* within the prohibitionist camp.

The war on drugs is a failure? I would never say that. It is a vicious, evil
lie — now we’re getting warmer. Reformers need to develop more of a sense of
intentional evil.

Addiction is an illness, not a crime? I would never utter that conventional
platitude that totally distorts what the drug war is *all about*. The drug
war has nothing to do with addiction, nothing to do with illness, and nothing
to do with crime. It’s a racket on the part of the prohibitionists, and
that’s all it has ever been, and this dragon can only be killed as what it is,
not as what it is not.

There are two kinds of reformers: the conceptual compromisers, and the
extremists who only want to tell it straight. We need more people to do the
latter to the extreme, because the former are too often oblivious to it. Part
of the extreme straight-talking approach is to emphasize that drugs are, among
other things, the holiest sacrament and the living flesh of Christ, the main
vehicle of the Holy Spirit of Truth. Now we are getting warmer.

How much can the reformers achieve while wearing a bag of ignorance over their
head? Their efforts may randomly occasionally pay off; they may occasionally
make profit-raking slightly less convenient for the amoral prohibitionist
profiteers. The prohibitionists are worried enough to feel they need to
invest in $3.2 million of propaganda during the Super Bowl to keep the sheep
hypnotized into shallow, emotion-driven, knee-jerk support for the
prohibitionist racket.

These sheep include the typical drug-policy reformers, who will refute the
prohibitionists using the conceptual world and paradigm of the
prohibitionists, thinking that they are providing an alternative view. There
are alternatives, and there are *alternatives*. Status-quo drug-policy reform
is succeeding so little and so slowly as to be a failure. We need to, for
once, see and speak the truth, rather than the usual approach of
counterpropaganda.

At least, reformers should *know* the truth, even if they continue trying
counterpropaganda (the use of distortion and double-talk to fight distortion
and double-talk) as a strategy. Counterpropaganda has made only slow, halting
progress; I don’t see it breaking through, only lessening the pain so as to
prevent the problem from ending. The only way to *end* prohibition, rather
than merely mitigating it, is to reveal the evil, the willful commitment to
lying and suppressing the truth, that is its foul, motivating heart and soul.

The same dance plays on and on without any real improvement —
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews . Most of all, I notice the same expressions
and phrases being used over the years. The conceptual artillery of the
reformers is stagnant and narrow. They would do better by being thoroughly
educated about the entheogen theory of the origin of religion — read the
books by Jonathan Ott, read Dan Russell ( http://www.drugwar.com ), read Dan
Merkur ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892817720 ,
http://www.promind.com/bk_mym.htm ), read Clark Heinrich ( Strange Fruit,
though out of print, is available at http://www.promind.com/bk_stf.htm ) and
James Arthur ( http://jamesarthur.net ). All of these books are available at
Mind Books — http://www.promind.com/conts.htm .

My favorite group of books, a needed addition to the more common coverage of
20th-century drug use and policy, is about the history of entheogen use at the
roots of religion — http://www.promind.com/conts.htm#E . This more complete
education about drugs, religion, and government, provides a greater range of
thinking and expressions. Reformers need a more general education with a
special emphasis on drugs, religion, and history. A teevee education produces
only a teevee-quality drug-policy reform movement by limiting our conceptual
vocabulary. The last thing the prohibitionists want is historical thinking,
knowledge about the history of drugs.

I have the following book, haven’t read it, and don’t know if it’s
prohibitionist, but it’s the kind of follow-the-money investigation,
especially of “U.S. interests”, that needs to be done by drug-policy
reformers. Drug Politics: Dirty Money and Democracies, by David C. Jordan.
1999. “the drug trade depends on state cooperation and compliance to sustain
multibillion-dollar levels of illicit global commerce.”
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0806131748 But again, beware of the
value system and assumptions this author makes about what drugs are really all
about and what goals we really have and could have for drugs — for that
critical aspect, rely on Jonathan Ott’s books, such as his book The Age of
Entheogens, The Pharmacratic Inquisition, and The Entheogenic Reformation.

No matter how tall a stack of books you read like Drug War Addiction: Notes
from the Front Lines of America’s #1 Policy Disaster, by Sheriff Bill Masters
( http://www.accuratepress.net/dwa.html ), something evil still lurks, giving
off as many foul fumes as ever: the disparagement of drugs, an error which
from the start is an upside-down attitude, framing sacraments as mere poisons.
Such error encourages the drug war to be put back into place, in one guise or
another, just as soon as it is dismissed.

The freed black man was a problem, so he was publically persecuted. After
such blatant persecution became unacceptable, he was covertly persecuted, put
away in jail in the name of “the drug problem” where he is of more use (under
forced labor) to the ruling powers than if he were dead — it’s more efficient
racism, persecution-for-profit that produces jobs for the designated good
guys. The latter scenario is like the supposed great victory offered by
today’s drug-policy reformers, who say they have a better way to deal with the
devil of drugs. If we keep framing drugs as the devil, along with the real
devil which is prohibition, then people will keep treating drugs as the devil
one way or another.

The first thing to change, then, is to stop demonizing drugs. The surest way
to not demonize drugs is to honor and respect them, a model offered most
clearly by psychedelics used as entheogenic sacraments. Let us also put the
opium pod on its deserved place on a pedestal, because opium and cannabis are
the greatest medical drugs — read Jonathan Ott, Dan Russell (Drug War), and
possibly Antonio Escohotado (Brief History of Drugs) on this point. Opium and
cannabis are *so* effective, they certainly are a competitive “threat” — or
an effective complement — to other, patented drugs.


Another genuinely positive book to at least be aware of as a demonstration of
the breadth of eternal entheogen use in religion all around the globe is
Richard Schultes and Albert Hofmann — Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred
Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers.

I also think often about the clear perspective offered by the book A Brief
History of Drugs — http://www.promind.com/bk_bhd.htm — “Story of
psychoactive materials: prehistory, Greek, Roman, witchcraft, new world
plants, start of real medicine; then modern history: prohibition, new drugs,
the psychedelic revolution, the drug war, and the present situation. Says
drugs have been used by most societies, and made important contributions.”
More info: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892818263 .

It’s a dubious cliché to say that religious experience is worthless unless it
produces a lasting change of one’s conduct and mode of life. Whether or not
the value of religious experience depends on anything outside itself is
debatable, but I would suggest that the best kind of “changed life” now should
be activism to truly end the bunk, sham, fake, pretend “war on drugs” racket,
and honor psychoactive drugs, effectively integrating them into the life of
humanity. This is the simplest way to differentiate drug-policy reformers
into two camps with two opposite paradigms: those who disparage drugs, and
thus support prohibition; and those who honor them, providing the only true
alternative to prohibition.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.reformnav.org — rapid-navigation portal for drug policy reform
sites — still needs work, but even now it works great for navigation and
contacts
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

This text file is automatically posted to the discussion group every two
weeks, in order to provide guidelines for writers, to keep the postings
on-topic and help writers know what subjects are considered most desirable
by this audience.

It is possible to write on most any topic and have it be relevant for this
Egodeath discussion group if you show how the posting is related to the
in-scope topics for this discussion group. This group is not formally
moderated, but it is consistently focused on the defined topics, including
peripheral topics if the writer explicitly connects them to the core topics.

— Michael Hoffman

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath — describes
in-scope discussion topics, as follows.

This discussion group covers the cybernetic theory of ego death and
ego transcendence, including:

o Nonreductionistic block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, the Eleusinian mysteries and
cracking the allegorical code of the mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.

Dear Michael, touching upon your recent post –

_____________________________________
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 14:17:44 -0600
From: “Thomas Roberts” <P80TBR1>
Subject: News from UUDPR

The following is an excerpt from the first part of this message. More
information is avaialble at the websites mentioned.

UUDPF = Unitarian Universalists for Drug Policy Reform

Tom Roberts
_______________________________
Dear UUDPR active participants,

Greetings. Here is some information about several new developments:

* UUDPR_Updates has been changed to
DrugPolicyUpdates. You will continue to receive 2-4 e-mail
updates each month from Unitarian Universalists for Drug Policy Reform.

* UU congregations have until March 1 to submit feedback on the UUA’s draft
Statement of Conscience — see the link on <http://www.uudpr.org>. Please
encourage your congregation to express support for the entire draft as is,
especially the parts stating that drug use should be a health issue, not a
crime (with users subject to arrest only if they hurt others). If anyone
has any concerns, please let me know, and try to address these concerns
using the info on UUDPR’s web page and pasted below.

* An excellent new publication has been written by the organization Common
Sense for Drug Policy (CSDP). The thoroughly documented “Drug War
Distortions” can be read online at http://www.cspd.org/research/dwdist.htm
— which refutes the most common claims in support of the drug war. Some
UUs have voiced concerns that ending the drug war would be dangerous to
kids. Therefore, I’ve pasted (below) CSDP’s response to the distortion,
“Current drug policy protects American youth.” Please share this with
members of your congregation.

* The best way to protect kids is through honest education, such as Dr.
Andrew Weil’s book, “From Chocolate to Morphine,” available through
http://www.uudpr.org — also see the publication, “Safety First: A
Reality-Based Approach to Teens, Drugs, and Drug Education,” which can be
read in its entirety at <http://www.lindesmith.org/library/safetyfirst.html>.

Arresting kids only makes matters worse.

<SS>
||

Although it might be verging on the conceptually obscene to post this to
egodeath, OTOH it does stimulate thinking about the vectors of access to
Cybermonk’s once & future book.

Not that I suggest that any such book be compromised or shoe-horned into
being “OSI (Oprah Semantic Infantilism) Compliant” by any means. It would
be miraculous and splendid however if the putative book was selected as
book of the month. Regardless of scoping, she is working a minor miracle of
using TV to promote literacy. That much credit she is due.

She consciously or not, acts as a valve or gateway of certain modes of
awareness to inculate into her audience, a memetic goddess, of sorts.
:
:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0201/05/text/spectrum4.html

The mother of all book clubs

Date: 05/01/2002

Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement can be worth millions to an author. Phillip
McCarthy examines the impact of the world’s most powerful literary promoter.

When Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was anointed by Oprah Winfrey in
August as the 42nd choice of her phenomenally influential television book
club, his publisher immediately went back to the printer for another
500,000 copies. That reprint was the equivalent of a $US1.5 million (almost
$3 million) windfall for Franzen personally, so it caused something of a
scandal when he began to question the accolade and to disparage Winfrey.

Her five-year-old club had honoured some “schmaltzy” books, he complained,
and her big “O” logo would “corporatise” his book jacket. Worse, he
fretted, such a mass-market honour might compromise his place in the
“high-art literary tradition”.

As TV’s high priestess of self-help, Winfrey has learned a lot over the
years about bad energy and obsessing about negatives. So she didn’t
vindictively yank Franzen’s status. But she did withdraw his invitation for
one of the perks of membership: sitting down to a televised dinner with her
to discuss the book. She didn’t, she said in her best Oprah-jargon, want to
make anyone feel “uncomfortable or conflicted”.

If Franzen, 42, thought his quixotic stance would be applauded in literary
circles, he hadn’t visited his publisher’s marketing department for a
while. In a media-saturated world books are business – mostly controlled by
giant communications corporations like Bertelsmann and News Corp – and
Winfrey has a breathtaking ability to move them. She’s the biggest thing to
happen to the industry economics since amazon.com. Besides, Winfrey doesn’t
choose trash.

As Robert Gottlieb, a former editor of the esteemed publishing house of
Knopf and of The New Yorker, put it: “Her choices seem to me to be very
solid, honourable books with feeling and some kind of substance.” Other
literary heavyweights are less reserved. In a recent interview with the
Herald, the German writer Bernhard Schlink , author of The Reader, said:
“She is one of the 10 people I have met in my life who really has charisma.
She really knows a lot about books, literature and culture. I really admire
her. And she makes all these people read who otherwise would just maybe
read magazines.”

Winfrey might wear her heart on her sleeve, as mandated by the demands of a
successful daytime television franchise, but as far as books are concerned
the heart is also in the right place. The book club came about because it
was the most commercially feasible way for her to introduce some literary
content on her show since, before its launch in 1997, her ratings fell
every time she did a show on a book or an author.

The important thing, of course, was that she was a reader and wanted to
find a formula to add books to her show; she might be bossy but she has
arguably done her audience a greater service than re-treading old shows on
shopaholics and lazy husbands.

None of the usual pulpy, mass-market suspects – Danielle Steele and Mary
Higgins Clark, or even Stephen King or Scott Turow – has ever appeared on
the Oprah Book Club list. But Franzen’s whine was not merely the
condescension of a white male. Even Winfrey’s favourite writer, the
three-time nominee Toni Morrison, was caught off guard when she realised
that Winfrey was a more valuable sales engine than her Nobel Prize.

“I’d never heard of such a thing,” she said back in 1996 when her
19-year-old novel, Song of Solomon, became Winfrey’s second selection.
“When I got the call, with the news, all I could think of was, ‘Who’s going
to buy a book because of Oprah?'”

The answer came fairly quickly and astonishingly. Song of Solomon had been
a modest hit on its own, and picked up steam when Morrison won her Nobel
Prize in 1993, and in the 10 years before its Winfrey selection had sold
360,000 copies. But with Winfrey’s seal the publisher immediately churned
out 730,000 copies, which were snapped up in weeks and soon after that the
book broke the million-copies barrier.

Essentially, a book that had long ago been consigned to the backlist
suddenly became a bestseller. Until Winfrey that sort of thing hardly ever
happened in publishing, but now it happens as often as she cares to pick up
an old book.

A nod from her is, in her sharing, caring way, a bit like a cash-register
hug. It seems to be worth close to a million copies for an author: an
extraordinary number when you consider that in America 100,000 is pretty
respectable. Her current selection, A Fine Balance by the Indian-born
writer Rohinton Mistry, is pretty indicative. Before Winfrey there were
64,000 copies in print. His US publisher has just churned out 700,000 more.

Mistry’s selection was announced only in December, so it’s still early, but
as the Oprah effect goes, that’s fairly modest. Possibly that’s because
Mistry’s book, about politics and corruption in India, lacks some of the
American immediacy of the average Winfrey tome. Consider, for example, the
fate of Chris Bohjalian’s more accessible novel, Midwives, which jumped
from 100,000 copies to 1.6 million after its selection in 1998.

Publishers Weekly once estimated that for every 12 million books sold on
Winfrey’s say-so, industry sales jumped by $US120 million. So if you
extrapolated those sorts of figures over the club’s five-year existence –
more than 43 selections in all – you have an extraordinary number of books
flying off the shelves because of her.

What she has done with her book club is what Rupert Murdoch never managed
to do with HarperCollins or William Morrow. It’s what the American media
mogul Si Newhouse couldn’t do with Random House before giving up and
selling it. It’s called synergy. It’s the idea of having a pipeline of
content to cross-promote and cross-pollinate books with other properties,
movie studios or magazines, in the stable.

Winfrey, of course, is not a book publisher. But she has been able to
leverage, to use the buzz word, her clout as a literary promoter to cement
premium access and enduring relationships to pursue her other enterprises.
Last year she launched

O magazine, a hugely successful start-up, and authors who routinely decline
writing assignments from newspapers and magazines crop up in its pages on
less than weighty topics. Winfrey’s television audience is so vast and so
on her touchy-feely wavelength that recently Time magazine described the
start-up of O as “the most successful magazine launch in history”. This for
a magazine that month in and month out has only one cover model: Winfrey.
Time’s accolade came in a piece anointing her as one of the globe’s 25 most
influential executives.

The author Winfrey has honoured most is Toni Morrison, who has three books
on the list: The Bluest Eye, Paradise and Song of Solomon. So, given that
she turned another Morrison novel, Beloved, into a movie, is there some
sort of conflict of interest there? Or is it just some canny vertical
integration of the sort that News Corp or Time Warner would be envious?

It hardly matters to the Winfrey audience; their heroine oozes empathy when
she has Morrison on the show. As Winfrey says unashamedly on her Web site,
Morrison is “the best writer, living or dead, and I love her work”.

In any case, the second most honoured author, Wally Lamb, is a white man
whose literary pedigree notably lacks Morrison’s Nobel Prize cache. Lamb
has two books on Winfrey’s list. But he does tackle Winfrey-style topics.
The heroine of his first choice, She’s Come Undone, confronts family
dysfunction, obesity, sexual ambiguity, self-delusion and madness – but
with humour, good grace and a redemptive ending.

And while book publishers no doubt attempt all sorts of extravagances to
try to curry favour for their books and their authors, there aren’t too
many in publishing who doubt that she is as scrupulous as any busy media
mogul can be about the way she selects her books. While the process by
which particular novels arrive on her nightstand in Chicago is unclear, it
is clear that she reads every book that ends up on her list.

Perhaps the other element that makes Winfrey so valuable to publishers –
and so different from other media prepared to spotlight a book or author –
is that her book club deals almost exclusively with fiction. Fiction lacks
the news angle that makes, say, a celebrity biography, or a Seymour Hersh
political deconstruction, perfect for chat shows or feature interviews. So
until Winfrey it was much harder to generate coverage for fiction unless
the author’s very success became a phenomenon (John Grisham, Stephen King)
or they became personalities in their own right (Jackie Collins, Jacqueline
Susann).

Only a handful of non-fiction books have made Winfrey’s list, and those
that have give some insight into her priorities and interests. One was the
fourth volume of the autobiography of the black poet and activist Maya
Angelou, The Heart of a Woman, chosen in 1997. A more recent one, from May
last year, was Malika Oufkir’s account of falling from grace with the
Moroccan royal family, Stolen Lives: 20 Years in a Desert Jail.

There are recurring themes among the books that have received Winfrey’s
imprimatur, and isolating the key elements of her choices is neither hugely
mystifying nor especially surprising. They are not that much different from
the content of her daily television show, her monthly magazine or, for that
matter, the themes of the movies that she has championed.

Like most of us she is drawn to books to which she can connect personally,
and inevitably the work and struggle of women, particularly black women,
are a recurring element, especially if they also deal inspirationally with
family, relationships and lessons learned. “Living your best life,” one of
those self-help-infused Oprah-isms that often bookend tales of redemption
on her show, has a place on her bookshelf, too.

A fairly typical example is Cane River by the black writer Lalita Tademy,
the book-club pick in June last year. A fictionalised account of four
generations of the author’s family, beginning with a girl born into slavery
in Louisiana, it follows them into freedom and their struggles for equality
right up to the civil rights movement. The theme is reminiscent of both
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. And they were
two books that so impressed Winfrey that she used her clout to have them
turned into movies with parts for herself in each, with varying success.

For women, particularly black writers, Winfrey amounts to a one-woman
support network. And in a society run on market economics, that’s not
something even the most reactive of quota-loathing American conservatives
can quarrel with, much to their private consternation.

But Winfrey certainly does not assume a stance of predictable advocacy
about her book selections, even when the elements seem to be there for it.
There’s some critical rigour to her choices, evidenced as much by what she
omits as what she includes.

About the most successful black author in the US these days is the
telegenic E.Lynn Harris, who churns out breathy novels about the
middle-class black experience like his latest, Any Way The Wind Blows. His
characters deal with traumatic pasts, unresolved family issues, divorce,
sexual uncertainty and racism. That’s all very Oprah, but Harris’s books
are a bit too trite for her. He has never made the list.

Which might give Harris further grounds to be a little jealous of Jonathan
Franzen and his elitism. Franzen has gone on to win a National Book Prize
and recently disclosed to People magazine, of all high-art literary
journals, that he was moving out of his Manhattan walk-up apartment for “a
roomier pad”. The least he could probably do is name a room after Winfrey.

This posting completes my thoughts from the previous posting. Any further
follow-ups of mine, if any, will be at my philosophy discussion area.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath

>Would you grant us permission to reprint your posting on our website?

Yes. You may do reasonable edits of it. Please point to one or both of my
sites below and send me the URL of your article.


I mentioned Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State —
an excellent, *most* jarring book, needed to shake reformers out of complacent
assumptions that prohibitionists are merely well-meaning but
mistaken/misinformed. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275950425 —
Drug Warriors and Their Prey, by Richard Lawrence Miller, April 1996. “One of
the most powerful books that you will ever read.” — a reader.


Two points or conclusions following from my previous posting:

1. If the so-called drug problem went away, the prohibitionist leaders would
hasten to put it back into place as quickly as possible.

2. What so jarred and shook me about the cliché tepid-reformer platitudes I
quoted at the start of the posting was that I clearly saw the *common
assumptions* shared by the prohibitionists and reformers, what can be called
the “drugs are bad” paradigm. I reject the common paradigm shared by
prohibitionists and half-informed, semi- (or pseudo-)progressive drug-policy
reformers: the “drugs are bad” paradigm. That paradigm asserts two key,
essential points that thinking people should absolutely reject:

o That it would be desirable to eliminate psychoactive drugs.

The fact is, psychoactive drugs provide many people with what they claim
are the most profound, brilliant, valuable, and meaningful experience of their
life.

o That the war on drugs is sincere and is intended to reduce drug use.

The fact is, the war on drugs is insincere; it is entirely pretense and
the leading prohibitionists know it. The pseudo-progressive drug-policy
reformers have nothing to teach these prohibitionist pretenders, these con
artists, that they don’t already know about the true benefits and risks of
psychoactive drugs. Thus such reformers are barking at shadows, at an
illusory enemy that doesn’t really exist as it is projected. Reformers are
fully hypnotized by the fake, cheap act of make-believe put on by the leading
prohibitionist profiteers.

The main problem of the reformers now is their own ignorance about the real
mindset and goals of the prohibitionists, not that of the prohibitionist
leaders who know quite thoroughly what they are doing in their manufacture of
consent among the sheep-like television viewers who superficially support
prohibition. But these propagandist manipulators also know that support for
the drug war is, although a mile wide, only an inch deep. These
prohibitionist racketeers know the drug war is running on fumes, sheer
momentum that is bound to run down. That’s why September 11th was dubbed
“America’s New War”.


There are four main, distinct groups to consider and interrelate in the
drug-policy reform battle:

o Prohibitionist leaders (con artists).

o The sheep subject to the manufacture of consent, who superficially support
the drug war, believing that it is sincere. Television-viewing voters who pay
slight attention to the drug war and debate about it.

o The pseudo-progressive drug-policy reformers, who try to inform and
manipulate the sheep but themselves fall victim to the assumptions that prop
up the propaganda (drugs are undesirable, and the drug war sincerely intends
to reduce drug use). The majority of active drug-policy reformers fall into
this worldview or espoused worldview. Within this group are two main
subgroups:
— The deluded ones who believe drugs are bad and believe the drug war is
sincere
— The “strategic” ones who believe drugs are good and the drug war is
insincere but who publicly pretend to believe that drugs are bad and the drug
war is sincere.

o The critically and historically educated, personal-freedom loving, radical,
social-libertarian, and also experientially religious (radical mystic)
legalizers. Sites: http://www.alchemind.org, http://www.tripzine.com. These
are the reformers who believe drugs are good and the drug war is sincere, and
who publicly *profess* these beliefs. This is the only position that is not
deluded and that is honest and that is not intent on profiting from an
industry of profit-driven persecution in the guise of benevolence.

It is up to the individual reformer to decide whether to public ally profess
what they believe, or to covertly and strategically distort and hide their
real position. What must first be accomplished to break out of drug-reform
stagnation is to, first, abandon the delusion that drugs are bad and that the
drug war is sincere.

In the categories I define above, I always group the two assumptions about the
desirability of drugs and the sincerity of the drug war. If you are informed
enough to know that psychoactive drugs are good, you are informed enough to
know that the drug war is insincere. If you are uninformed enough to believe
that drugs are essentially undesirable, then you are uninformed enough to be
conned into believing that the drug war is sincere.

It is an open question: who differs more in their professed versus actual
beliefs: the prohibitionist leaders, or that subgroup of the
pseudo-progressive drug-policy reformers who believes drugs to be desirable
but professes to consider them undesirable, claiming that it would be good if
drug use could be eliminated? They are both engaged in propagandistic
distortion to hide their real beliefs from the mass of voters they are
attempting to covertly manipulate and persuade through trickery.


Pro-drug legalizers should expose the tepid pseudo-reformers as forked-tongue
counter-deceivers who aim to cure lies by lies, and to replace profit-driven
coercion by profit-driven coercion. The two opposite kinds of reformers can
cooperate strategically, but let us all recognize which is which — the two
kinds of reformers radically disagree. One believes, or poses as believing,
the “drugs are bad” paradigm and the “drug-reduction war is sincere”
assumption. The other believes that drugs are good and the drug-reduction war
is a giant hoax, a racket, a sham, the royal scam of the century.

Prohibition, in the hidden heart of its leaders, is nothing but a make-believe
witch hunt driven purely by greed and malice on the part of the supposedly
well-meaning prohibitionists. These bleeding-heart prohibitionist actors are
deliberate, extreme moral hypocrites: they knowingly falsely accuse drug users
of those evil motives they themselves are so intimately familiar with: greed,
immorality, and disdain for ethics, with racism and the need to public ally
demonize others to apparently elevate themselves, to top it off. Reformers
don’t have a ghost of a chance until they comprehend the depth of amorality
and ill-will that motivates the heart of the opportunist, self-serving
prohibitionist leader. This enlightenment about motives, about who is good
and who is evil boils down to the question:

Do the prohibitionist leaders really mean well? Are they sincere?

They do not and they are not. Here is a heavily armed army of aggression, led
by prohibitionist schemers, bearing down on its own populace it is sword to
protect, shooting and poisoning at whim, with an aim of maximizing its own
profits and whipping the drug use/drug repression cycle up into a frenzy, with
equal parts of DARE’ing and Just Say No, to drive the prices up. What is the
impotent response of the reformers? To inform this army that their tactics
are causing harm and are not reducing drug use — both points which are in
fact considered success, not failure, at the actual goals of the
prohibitionist army. What better encouragement could the reformers offer such
prohibitionists to continue their same tactics? Such reformers are to blame
for much of their own problems.

The army of prohibitionists, especially at the top, *intends* to cause harm,
and *intends* to drive drug use up. Blacks are dead, jailed, everyone is in
terror because of the drug squads? Terrific! We’re achieving our goals! The
only way to withdraw public support for such a mission and such a covert
definition of “success” and “winning”, is to expose the entire system of
deception and covert actual goals and mode of operation to the public. But of
course before that is possible, the drug-policy reformers must themselves pull
their heads out from their worldview and understand the real motives, values,
and dynamics driving the prohibitionists. “Reformer, reform thine own
worldview.”

In the Kingdom of God, the least shall be greatest and the greatest shall be
least. Who is the least? Comparing jail terms and which “crime” is demonized
the most, in the U.S. — capital of prohibitionism — “the least” would
evidently be the drug enthusiast or even the drug-Eucharist worshipper. The
values of the prohibitionists are more upside-down than the half-informed
pseudo-reformers can fathom.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience
http://www.reformnav.org — rapid-navigation portal for drug policy reform
sites

At a glance, that posting seems related to D’Aquili and company.

The Mystical Mind : Probing the Biology of Religious Experience
by Eugene G. D’Aquili, Andrew B. Newberg
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0800631633

Why God Won’t Go Away : Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
by Andrew Newberg M.D., Eugene G. D’Aquili Ph.D., Vince Rause
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345440331

Brain, Symbol & Experience : Towards a Neurophenomenology of Human
Consciousness
by Charles D. Laughlin, John McManus, Eugene G. D’Aquili
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0231081391

Click author’s name for more titles.

Shows a pop-Christian perspective on rave culture, equating it with drugs. I
wonder if it talks about entheogens as the true flesh of Christ? I once asked
for books about drugs in a Christian bookstore, but they came up with almost
nothing. Evangelist scholar Dave Hunt has an almost favorable view of
entheogens in a recent book; he only warns that entheogens have led to worship
of spirits other than the Holy Spirit — a complaint I can relate to; people
experience encounters with fantastic creatures where I hope they would instead
experience what it means philosophically to be a creature that is entirely
produced-forth, in every thought and action, by the Ground of Being and as
part of the Ground of Being.


All the Rave – A Novel, by Tim LaHaye, Bob DeMoss. Published Jan 2002.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0849943205

“It’s Labor Day weekend – and it is turning out to be a holiday that will not
soon be forgotten. More than 15,000 ravers have gathered for a 72-hour dance
party at the waterfront warehouse in Philadelphia. Kat is strung out on drugs
and next to her lies the body of a dead boy who overdosed; Heather falls in
love with a college freshman who threatens to leave her with nothing but
feelings of rejection and serious regret. Experiencing firsthand the dangers
of an unguarded heart, the girls are forced to reevaluate God’s true place in
their lives.” From the Back Cover — “It was the first night of the Memorial
Day weekend and Kat Koffman figured she’d dance the night away at a massive,
East Coast rave. She’d go to the beach in the morning with friends from
school. At least that was the plan. But when classmates Jodi Adams and Bruce
Arnold found her, Kat lay unconscious on the second floor of a rat infested
warehouse. Beside her was an empty syringe–and a dead boy. Jodi wanted
answers–and justice. How did the boy die? Was Kat next? Why did the syringe
look familiar to Bruce? And why did the police refuse to help? Nothing could
prepare Jodi for the fact that some kids are worth more dead than alive. And,
just when she thought she’d uncover the truth, she got more than she bargained
for. The Russian Mafia.”

>And why did the police refuse to help?

The ultimate answer for these questions is, “Because of the Prohibition
gravy-train.”

My university library has this in hardcover for $85 but now it’s finally
shipping in paperback for $27.

Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, by Susanne Bobzien, March 1999.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199247676

“Bobzien presents the definitive study of one of the most interesting
intellectual legacies of the ancient Greeks: the Stoic theory of causal
determinism. She explains what it was, how the Stoics justified it, and how it
relates to their views on possibility, action, freedom, moral responsibility,
and many other topics. She demonstrates the considerable philosophical
richness and power that these ideas retain today.”

My gathered info:
http://www.egodeath.com/determinismbooks.htm#_Toc518056556

“The definitive study of one of the most interesting intellectual legacies of
the ancient Greeks: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. She explains what
it was, how the Stoics justified it, and how it relates to their views on
possibility, action, freedom, moral responsibility, and many other topics. She
demonstrates the considerable philosophical richness and power that these
ideas retain today.”

“The first comprehensive study of one of the most important intellectual
legacies of the ancient Greek world: the Stoic theory of causal determinism.
The book identifies the main problems that the Stoics addressed and
reconstructs the theory, and explores how they squared their determinism with
their conceptions of possibility, action, freedom, and moral responsibility,
and how they defended it against objections and criticism by other
philosophers.”

“This is an awe-inspiring work….It is extraordinarily ambitious. It aims to
recover and understand, so far as the sources allow, the entire early Stoic
theory of fate, causal determinism, and responsibility. It achieves this
ambition while at the same time showing how immensely more difficult the task
is than anyone had appreciated before….It will most certainly be the first
work that everybody interested has to get to grips with. They will have to
start here both because the book is a model of scholarly method and because it
is an outstanding example of lucid philosophical thinking in an area where
clear thought is extremely difficult.” — Miles Burnyeat, All Souls College,
Oxford


Contents

Introduction
1. Determinism and Fate
2. Two Chrysippean Arguments for Causal Determinism
3. Modality, Determinism, and Freedom
4. Divination, Modality,and Universal Regularity
5. Fate, Action, and Motivation: The Idle Argument
6. Determinism and Moral Responsibility: Chrysippus’s Compatibilism
7. Freedom and that which Depends on us: Epictetus and Early Stoics
8. A Later Stoic Theory of Compatibilism
Bibliography; Indexes


I don’t necessarily recommend that as the first book to read or the clearest
book. What we need is a history of ideas about determinism in its many
guises.

Everyone interested in determinism should read Richard Double’s Metaphilosophy
and Free Will – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195107624 – explaining
the different motives of what I’d called the freewill *moralists* versus the
determinist *philosophers*. I had already concluded what this book lays out
systematically: that philosophers who advocate freewill are motivated by
desire to prop up conventional moral agency and moral thinking, while
philosophers who advocate determinism are motivated by desire for a coherent
model of the world — the debate amounts to morality versus truth, or the
moralists versus the truth-seekers.

http://www.episcopalbookstore.com/pages/news.asp

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or order from us online is held in strict confidentiality. We will not share
it with anyone, for profit or for free. You may order from us with confidence
that your privacy rights are protected.***

***As of the end of October 2001 there has been a slight change in the above
policy. The antiterrorism bill has been signed into law. It gives the federal
government expanded authority to search business records, including the titles
of books purchased by our customers. The new law includes a gag order that
prevents us from disclosing “to any other person” the fact that we have
received an order to produce documents. The Episcopal Bookstore will resist
any requests as far as we can. Except for complying with this law, we will
continue to keep your information strictly confidential.

The events occurring since the September 11th event keep most of us on edge,
not only us in this ministry-which-is-the-store, but, it seems, to many
others. We’ve noticed a different pattern to the frequency of shoppers
visiting our store. We have also seen a dramatic increase in orders through
this Web site. Apparently many customers are more comfortable ordering without
leaving their home or workplace.
If this fits you at this time, please know that we will do all we can to meet
your needs as an individual, with our utmost care, and with the dedication to
get your purchases to you quickly and safely. The increased number of sales
has not effected our quick, personal service to you, our brothers and sisters
in Christ.


More:
http://www.mapinc.org/find
Search past year for “tattered”. This case — based around a drug book bought
from Tattered Cover — is still in development.


http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n052/a04.html?1482

DRUGS SQUAD FUMES AS BOOKSHOP SHIELDS READER

Prize-Winning US Writers Queue Up To Defend Privacy Of Customer Who Bought
Uncle Fester’s Illicit Manual

It never won a Pulitzer or appeared on the New York Times bestseller lists but
a 400-page book about the manufacture of illicit drugs by an author known as
Uncle Fester is at the centre of a legal battle over the privacy of the US
book-buying public. In what has been described as a landmark case for the US
book industry, the Tattered Cover bookshop in Denver, Colorado, has spent 18
months resisting the attempts of both police and courts to obtain the identity
of a customer who purchased Uncle Fester’s opus, Advanced Techniques of
Clandestine Drug Laboratories .

Many of the country’s most celebrated authors, publishers and booksellers are
supporting the shop, which has argued that handing over the information would
be a serious attack on free speech.

‘There is a right to privacy in this country and that includes the right to
read what we like without government interference,’ says award-winning
novelist Michael Chabon. ‘If the police get what they are after in this case,
what is to stop them demanding to know all sorts of things – like who has been
reading books about any subject the authorities deem to be ‘dangerous’, such
as religious beliefs that don’t fit into the so-called mainstream.’

Chabon, who won the Pulitzer last year for his novel The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay, is one of several leading writers, including David Eggers,
Dorothy Allison and the children’s book author Daniel Handler, who have giving
financial support to the Tattered Cover’s legal defence fund, along with the
American Booksellers’ Foundation.

‘People shop in bookstores on the understanding that their choices are
confidential,’ says Chris Finan, president of the ABF’s Foundation for Free
Expression. ‘There are a lot of books about subjects – mental health, sexual
dysfunction – that we do not want our wives or husbands to know we’ve been
reading about. If people know the police can get that kind of information
they will not shop for those books.’

The case centres on a raid by drug enforcement officers at a trailer park near
Denver in March last year. The Uncle Fester book and another called Advanced
Techniques of Clandestine Psychedelic Drug Laboratories were found inside a
trailer owned by a man suspected of operating a methamphetamine lab. An
envelope discovered in his rubbish bin contained an invoice from the Tattered
Cover.

The following day four plainclothes officers arrived at the shop with a search
warrant, demanding to know if the books were bought there and, if so, by whom.
The shop’s owner, Joyce Meskis, refused to provide the information. ‘It is
not our job to do the police’s work for them,’ she said.

Denver police then asked that it enforce the subpoena. At a subsequent
hearing, lawyers for the bookshop argued the police had failed to interview
other witnesses who could have helped convict the suspect. Details of a
customer’s purchasing record were not sufficiently important to the criminal
case to justify the ‘chilling effect’ that releasing such information would
have on the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment, they said.

However, the court upheld the police request – a decision which has been
challenged by the shop’s owners in the State’s Supreme Court. A ruling on the
appeal is expected in the next few weeks.

The case has echoes of that brought by Kenneth Starr against two bookshops in
Washington DC during his investigation into the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’.
When it emerged that Lewinsky – who was said to have given President Clinton
several books as presents – was a regular customer at the shops, Starr
demanded to see her purchase records. The shops’ owners resisted his request,
but the case never reached court after Lewinsky struck a deal with the former
Independent Counsel.

Finan said yesterday there was a growing problem with authorities seeking
private information from bookshops. ‘I’m afraid this may be a bad idea whose
time has come, and the chilling effect on publishing could be very serious
indeed. In the Lewinsky case, a false rumour went around that the bookshops
were going to comply with Starr’s request. The effect of that was they saw a
big fall-off in business. People trust bookstores to protect them. If they
don’t have that trust, they will not shop there.’

The Tattered Cover, spread over four floors in downtown Denver, is a required
stop on the book tour schedule for every bestselling author and has a
reputation for stocking radical, independently published books that have
little chance of finding shelf space in chain stores such as Borders and
Barnes and Noble.

Meskis said she had been heartened by the support she and her staff had
received from writers, publishers and the public. More than 400 people turned
up at a fund-raising event at a San Francisco bookshop last night.

‘Like us, they realise that everyone in society has to do what they can to
uphold the rule of law but that we also have an obligation to the community to
protect the constitution. When you have one responsibility bumping up against
another, then that’s when the courts should decide.’

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0202/11/text/opinion5.html

Giving a good book a bad name: the Bible exposed

Date: 11/02/2002

The conception of every Anglican’s favourite translation – the King James –
was far from immaculate, finds Stephen Holt.

THE HECKLER

It’s time to demystify the King James Bible. Though long revered as a
religious and literary treasure of the English-speaking world, it turns out
to have had an unheroic, if not downright unholy, birth.

This sobering view of an Anglophonic icon is the only honest conclusion
that can be drawn from a recent pop-scholarly account, In the Beginning:
The Story of the King James Bible, by Alister McGrath. Professor McGrath is
no dyspeptic irreligious bigot, but Principal of Wycliffe Hall, a
Protestant madrassa at Oxford University.

McGrath’s narrative shows how the King James Bible started life as a
cunning response to theological factionalism in 16th and early 17th century
Britain. This was a disunited kingdom where religious, political and ethnic
hatreds were intertwined in a mixture as bewildering as anything inside
war-torn Afghanistan. The authorised English bible was directed at
protecting the established authority from militant Catholic and Puritan
opponents. It was an important initiative in a kingly war on terrorism.

At times 17th century Britain eerily prefigures the smoke and rubble of the
World Trade Centre and Afghanistan. In 1605, Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up
James I and Parliament. In 1666, the Great Fire of London was attributed,
falsely, to Papists. The cult of martyrdom was universal, able to sanctify
anyone from the Protestant King Charles I down to the humblest harried
Catholic priest. Scripture was seen as “a whole armoury of weapons, both
offensive and defensive”, with rival interpretations exacerbating a
murderous civil war.

The more belligerent Puritans were the Taliban of their age. This was an
era when Protestant hysteria was whipped up by well-born parliamentarians
eager to extirpate the spell of Catholicism. The same hysteria ended up by
republicanising England and purging Parliament.

Retaining supreme power amid this instability depended on successfully
hijacking the deadliest weapon of all – the Bible. Protestant missionaries
spread Bibles across the land but the most popular version of all was
frowned on by the ruling authority. Published in Geneva – the Kandahar of
Calvinism – its text was disfigured with anti-monarchical marginalia.

A non-incendiary English Bible had to be invented. James I, who came to the
English throne in 1603 and had a firm belief in the divine right of kings,
achieved this in a way that would do pride to the craftiest bureaucrat.

The job of concocting a trustworthy translation was entrusted to committees
of Oxbridge mullahs whose malleability was ensured by the lure of
ecclesiastical promotion. Extensive cutting and pasting from the
salvageable parts of previous translations was indulged in, with the final
work vetted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Ecclesiastical power brokers ensured that the decision to impose a
sanitised Bible on a restive nation was surrounded with enough ambiguity to
ensure that nobody involved could be held responsible if things went amiss.

Although the translation of 1611 is known to posterity as the “King James”
or “Authorised” Bible, Professor McGrath points out that no evidence exists
to indicate whether or not the king ever got round to signing a final
document of authorisation. In a fallback position worthy of Humphrey
Appleby, any chance of establishing individual responsibility for the
translation was obliterated after fire swept through the royal archives.

The translation, suffused with the conservatism of England’s Home Counties,
failed to impress the more zealous reformers. The explosive Geneva Bible
was only sidelined when, in 1660, the Puritans succumbed to factionalism
and sought, as the Taliban are doing now, to fade into the wider populace
at large.

A spiritual vacuum resulted. For a century after Puritanism imploded the
King James Bible enjoyed dutiful ecclesiastical rather than popular or
literary regard. In an age of Enlightenment religious terminology was in
bad odour.

It was not until almost two centuries after its initial publication that
the King James Bible finally began to enjoy an unchallenged position in
English literature and religious culture. After the French Revolution – and
until recently – politicised atheism rather than religious fanaticism was
the prime menace in the eyes of the English-speaking world. Sacred texts
were safe and soothing. It was in this atmosphere that the King James Bible
became an enduring cultural delight that would be revered outside the
slowly diminishing host of willing Christian believers.

Stephen Holt is a Canberra writer.

This text file is automatically posted to the discussion group every two
weeks, in order to provide guidelines for writers, to keep the postings
on-topic and help writers know what subjects are considered most desirable
by this audience.

It is possible to write on most any topic and have it be relevant for this
Egodeath discussion group if you show how the posting is related to the
in-scope topics for this discussion group. This group is not formally
moderated, but it is consistently focused on the defined topics, including
peripheral topics if the writer explicitly connects them to the core topics.

— Michael Hoffman

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath — describes
in-scope discussion topics, as follows.

This discussion group covers the cybernetic theory of ego death and
ego transcendence, including:

o Nonreductionistic block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, the Eleusinian mysteries and
cracking the allegorical code of the mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.

Earl Doherty’s work has a weakness that also may be a strength relative to
Christian Literalists. I’ve read about 50% of his published work, and skimmed
more, and the coverage of mystic experiencing seems vanishingly small, as I
would expect from such a “scientific”-styled researcher. Scientific
demythologizers throw out the baby with the bathwater: when Christianity is
discovered to be myth, it vanishes altogether for them. But this lack of
coverage of Christ-shaped religious experiencing, of oneself experienced as
crucified with and as Jesus, enables Doherty to focus on scientific refutation
of the Historical Jesus and do an effective job of this for an audience that
is accustomed to placing their Literalist Christology on a scientific footing.

It is harder for such Literalists to dismiss Doherty than to dismiss Acharya S
(The Christ Conspiracy) or Freke & Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries, Jesus and the
Lost Goddess), who in addition to scientifically refuting the Historical Jesus
also put forth a theory of astrotheology and Gnostic mystic experiencing,
respectively.
All three — the Jesus-myth work of Acharya, Freke & Gandy, and Doherty —
provide uniquely valuable and urgently needed work, in different ways. The
more I read of mainstream Christian scholarship, the more I realize that
Doherty’s work stands in most intense contrast and contradiction with almost
the whole of it. Practically *every* mainstream scholar assumes that Jesus
existed — that point is out of bounds as an investigation for them; for them,
the only question is about the details. The mythic Jesus books by Acharya and
Freke & Gandy may be more radical and more relevant in the long run, into the
era that will be familiar with the no-HJ alternative.

But at the moment, Doherty seems to be the most relevant, the most glaringly
opposite of the wave of recent Historical Jesus and Early Christianity
studies. The more mystical mythic-only Jesus scholars are “opposite” of
mainstream scholars, and Doherty is also “opposite” of mainstream scholars,
but in different ways.

In some respects, the most forceful alternative to the Historical Jesus
unexamined-assumption is not just negative (disproving HJ) but also positive
(providing a full, rich alternative picture of Christianity as mystic
initiation, which I happen to portray as initiation into the mystic altered
state of deterministic ego sacrifice). However, such a twofold move, of
negation of the conventional paradigm together with a positive alternative
paradigm, is too complex for scientific-minded Christian scholars, whether
they are supernaturalists (Literalists), atheists, antisupernaturalist
ethicists (Liberal Christians), or antisupernaturalist spiritualists
(Spiritual Christians).

Not even a New Age Christian is likely to readily follow the move of both
discarding the accustomed assumption of the Historical Jesus (assumed by them
to be a perfect spirituality expert) *and* retaining Christ as a vivid,
profoundly meaningful myth that describes their own mystic experiencing.

To make the proposed positive, mystic-experiencing alternative even more
complicated, I additionally ask people to also accept a certain kind of
frozen-future cosmic determinism — yet not the reigning standard conception
of determinism — together with entheogens as flesh of this now entirely
mythic, yet also molecular and physical, Christ.

And, as I have vividly found, such positive speculation about the meaning of
the Christ figure, when the anchor of the Historical Jesus
unexamined-assumption is discarded, can explode with richness, becoming a
confusing entire *realm* of overloaded, multiple mythic meanings (just as it
was designed to do, as a way of encapsulating any and all central religious
mythemes). Christologies are problematically multiple now, but after
discarding the anchor of the Historical Jesus unexamined-assumption, many
additional viable meanings of the Christ figure are revealed.


Doherty’s method and proposition is easier to follow. How many people, at
this time, feel it is relevant for them to engage in dispute with Doherty?

How many people, at this time, feel it is relevant for them to engage in
dispute with Acharya S’ Christ Conspiracy and her forthcoming book Suns of
God? http://www.truthbeknown.com/introduction.htm

How many people, at this time, feel it is relevant for them to engage in
dispute with The Jesus Mysteries & Jesus and the Lost Goddess?


When I read any recent book about Christianity, a frequently occurring thought
is “Doherty has refuted this Historical Jesus assumption this author
thoughtlessly buys into, and thus has rendered this entire book deeply
problematic.” The most glaring contrast is between scientific Christian
historical scholarship, which adheres to the Historical Jesus
unexamined-assumption, and Doherty’s similarly scientific-style scholarship.
Acharya and Freke & Gandy are obviously outsiders, obviously different than
the Christian scholars, and are currently easy for Christian scholars to
dismiss because they are so different in method, style, and overall concerns.

Doherty may have more of an immediate impact because his is *so similar* in
his method and many aspects of his style, to the Christian scholars. Doherty
has infiltrated the methodology, using the method and style of the Christian
scholars to refute the unexamined foundation of their entire system.

Most books about Christianity are not mystic-experiencing oriented enough for
me to think, “Freke & Gandy have refuted this Historical Jesus assumption this
mystic author thoughtlessly buys into, and thus has rendered this entire book
problematic.” The most mystical books, such as The Beginnings of
Christianity: Essene Mystery, Gnostic Revelation and the Christian Vision, by
Andrew Welburn, seem to be completely unruffled by anything the mythic-only
Jesus scholars can propose. Welburn, as normal, adheres to the Historical
Jesus unexamined-assumption, but that is already in contrast with his deeply
mythical, mystic-experiencing portrayal of what proto-Christianity was all
about. Perhaps there is no great contrast between mystical Christian writers
who, as normal, adhere to the Historical Jesus unexamined-assumption, and
those mythic-only Jesus scholars who positively assert that Christianity was
essentially about initiation experiencing in which one was mystically
crucified and resurrected.

Mystical mythic-Jesus scholars point the way past the Historical Jesus
confusion, but for most Christian scholars today, Doherty’s work is in the
position to be more relevant and influential, because its style is limited to
that of scientific scholarship about Christianity, and focused on that
methodology. In the longer term, I would expect and hope that the positive
mystic-experiencing hypotheses are influential. Of course Christianity has
always been many things and has spread many ways. Rodney Stark provides some
non-religious explanation of the rapid spread of the Christian religion, but
as a sociologist, he does as the scientists do, omitting the
mystic-experiencing initiation aspect at the same time as he abandons the
assumption that people adopt Christianity for theological and religious
reasons (he asserts that the real driving reasons are social and practical,
even if the converted later assume they were motivated by
religious/theological reasons).


The liberal Christians formed “religionless Christianity” meaning a system of
ethics more than of religious experiencing; similarly, scientific scholars of
Christian origins are inclined to consider early Christianity as a political
and social movement without considering the mystic experiencing of Christ.

Using a Ken Wilberian “integral studies” approach, we may find that even if
mystic Christian experiencing is the highest form of Christianity, and even if
the history of Christian mystic experiencing is the most lofty kind of history
of Christianity, other, non-mystical threads of Christian history (such as
social or political) are even more important if we measure in terms of sheer
quantity of influence. There’s no way we can say “esoteric Christianity is
real Christianity”, any more than Theology and Creedalism is real
Christianity. Christianity may be best thought of as a free-floating nexus of
power and meaning, which any group with any goal may harness to their own end.
We tend to assume people identify with Christ in order to secure eternal life,
but that’s just the simple official story.

Thus I do not quite go so far as to say that Doherty clears away false,
Literalist Christianity so that the more mystic-initiation oriented
mythic-Jesus scholars can at last present the real, mystic Christianity.
Christianity is what Christianity is: predominantly exoteric, largely social
and political, and at an elite level, a hidden tradition of esoteric
initiation and mystic experiencing. I propose that Christianity should be
considered a 2-level system of Literalist/exoteric and fully
esoteric/mythic/mystic-experiencing, but the exoteric level may be considered
as more than one thread:

1. Social
2. Political
3. Religious in the familiar sense. This familiar sense is exoteric
religiosity, which solidified and justified the egoic moral self and guided
that self by a promise of eternal temporal duration, on the one hand, and the
moral ballast of punishment and reward, on the other.

Starks’ theory of religion is that people adopted Christianity because it
worked for them, but that theory only covers exoteric religion: it explains
that Christianity “worked” successfully to give egoic people what they needed;
that egoic, Literalist, exoteric Christianity served to effectively prop up
the egoic, freewillist, morally culpable (and empowered) agent.

4. Christianity has also served, though as poorly as other religions, to
provide esoteric religious experience of ego transcendence. I get the
impression Start overlooks this dimension of ways in which “Christianity
spread because it worked (socially and psychologically)”.

Doherty refutes thread 3 above, which also affects or weakens thread 1 and 2
as we’ve known them, but doesn’t affect thread 4 much if at all. The mystic
mythic-Jesus scholars ultimately build up thread 4. In shifting from
Literalist to mythic-only Jesus, we move from emphasizing exoteric to esoteric
Christianity. Doherty focuses on reducing exoteric; others focus on
increasing esoteric Christianity. But I’d hesitate to say that esoteric is
“real” Christianity; rather, it’s “higher”. Portraying esoteric as “higher”
Christianity is justified because esoteric happens after learning the
exoteric. My further detailed portrayal of this 2-level system accords with
Pagels’ Gnostic Paul: exoteric naive freewill morality comes first, and
esoteric determinism is discovered later (and is quasi-transcended), in mystic
experiencing. Lower Christianity is not so much “false”, as a needed,
stage-appropriate fairy tale to prop up the miraculous delusion of independent
egoic sovereignty; exoteric moral religion provides and nourishes our seeming
ability to change what our own future will be (a sloppy, confused notion
inherent in the initial, egoic worldmodel).

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Excerpts from the song Night Is a’ Comin’ – by Warm Sounds (track 110 on my
Pop Sike Comp Mix CDR). In the common schizophrenic light, happy, trippy,
heavy, freaky style.


Ha-lleluja, Ha-lleluja, Halleluja, Halleluja, Ha-l-le-lu…

Somewhere high an elusive fire keeps you burning like a million stars
In my head the grateful dead are peering through the bog
The rainbow trees in a garden thoughts are making ripples on a lake of glass
The person you, suspect is who, is disappearing fast
…
Well the giant comes down from the rooftop shouting
Doesn’t anybody know my name
Yes we do, your name’s guru, and everything remains the same

When it’s light and you’ve got no sight
And inner nothingness is like a knot
Can I be so bold as to ask you what you’re growing in your flower pot
…
(guitar freakout)
…
[backwards vocals, fading out on runaway echo-feedback]

After September 11th, suddenly Usan (“American”) Christendom has belatedly
realized that the predictions from a hundred years ago have practically come
true: suddenly, conservative Christianity is merely a marginal cult, and the
majority of self-identified “Christians” are Biblical illiterates and hop not
only between denominations for their occasional Church visit, but among
different religions — it’s a fluid, post-modern kind of Christianity that
takes an extreme cafeteria pick-and-choose approach. My preliminary research
shows that official Christianity is seriously running scared. The trends
started before Sep. 11, but that event has crystallized this awareness of the
trends. During the past few months, Christianity is entering its greatest
time of tribulation since the Reformation. I am saving money to buy some of
the next wave of books on Christian trends. It should be interesting.

And one popular, all-too-typical Christian apologetics book, The Case for
Christ, is up at sales position 343 at Amazon — there are only 342 books that
sell more copies than it, and the reviews mention Earl Doherty’s detailed
point-for-point rebuttal frequently. Meanwhile, I am seeing Freke & Gandy’s
books The Jesus Mysteries, and Jesus and the Lost Goddess at every regular
bookstore, even an Episcopalian bookstore. On top of that, Huston Smith’s
book Cleansing the Doors of Perception is spotted in most Christianity
sections of regular bookstores. It should be interesting.

Back to the books. Please keep the discussion group alive. I may be able to
start work on a glossary of ego death while reading the books.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>http://www.amptone.com/buddadualstage30.htm
>http://www.reverendmusical.com/reverend/amps_etc/hellhound_40_60.html

>Regarding your Amp Tone site, I asked if you were like “the chosen one” and

then you blew my mind with that Amanita/Christ trip. Although most of the
stuff at Egodeath.com is too heavy for me to comment on, your Amptone
editorial [http://www.amptone.com/overview.htm%5d still stands virtually alone
in its articulation of the deeper aspects of amplified electric guitar tone.

>I have thought on occasion that harmonic feedback has a cosmic significance

akin to Nietzsche’s infinite loop (especially with lots of delay [echo] and
reverb), but my knowledge of both is too shallow for it to be anything more
than an amusement. Just wanted to note my admiration and appreciation of your
dedicated and enlightened perspective.

>Hawkwind’s “Warrior on the Edge of Time” album is some sort of

altered-consciousness classic.

>Also Monster Magnet’s take on the “space-rock” genre may be worth checking

out.


Here is some more Monster Magnet psychoacoustic High Art.

Album: Brotherhood of Electric: Operational Directives. Artist: Wellwater
Conspiracy — Feb 1999. “A multifaceted sound that lurks somewhere between
the sonic realms of Seattle grunge and psychedelic garage. Showcasing the
talents of ex-Monster Magnet guitarist John McBain and former Soundgarden
drummer Matt Cameron, the Wellwater Conspiracy exist as an adventurous studio
project steeped in ’60s psychedelia.”
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000HZTJ


Monster Magnet? Watch out for the control vortex with the Minotaur in the
middle; it will pull you in and spit out only bones, ending in a great
victorious defeat. “Oh no, not that thought, don’t think That Thought, that
right there is the one not to think — but it is beautiful as well as
terrible!” That is the thought that kills, the Realization of the
metaphysical impotence and inherent nullity of one’s personal control with
respect to spacetime.


The following new Heavy Metal album has a release date of November 14, 2001 —
the same day as my revelation that frozen-future determinism is the key to a
dirt-simple, rational mystic interpretation of the Christ allegory.

Album: Fed To Your Head. Artist: Scorched Earth. “[Neo-acid/psych guitarist]
Bevis Frond under a pseudonym with help from the Alchemysts and the Lucky
Bishops. A “heavy metal” record in the vein of the early 70’s style.”
November 14, 2001.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005QGA8


Spectators of my discussion group may regret that I am so absent. However,
the group is influencing me by requesting coverage of Buddhism. I don’t like
the burden of explicitly covering religions other than esoteric Christianity,
but recent trends in religion concur that I am obliged to address a Buddhist
and Islamic audience, and a Hindu audience, really as much as a Christian
audience. When I committed to tackling the project of making rational sense
out of the Christ allegory in 1988, it was true at that time that Christianity
towered above the other religions in Western culture. But that was 14 long
years ago. The New Age isn’t new anymore, and Buddhism is no longer exotic to
U.S. natives.

Making sense of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam in terms of rational mystic
experiencing is easy compared to Christianity, especially when one already has
cracked the riddle of Christ as the principle of determinism. Also recall
that my core philosophy was based on Zen, not Christianity. Like in Watts’
books The Supreme Identity and Behold the Spirit, we can use Eastern religions
to at last solve the riddle of the meaning of the dominant Western religion.
So first I had to make rational sense of Watts’ portrayal of Eastern
enlightenment, especially short-path satori, and after solving the riddle of
Eastern religion, then I moved on to the much harder and more hidden riddle of
the Western religion. Thus, explaining Buddhism in terms of deterministic
self-control cybernetics is elementary in comparison to explaining
Christianity in such terms.


The keys to a rational theory of religious insight are determinism,
entheogens, and the mythic-only Christ. Attached posting below.

The definitive psychedelic effect is runaway echo that builds and builds —
used commonly in my 60s Pop Sike compilations.

I have genuine recorded white-light feedback guitar sound that I recorded
myself, a perhaps 4-minute piece in the middle of what may be the most
important peak experience. I keep wondering what day my most important
religious experiencing was, somewhere in the midst of the 90s. I have the lab
notes somewhere on my old hard drive, and may have a printout, but what is
most remarkable is that I have a 4-track cassette tape with tripped out
electric guitar improvisation in one direction, and with *two* tracks of
spoken voice (brainstorming idea development about religious insight) in the
other… from that highest visitation of the Holy Spirit.

There are several episodes from that era, but that was the most perfect, when
I had the tape rolling and I have the moment on tape, the moment of
cybercontrol death and understanding what the fear of God is, understanding
why one would, trembling, be forced to pray, forced to posit and wish for the
unknowable: praying that a compassionate puppetmaster is the one who is
pulling the strings that are certainly moving all my thoughts and actions,
perceptibly.

That peak mountain is merely one of a series of tall mountains, that
effectively communicate across time to each other from their peaks. But that
mountain is the most perfectly significant as far as specifically religious
experiencing — that was the key kneeling prayer, when I understood rationally
and fully clearly why a clear understanding of self-control cybernetics would
cause kneeling in trembling.

There is great competition among these mountains of peak mystic experiences.
An atheist who has debunked the Historical Jesus reports that he has no
understanding whatsoever of what it could possibly mean to experience oneself
as crucified with Jesus and crucified as Jesus, but when keeping the
frozen-future, block-universe model of spacetime in mind, in the midst of the
mystic altered state, when one is consciously frozen into the spacetime block
that strips one of the apparent power to change one’s future, this is much
more of a *report* of an intensely, physically felt *experience* than an
abstract *theory*.

This is why I theorize with such confidence: the Holy Spirit first brings full
intense experience, and theorizing then proceeds to explain and make sense of
that experience. It’s not a tall edifice of theorizing building itself up on
its own, alone; theory and experience must build each other up.


I hope to upload to mp3.com someday my recordings from the peak trembling
prayer experience, with the white-light guitar feedback in the background.
That soundtrack was with a Marshall all-tube combo amp, miked with an SM-58
mic, at quiet volume but with high preamp gain.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience
http://www.amptone.com — toward any Tone at any volume

Greetings Michael,


After September 11th, suddenly Usan (“American”) Christendom has belatedly
realized that the predictions from a hundred years ago have practically come
true: suddenly, conservative Christianity is merely a marginal cult, and the
majority of self-identified “Christians” are Biblical illiterates and hop
not
only between denominations for their occasional Church visit, but among
different religions — it’s a fluid, post-modern kind of Christianity that
takes an extreme cafeteria pick-and-choose approach. My preliminary
research
shows that official Christianity is seriously running scared. The trends
started before Sep. 11, but that event has crystallized this awareness of
the
trends. During the past few months, Christianity is entering its greatest
time of tribulation since the Reformation. I am saving money to buy some of
the next wave of books on Christian trends. It should be interesting.

While not disagreeing with you about the majority of “Christians” behaving
in such manners, I wonder where you draw the conclusion that Christendom has
“realized” that they are that…

When did the masses wake up and see themselves in the mirror?…I have seen
no evidence of this…perhaps you can expound?…

Blessings,

~~~.:9:.


***DISCLAIMER***

~~~We may not necessarily still believe the opinions expressed by our
previous selves…~~~

“The analogy of opposites is the relation of light to shadow, peak to abyss,
fullness to void. Allegory, mother of all dogmas, is the replacement of the
seal by the hallmark, of reality by shadow; it is the falsehood of truth,
and the truth of falsehood.” — Eliphas Levi, Dogme de la haute magie

“For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the hated. I am the
saint and the prostitute.” — Fragment of Nag Hammadi 6, 2
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AMU-Outer/
http://www.topica.com/lists/amu/
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/2695

I came back to the group to post a message about what me and my
friend had talked about the whole night. Egodeath, the nature of
reality and the quality of realness to a conscious being the meaning
of life and the quality of meaning to a conscious being. Can quality
exist without consciousness? We can say that this stone looks like
different from the other but does that intrinsically change it’s
quality? If it does, how can quality be defined? This is something
that Pirsig pondered about but I can’t remember what he ended up
with. Is that something we can never understand logically because our
brains and minds are not up to the task but only through intuition
and/or momentarily experience the essence of quality. Are there any
way to make certain that this experience is or isn’t valid? If there
aren’t, am I really talking about enlightenment and seeing through
maya when I’m talking about the essence of quality?

I wasn’t supposed to post this particular message. I have no idea
whether I will screw this message too like the last one I wrote just
before trying to SAVE it to prevent accidentally wiping it off the
screen. Before I wrote the message I thought to myself that perhaps
my message will lead to something interesting in the minds of other
fellow humans. After the message disappeared I wondered if there was
a meaning for that greater than just clumsiness. Perhaps it was to
signal me to learn a lesson. About what? How fear gives me a lot of
trouble in life but then how the real trouble is just clinging to the
experience of trouble and it’s “troublesomniness” (here we go
again…) Perhaps not. Perhaps there was no big reason. I guess I’ll
never know.

I feel it can be dangerous just to think everything is predetermined.
Like there’s no morality in zen right? I don’t believe in karma so to
me it is perfectly possible that you could go and kill a hundred
people and claim that you believe that those people were used as an
energy source for selfish beings with consciousnesses but no body,
for example and that you wanted to be good and not give the selfish
beings the chance to use these as their batteries. So egoic interest
excluded, would our socio-biological hardware (meaning all the brain
areas that affect our social functioning) be the only thing that
would make us not consider killing seriously for very long even if we
had a strong sense of this behavior as our “mission” and fate.

Is it really so that what happens, had to happen because it happened.
Is society and the laws it sets AND efforts to make them more just
therefore a dynamic part of determinism, a ying-yang sort of thing?
Could Ken Wilber have it all wrong about existence progressing to
look at itself from the mirror? What if suddenly the human race is
wiped out because of some quickly spreading, deadly and incurable
virus? Then all the things he has said in his books becomes obsolete
because The Master of Puppets would not have it any other way. Maybe
there are other life forms in the Universe but they never developed
consciousness. It was something that fit the set & setting for some
time but then the chaos principle changed the direction of evolution
once again. Why is it so difficult for scientists to accept the
possibility that we could be the only conscious species in the
universe? Haven’t they read from their HGTTG about the Infinite
Improbability Drive (or whatever it’s called in the English edition).

Who knows, maybe “some rules can be bent, while others can be broken”
can be extended to apply to the rules of physics. Or, perhaps certain
changes in the quantum (or is it “morphological”) fields in
consciousness could suddenly cause the engaging of a previously
undiscovered self-extermination mechanism of the whole planet? I know
this is pretty wild but first, remember I haven’t slept at all and
second, that this is still pretty much down to earth compared to the
sum of the things we talked through.

How do you use Occam’s razor in a world that could already at the
same time exist and not to exist? It is possible to “cheat” time
relative to the age of people on Earth by going deep and fast enough
to the space. I see a rule bent here. And most scientists don’t even
know about ego death. Then there is the Hedonistic Imperative arguing
for the use of medicines, genetic therapy and mind machines for the
spreading of mood improvement. Are there any reasons why the two
(cleaning the contact lenses of perception) and efforts to accelerate
emotional evolution with technology and increasing knowledge about
the limbic system could not be paired? It’s strange how many people
are against the use of mood elevating drugs. Do they simply happen to
represent the memes that hold society together? And the ones who
advocate personal freedom to use or NOT use drugs (Ritalin and other
ADHD-meds are a dangerous example of Brave New World mentality) are
seen as escapists or as people playing with fire (more like the
unknown and feared). People in power, who decide about the
legislation, can say using drugs is stupid but yet use in private.
They can be afraid of ending their political career or of the
consequences to the society at large. The thing people fear in
improving one’s mood over the “normal” line (which is pretty
relative) is the feeling of unconditional acceptance or, as people
come to call it, love because the change would not come overnight.
They could not trade the love of money for real love in a tight
schedule because that would probably require a majority of people and
government backing.

Perhaps sometime after our fight&flight-nervous system would have
been slightly updated to reflect the changes in our environment (much
less REAL danger) could the minds of an increasing number of people
to be ready for experiencing ego death. This quote from the Bible is
very fitting: Luke 9:23-24 (NIV) Then he said to them all: “If anyone
would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily
and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but
whoever loses his life for me will save it.” It will take a lot of
time for people to understand this and face both their fear of
material death and the death of their sense of self. The result will
be more a world that has more to offer than just an empathy box like
in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. We have
substances that make you feel real good and allow you to relief
yourself of the things you’ve tried repress (like ecstasy). But raves
and clubs as noisy environments are most often not the places for
deep healing because one doesn’t feel safe enough to come open about
one’s really Dark Side. I believe that we storage our repressed pain
in some way similar to the COEX-systems described by Stanislav Grof.
In a good set & setting people can let go off some of their pain
and probably rewire their brain somehow so that they become more
honest and feel better about themselves and others even permanently.

Hope you’re not annoyed by a lot of things that you already know
about. This seems to have become something like a semi-essay. But
now, let’s continue… the current psychedelics may be adequate for
most people to experience ego death in a way that benefits them most
(timewise, visually, etc.). In the future designer psychedelics
might, for example, allow people to have similar experiences if
that’s what they would like to do.

Now I’m going to sleep. I won’t write about this last part much, just
mention it to give you something to comment on. What is the
relationship between ego death and emotions? The fear of loosing the
ego certainly involves powerful emotions and can trigger repressed
memories. Afterwards the center of awareness may change from oneself
and from yesterday to everything and the immediate moment. Increasing
good feelings (something like empathetic contentment) on the other
hand could make dealing with the unconscious and superconscious
easier.

The change from a deeply traumatised and wounded humanity to a much
humane world with ego death experience perhaps regularly to remind of
the pragmatic nature of ego. It might take a long time because there
is so much to heal even when there are good tools, knowledge and
support available.

Hope you were able to dig something something out of this mess.. it
took a long time to write because I got sleepier and sleepier.
ZZZZZzz..

Thanks, Michael, for such a good overview.
Doherty does read much better than Acharya. He makes even me
consider Jesus as a figment of Paul’s imagination. I surfed a
bunch of his web pages listed below, best ranking pages first.

http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp10.htm
Josephus Unbound
josephus jesus christian james reference antiquities phrase jewish
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/jhcjp.htm
THE JESUS PUZZLE
jesus christ paul god historical christian man world son gospel
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/sil20arg.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES
christ jesus paul god flesh gospel verse lord man spiritual world
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORVardisFisher6.htm
VARDIS FISHER’S “TESTAMENT OF MAN”
fisher man testament jesus richard ideas christian god men life
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/BkrvEll.htm
No title
jesus teacher paul god ellegard christ man century jewish spiritual
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/CTVExcerptsOne.htm
A REVIEW OF LEE STROBEL’S ‘THE CASE FOR CHRIST’
jesus gospels strobel evidence gospel josephus christian cross
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/CTVExcerptsThree.htm
A REVIEW OF LEE STROBEL’S “THE CASE FOR CHRIST” PART THREE
jesus mark john gospel women paul tomb appearances death luke
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/CTVExcerptsTwo.htm
A REVIEW OF LEE STROBEL’S ‘THE CASE FOR CHRIST’ PART TWO
god jesus people strobel human son world hell gospels himself
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/CTVReviews.htm
Reviews of Challenging the Verdict
book doherty jesus strobel arguments verdict christ challenging
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/crossbr.htm
No title
jesus crossan gospel story thomas tradition god death jewish sayings
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/parttwo.htm
Part Two: Who Was Christ Jesus?
christ jesus god paul world spiritual through christianity earth
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfJHbkrv.htm
No title
jesus paul john god gospel mark doherty christian historical jewish
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfjprev.htm
No title
jesus book doherty christian historical puzzle evidence christ
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset14.htm
No title
jesus paul christ god man gospel christian son world flesh historical
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset15.htm
No title
jesus century gospel christian death god story jewish josephus
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset16.htm
No title
jesus paul mark historical peter human gospel christ movement
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset17.htm
No title
jesus paul christian historical gospel century luke rome world
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset18.htm
No title
jesus matthew luke john sayings believe christ god book mark gospel
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset19.htm
rfset19.htm
jesus paul god christ jewish gospels john man faith movement through
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/sil12cor.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: 1 & 2 CORINTHIANS
paul god jesus christ spirit corinthians apostles himself through
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/silgals.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: GALATIANS
jesus god christ paul son ephesians writer himself earth through
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/siljampe.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: JAMES, 1 & 2 PETER
jesus peter god writer christ james epistle himself lord neb verse
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/siltop20.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: TOP 20
jesus god paul christ christian gospel himself through life epistles
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp02.htm
A Solution to the First Epistle of John
jesus god son john gospel christ epistle writer life community
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp03.htm
Who Crucified Jesus?
jesus god paul christ world death pilate son earth jews timothy
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp04.htm
Odes of Solomon
god ode jesus odes son lord wisdom poet knowledge odist salvation
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp05.htm
Tracing the Christian Lineage in Alexandria
god logos philo wisdom jewish christ son paul christian jesus
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp06.htm
The Source of Paul’s Gospel
paul gospel christ corinthians jesus god received revelation through
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp08.htm
Christ As “Man”: Does Paul Speak of Jesus as an Historical Person?
paul christ man jesus god spiritual world heavenly adam earth
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp09.htm
The Son in the Epistle to the Hebrews
jesus writer christ hebrews sacrifice world earth son god epistle
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp11.htm
Revelation: The Gospel According to the Prophet John”
jesus christ revelation god john lamb jewish world christian spiritual
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORVardisFisher2.htm
VARDIS FISHER’S “TESTAMENT OF MAN”
women male sex world fisher men dove human evil life spirits power
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORVardisFisher3.htm
VARDIS FISHER’S “TESTAMENT OF MAN”
world solomon god fisher israel novel ahijah people between greek
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORVardisFisher4.htm
VARDIS FISHER’S “TESTAMENT OF MAN”
jesus fisher joshua god figure world man story myth parable testament
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/partone.htm
Part One: A Conspiracy of Silence
jesus paul god century christian christ himself silence son gospel
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset10.htm
No title
jesus name christ paul god john gospel son christianity mark docetic
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset7.htm
No title
jesus historical fact christian james christ response evidence
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset9.htm
No title
jesus paul historical john century james christian gospels josephus
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/silrom.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: ROMANS
jesus paul god christ romans himself faith gospel son jews neb
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/silthess.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: 1 & 2 THESSALONIANS
jesus god christ paul timothy gospel earth neb savior writer himself
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/century2.htm
The Second Century Apologists
jesus christian god apologists christianity justin faith christ
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/funkrev.htm
Robert Funk book review
jesus funk paul god story death gospel human mark christian historical
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/home.htm
Historical Jesus or Jesus Myth: The Jesus Puzzle
jesus historical puzzle novel christian christianity testament
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/partthre.htm
Part Three: The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth
jesus mark gospels luke gospel jewish sayings john community death
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/review1.htm
No title
jesus mack paul christ god community death myth movement gospel
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset13.htm
No title
jesus paul christian historical christ gospel god luke man evidence
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset2.htm
Feedback
jesus mark historical christian gospel christ paul figure perhaps
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/spongrev.htm
John Shelby Spong Book Review
jesus spong mark jewish god gospels gospel midrashic story historical
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/jenksrev.htm
No title
jesus paul jenks god christ traditions lord gospel son through
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfindex.htm
Feedback
jesus rfset john paul christian christianity gospel silence christ
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset11.htm
No title
jesus christian jewish century christianity historical greg faith
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset12.htm
rfset12.htm
jesus paul christian historical world christ jewish god christianity
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset8.htm
No title
jesus paul historical gospel god gospels figure john man scripture
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/siljohns.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: 1 & 2 JOHN, REVELATION
jesus god christ john son life gospel epistle community revelation
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp07.htm
Transfigured on the Holy Mountain: The Beginnings of Christianity
jesus peter god christ paul son writer through gospel lord revelation
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/whatsnew.htm
No title
jesus feedback reviews available puzzle response responses strobel
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORFeedback.htm
AgeOfReasonFeedback
god bill existence something science explanation creator denis
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORVardisFisher1.htm
VARDIS FISHER’S “TESTAMENT OF MAN”
fisher testament man fire ideas primitive through age humanity
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORVardisFisher5.htm
VARDIS FISHER’S “TESTAMENT OF MAN”
jesus damon christian christians fisher god man figure jews religion
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AgeOfReason.htm
AgeOfReason
world reason age evidence faith religious strobel book scientific
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/CTVCourt.htm
CTVCourt.htm
strobel evidence book guards jews christ examination jesus rebuttal
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/ctvadvert.htm
Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ”
cross evidence examination jesus chapter book verdict challenging
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/jpadvert.htm
The Jesus Puzzle – Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ?
jesus chapter book order card credit puzzle mail address canada
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset5.htm
No title
jesus historical gospel century myth mark earlier gospels response
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset6.htm
No title
jesus mark gospels sayings gospel historical john believe jerusalem
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/BkrvPric.htm
No title
jesus price historical christ gospels figure gospel christian
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/CTVExcerptsIntro.htm
A REVIEW OF LEE STROBEL’S THE CASE FOR CHRIST
cross examination excerpt chapter evidence book jesus strobel
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfholdin.htm
No title
holding jesus paul article god writer gospel christian fact reference
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset4.htm
Feedback
jesus christian paul christianity gospels mysteries century christ
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/wilbrweb.htm
No title
paul wilson jesus christ god historical world christian human
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/BkrvTCC.htm
No title
jesus story ancient book gospel mythology parallels christ history
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/BkrvTJM.htm
No title
mysteries jesus christianity jewish world freke gandy gnostic
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/geerrev.htm
No title
jesus god geering christ paul divine jewish prof christian epistle
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/postscpt.htm
POSTSCRIPT
jesus christian historical paul jewish century man god figure
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset1.htm
Feedback
jesus john christ sect historical sects baptist christian figure
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfwells.htm
No title
jesus wells earth christ historical paul regarded spiritual christian
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/silpost.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: POSTSCRIPT
jesus paul writers holding christian silence reason gospel fact
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/silintro.htm
THE SOUND OF SILENCE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES: INTRODUCTION
jesus silence paul epistles gospel writer argument life details
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/supp01.htm
Apollos of Alexandria and the Early Christian Apostolate
paul jesus apollos christ wisdom god corinthians christian apostles
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/puzzle2.htm
Jesus Puzzle – Quick Assembly
jesus christian jewish piece assembly historian puzzle references
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/rfset3.htm
Feedback
jesus paul god james christ apostles lord christian himself brother
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/AORVardisFisher.htm
VARDIS FISHER’S “TESTAMENT OF MAN”
fisher american man vardis age atheist history reason society
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/preamble.htm
Preamble
jesus christian historical paul christ gospel christianity testament
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/novel.htm
No title
novel jesus pdf puzzle historical quinter adobe book christianity
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/puzzle1.htm
Jesus Puzzle – Quick Assembly
jesus assembly christian epistles human piece puzzle silence story

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
scheper
http://www.antelecom.net/~scheper/
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.

In Los Angeles this weekend

Hi All, I know that most of you are not within a reasonable distance
to be able to come but I’m sending this out to everyone just in case.
I will be hanging out on Saturdasy at the “Beverly Garland Hotel” in
North Hollywood, Ca. I will be doing an all new presentation at 3:00
PM at the Conference called “The Catalyst Conference” which is going
on at the hotel. The speakers actually start at 10:30 AM in case you
are interested (There are some interesting topics). Come if you can.
To see the flier for the Conference you can go to my webpage or to
just view the flier with speakers and a contact number for more
information by clicking on the link below. Hope to see you there! Jim

<A HREF=”http://www.jamesarthur.net/catalyst1.gif>AOL users Click Here</A>

http://www.jamesarthur.net

>We are all subject to the world’s boundaries. This gives us a subjective
>spirit. The Absolute Idea forms an objective spirit. The Absolute Idea was
>existing only in posse. Until I had it. It is a metaphor for surrender, as
>is egodeath. I have completely surrendered once. The objective spirit is
>beyond all knowledge in its power. It is to make my subjective abstract to
>it. I have overdosed on about 400 dollars worth of mescaline hydrochloride.

> A true near death experience where I had the power of my life held by mere
>thought. I want to surrender my subjective, but feel as if I need to bring
>something with me such as thoughts. I am afraid of this next surrender,
>because the mere thought is still there of life or death. I would not want
>to fail the world in my surrender if I happened to die before I became
>abstract to the objective. You must understand of the objective, though,
>that if it takes over noone will have to worry about anything. Your job,
>car payments, dog, wife, business, money, greed, loneliness, none of these
>things and their comparts will be of any bother in the objective’s light.
>Please drop all of the barriers that would refrain you from E-mailing me
>ASAP. I am tired of being afraid. I only want to let go. Peace.

Although I don’t believe Jesus existed, the mythic symbol of the willingly
crucified sovereign on the cross enables us to say “I have so surrendered my
false self.” It is an experienced symbol; one *is* the man on the cross. And
one lives to tell about the experience. How can I methodically and
deliberately kill myself as false self, yet live and even be unharmed? By
being and participating in such a symbol of surrendered sovereignty.

There is nothing to do to purchase identification with such a symbol of ego
death; the only price is to want to reject any false aspect of personal
sovereignty. When you hate false notions about personal sovereignty above
all, and want to root them out of your thinking, such an experiential symbol
of negating one’s false self-sovereignty, a symbol of deliberately killing and
negating one’s false kingship, fits the requirements.

Such a symbol is valuable because through it, by participating mythically in
it, we can completely and perfectly put the lower self in its proper place
without requiring any physical observance, but instead requiring only the
mythical or spiritual act — a cognitive vision-logic act — of comprehending
and identifying with a symbol.

The only “letting go” that is really on-target is to deliberately reject the
deluded concept of personal metaphysical sovereignty. This is an act of
comprehension, not of letting go of the scepter — rather, seeing that one’s
control of the scepter of self-rulership, of self-command, is and has always
been essentially illusory. I never was the ultimate controller of the scepter
in the first place, so there is nothing I can do to let go, except in the
sense of rejecting serious belief in the illusion of being the ultimate
controller of the scepter of self-control. Surrender is no other action than
mentally realizing and understanding the illusory aspect of personal
controllership.

I am investigating esoteric Christianity and comparing it to the equivalent
approach in other major religions. I’m working on a fully esoteric
Christianity such as Arthur Drews proposed in the book The Christ Myth.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573921904

Related books: http://www.egodeath.com/christmyth.htm

http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

In order to establish some ground rules here,
for the benefit of a “new person” on this list,

is there a consensus definition that the list holds
as to the nature of the “ego” that dies?
—
Christopher Wynter,
lifestreams

A simple answer:

No, but I recommend the following:

http://egodeath.com/egodeath.htm#xtocid2655


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hello Aaron ..

This does not answer my question ..

In simple terms, what is the primary premiss for the paradigm of
ego for this list ..

I have read the site .. and some of the previous discussions ..
but, when you say that “the ego is the controller” what are the
terms of reference for the controller ..

are they ..

1. unconscious personality archetypes at the root of reaction
2. the logical reasoning of the thinking mind
3. the conditioned belief structure imprinted into the linear brain
4. the conditioned beliefs imprinted into the unconscious mind

and so it goes on …

or are we talking about a matrix of all of these ..

and ..

I’m not being funny here, because there is a “death” metaphor
associated with the release of each and every one of these ..

and to go one step further ..

whatever the thinking mind is aware of, it is a retrospect view of
a perception of an event through preconditioned belief filters.

I could go on here ..

but, the simple question is ..

in terms of the discussion on this list –
what are the parameters for defining the ego
in terms of “The ego that dies ..”

== Christopher Wynter

Attachments :

This recording doesn’t have the signal-noise ratio I hoped for. I need to
put a real sound-card in this computer. Probably all the still-substantial
noise in this latest recording is from the on-board (thus bad) sound “card”
— I doubt that the mic and mixer noise is at all audible against that din.

It’s also lossy-compressed more than my usual: 96 Kbps rather than 128.

Attachments :

I re-recorded my reading of the post “Emergent missional post-church
practice, entheogen house-church movement”, and uploaded it.


Signal/noise ratio:

This time, I used a Mac with good sound chips onboard. This is top-quality
sound for an unprocessed signal (no compressor, no noise gate). I’m going
for an ultra-honest, unprocessed, immediate sound, done optimally. It’s a
philosophy that has pros and cons. This recording has the very good
signal-to-noise ratio I hoped for originally — no ragged, ratty digital
junk noise in the background (like my first try today). I’d have to turn
off the HVAC system to silence the background (room noise leakage) more.


Production:

My voice became hoarse and the room resonates badly. The editing is sub-par
because I just learned the GarageBand recording application. Sometimes
there’s complete silence — an automatic feature I didn’t intend.

This audio file is not as loud as a standard pro recording should be,
because it uses no compressor, limiter, or clipping. GarageBand normalized
it to 0 dB.


Vocalization:

My first try at reading this today used over-pronunciation; it was stilted,
choppy. I read it more smoothly and flowing-together, for the second
recording, although my voice became worn out, more deep and raspy, and less
clear-toned. It’s hard to relax and sound flowing while also working to
control the vocalization and breathing. The recording is really good, aside
from the above complaints, but it’s not my voice, which should be a little
higher and clearer.

Attachments :

I might read-aloud various decent past postings.

I want to refine my spoken-word recording skills, including the vocalization
(clean, natural, and flowing), recording (clean, clear, and
immediate/present), and production aspects (loudness, & speed and ease).
One way to gain the quantity of experience and practice to apply what I’ve
learned, is to read-aloud past postings.

For any future postings, I’ll consider also reading them aloud, hopefully as
a thread and as 45 minutes long. Hopefully with some added clarification,
added points and commentary, added-in.

The Church of Christ quasi-denomination is based on the principle of exactly modelling
today’s church worship activity on the model that is specified in the New Testament. Does
the worship practice in the Churches of Christ today actually match the model specified in
the New Testament?

Even more directly to the point, does the worship practice in the Churches of Christ today
actually match the practices of early Christians, where those early Christian practices are
basically aligned with the New Testament description of the practices of Jesus followers? I
will abbreviate the latter question:


Does today’s church practice match the practices and purposes of early Christians? For
what purposes should enlightened people do Christian practices today and gather for
house-church-shaped Christian assemblies today? Is it possible to do church in the exact
same way and for the exact same purposes as early Christians?

I define “early Christians” as circa 135 CE ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt
) to 313 CE (a 178-year period that is my favored period as point of reference for what
Christianity or New Testament Christianity actually was about, what it meant). I select this
period as the definitive measure of and reference point for authentic New Testament
Christianiy because I hold that the New Testament books were written, or redacted into
existence from Josephus etc., starting in 135, and that the nature of Christianity shifted
from counter-empire house-church Christianity to organized institutional empire-
supporting Christianity starting in 313.


Did early Christians have pews? No.

Did early Christians have a podium and microphone? No.

Did early Christians have fresh grape juice to drink, on demand? No.

Did early Christians dress up on Sunday and take their family to a building called “Church”?
No.


Why do people “go to church” today? Why did early Christians gather, and how often did
they gather, while the New Testament canon was being formed? What are the motivations,
and how are the motivations for “going to church” conceptualized today? What were the
motivations for the early Christians to come together into assemblies?

What are the background cultural conventions today, as the backdrop or general context
against which people “go to church” and do what they do? What was the normal cultural
context and practices of the early Jesus followers, against which they gathered together
during their assemblies?

Why do people gather “in church” today and bring their children, their families? Why did
early Jesus followers come together into assemblies, and did they bring their children? Did
they have a “family oriented assembly” mentality?

Ultimately, “going to church” and doing “Christian worship” today must be compared not
to early Christian practice, but to *non*-Christian broadly religious-related practice in
antiquity.

Why did ancients in general do whatever they did that is roughly equivalent to, although
distinctly different from, modern-era “going to church” or other “Christian activity”? To
have a religious drug party, with other social activities connected, like symposium
“drinking parties” and “funeral clubs”?

How is “going to church” and “Christian activity” distinct from other aspects of life today?
How was “religious-related activity” distinct from other aspects of life in antiquity, for
non-Christians and for Jesus followers (or Jesus assemblies)?


A Woman’s Place: House Churches In Earliest Christianity
by Carolyn Osiek
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0800637771/
Nov. 2005

Families in the New Testament World by Carolyn Osiek

Early Christian Families in Context by David L. Balch

Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World by Ross Shepard Kraemer

Households And Holiness: The Religious Culture Of Israelite Women (Facets) (Paperback)
by Carol L. Meyers

House Church and Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity
by Roger Gehring

The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives by Beryl Rawson

Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family by Richard P. Saller

From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World by Dennis E. Smith

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I wrote and posted this review today. The ASIN book links resolve when
reading the review at Amazon.


Review title: Maximal entheogen theory of religion in late antiquity
Rating: 5 stars
Tags: entheogens, late antiquity, psychedelics, psychedelic drugs, visionary
plants, religion, altered state, mystic experiencing
Reviewer: Michael Hoffman


The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization
By David Hillman, Ph.D.
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0312352492/
Aug. 2008, 243 pages.


David Hillman’s book “The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western
Civilization” is a required book in the field of entheogen scholarship. It
presents a maximal entheogen theory of religion in Late Antiquity; it is the
first book to present such a strong, clear view. The use of psychoactives
was utterly normal, commonplace, mainstream, and culturally integrated.

Hillman forces a revision of the assumption-framework that is used by some
other entheogen historians. John Allegro’s book [[ASIN:0340128755 The
Sacred Mushroom & The Cross]] postulated that the early Christians were
motivated to use coded story-figures such as the figure of Jesus in order to
hide their deviant, unusual practice of use of visionary plants (mushrooms)
from mainstream culture, which persecuted and disallowed such use. Hillman
doesn’t address Allegro’s explanation, but that aspect of Allegro’s theory
is soundly disproved by the culture that Hillman reveals, a culture
thoroughly saturated with psychotropic drugs, and must be abandoned.

The cover art shows Plato with red eyes, which today has culturally
distorting connotations of “Plato smoked pot.” Hillman should’ve chosen
instead something like the fresco showing Dionysus’ victory procession, with
Dionysus on a chariot drawn by four tigers with mushrooms above their backs.
The book would benefit from ancient pictorial evidence of psychoactive
plants and their use, of which there is no shortage.

The book ought to have subheadings. The author omits subheadings, thus
obscuring what specific topics are covered in the book. This lack of
topical entry points can also make the book seem more boring, when one gets
caught in a topic of less interest and cannot see where the next topic of
interest begins. I have extracted some potential subheadings below.

Introduction chapter. Hillman’s thesis committee forced him to remove his
chapter on ancient world’s recreational drug use, saying “the Romans just
wouldn’t do such a thing” — a baseless anachronistic presupposition,
projecting today’s outlook onto the past, thus censoring and obscuring the
outlook that characterized the past.

Chapter 1: The Ancient Crucible. This chapter emphasizes the misery and
anguish of ancient life. I too felt miserable and filled with anguish after
reading most of it, since I was expecting to read about entheogens instead.
The reader starts wishing for some opium to ease the pain of reading this
chapter. Skip this chapter and read it afterward. It is of peripheral
relevance and gives the wrong impression that the book justifies entheogen
use because opium lessens misery.

Chapter 2: Ancient Medicines. Skip this chapter and read it afterward. It
is of peripheral relevance and would give the wrong impression that the book
prefers a medicinal paradigm. Chapters 1 and 2 are appropriate to provide
background and peripheral information, but act as a hurdle in their
placement in front of the expected chapters about entheogens.

Chapter 3: Greeks, Romans, and Recreational Drugs. The classical world was
well aware of the effects of cannabis, scopolamine plants, opium, mushrooms,
ergot, wormwood (thujone), and hemlock.

Chapter 4: Promethean Euphoria. Covers drugs in myth, including the myths
of Prometheus, Demeter, ambrosia, Dionysus, Odysseus & the Cyclops giant
Polyphemus, and Narcissus. Mixed wine is partly covered here.

The scope of the book is Greek and Roman culture in Late Antiquity; there is
little comment on the transition to Christendom. Hillman doesn’t address
the question of “To what extent were visionary plants used throughout
Christian history?” But he does conjecture that Jewish and earliest
Christian practice included visionary plants. He uses the noncommittal term
“Christian mythology”, and discusses political struggles in antiquity, but
doesn’t address the origins of the Jesus figure or the motives for creating
Christianity. The investigation of the history of the mystic altered state
must extend far beyond this books’ focus on the sheer use of visionary
plants, such as commentary connecting social structures with the specific
phenomena that are encountered within the intense visionary state.

Hillman doesn’t cover mythic metaphors, cognitive phenomenology (per Benny
Shanon’s book [[ASIN:0199252939 The Antipodes of the Mind]]), and
altered-state metaphor. Hillman’s treatments of myths remain as superficial
as any uninspired scholar’s. He focuses on the sheer fact that the plants
were used, rather than on cognitive phenomenology resulting from the
plant-induced altered state. Like Carl Ruck’s work, Hillman doesn’t provide
interpretations of mythic metaphors except in terms of the physical plants
and the sheer fact of using them. He assumes simple literalistic readings
of the mythemes, as opposed to reading them in terms of mental experiences
from visionary plants.

He doesn’t cover self-control instability in the altered state, or the
common experiential phenomenon of ego death. He reads all mythic references
to “death” as literal death, rather than metaphorical description of
specific cognitive phenomena encountered in the mystic altered state. The
mythemes of ‘death’, ‘mortal’, ‘divinization’, and ‘king’ are bandied about
unreflectively in these pages, rather than considering them as aspects of
plant-induced experiencing. What does ‘death’ mean to the person during the
altered state which Hillman writes about? He ought to consider, for
example, ‘death’ as the altered-state suspension of the self as controller
and mental construct, and the overpowering of the personal self by the
broader space-time world in which the self is embedded.

As another example, the Introduction discusses Actaeon being killed for
looking upon the goddess Artemis, but Hillman superficially treats this
death as a simple literal death as punishment for (vaguely) “seeing too
much”, rather than as the specific death of the pseudo-autonomous self
during the mystic altered state. Hillman doesn’t tie-in the myths from late
antiquity with today’s mystic-state reports of the cessation of the egoic
conception of oneself, or perceiving a higher level of control that trumps
and originates one’s own power.

He reads the themes of ‘maiden’ and ‘youth’ flatly and literalistically,
rather than matching them with the idea of the uninitiated mind prior to
ingesting the sacred meal in a mystery-cult initiation. Hillman’s line of
thought needs to develop further by applying cognitive phenomenology to the
interpretation of mythemes — by explaining mythemes as metaphorical
descriptions of the cognitive phenomena that are encountered in the
plant-induced, altered cognitive state.

Chapter 5: Drawing Down the Moon. This too-vaguely titled chapter actually
covers sorcerer/druggists; ancient magicians were somewhat comparable to
“drug dealers”. Zoroastrianism and the Magi. The practice of magic was
tantamount to the use of drugs. Magic was a matter of control &
manipulation, including manipulating the mind of a desired lover, through
seeming manipulation of reality in the drug-induced altered state. Medea &
Jason. Scholars intentionally mistranslate words to avoid writing “drugs”;
Circe’s mastery is specifically of drugs, and yet scholars deliberately
mistranslate words for her drugs instead as vague “charms”.

Hillman affirms the ancient Greeks’ belief in Fate (heimarmene), but without
detailed elaboration, without considering how the belief in Fatedness was
connected with altered-state experiencing.

Chapter 6: The Divine Gift of Mind-Bending Intoxication. Scholars
standardized on mistranslation of words for opium as “poppy seeds”.

Hillman writes that drugs were “a” means of entering into the divine realm,
“just another means of invoking the Muses”, but he never says what the
implied “other means” of entering into the divine realm were. That raises
the question, which he should’ve addressed, of whether drugs were the only
effective means of entering into the divine realm. If plant-drugs were the
chemical muse, then was there some non-chemical muse as well, some non-drug
technique of entering into the divine altered state? It is surprising that
Hillman is silent about the existence of that debate among entheogen
scholars.

The Muses, divine poetic inspiration, and ancient literature. Psychoactive
drugs were a primary, standard concern of ancient literature. Homer’s
bardic works: the Illiad; the Odyssey, including the Lotus-Eaters. Virgil’s
work: the Aeneid, including stories of Dido and Amata. Ovid’s works:
Amores; Heroides; and Ars amatoria. The audience used psychoactives and
understood the authors’ incorporation of themes involving psychoactives.

Chapter 7: The Pharmacology of Western Philosophy. The pre-Socratic
philosophers, drug-sorcerers, or sages. Diogenes. Epimenides:
Root-cutters, mandrake, and Epimenides’ stimulant. Pythagoras: his
initiations into mystery religions, and Magi. Empedocles and the birth of
natural science. Mixed wine included opium, henbane, and psychoactive
herbs, unguents, and spices. Plato’s Phaedrus: Divine madness, inspired
mania, divine possession, and the Muses.

Chapter 8: Democracy, Free Speech, and Drugs. This chapter opens with 8
pages about the creation of democracy in ancient Athens, with no connection
to entheogens. This puts a strain on the reader’s patience, waiting so long
to get to the claimed subject matter of the book.

The political and drug aspects of plays. Until recently, scholars
deliberately mistranslated or suppressed Aristophanes’ ribald wording, but
they continue to deliberately mistranslate drug references to suppress,
distort, and censor those. Plato’s work The Laws. Aristophanes’ play
Thesmophoriazusae. Aristophanes’ play Wealth. Euripides’ play Andromache:
free speech, personal freedom, and civil liberties. Athens vs. Sparta:
egalitarian democracy vs. authoritarian oppression. Euripides’ play Medea.


This chapter touches on mystery cult initiation, Eleusis, Carl Ruck’s book
[[ASIN:1556437528 The Road to Eleusis]], and the scholarly suppression of
such academic investigation into ancient psychoactives use. Surprisingly,
Hillman provides no deep coverage of entheogens in mystery-cult sacred
meals, which most readers are expecting; he presents only 2 pages focusing
on this topic. The book has a surprising lack of detailed coverage of
entheogens in the sacred meals of all the mystery cults of late antiquity,
such as emperor cult. Hillman merely touches on, but doesn’t provide
sustained, in-depth coverage of “drinking” symposium parties; for example,
he doesn’t expound upon Dennis Smith’s book [[ASIN:0800634896 From Symposium
to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World]] to explain
“drinking clubs” in terms of visionary plants in mixed wine.

Conclusion chapter: The Western Pursuit of Happiness. Personal freedom and
democracy in Athens went along with psychoactives. The status quo claims to
endorse freedom, democracy, personal autonomy, and civil liberties, but
demonizes psychoactives, against the values of Athens which created our
valuation of freedom and personal liberties. The drug knowledge that is
embedded in antiquities would be a valuable resource, and is the kind of
knowledge governments and businesses are looking for. Moralistic censorship
rewrites history and creates a fictional image of the past to prop up the
status-quo powers. Factual historical knowledge about the integration of
psychoactive drugs into the culture of antiquity would provide conceptual
tools that would help society remain free from tyrants and aristocrats.

Notes section. The book uses endnotes rather than footnotes. These are
proper, correctly used endnotes (or footnotes): they are strictly citations
of where to find source material, rather than passages which ought to be in
the body of the book instead. Much more of the book needs such pointers to
the source texts, to help interested scholars quickly develop the material
further than Hillman takes it.

Bibliography. The only entheogen-scholarship book mentioned is The Road to
Eleusis. Hillman’s book seems to be research done in isolation from the
most closely related existing books. There is a surprising absence of Carl
Ruck’s other books, Dan Merkur’s books such as [[ASIN:0892817720 The Mystery
of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible]], Clark Heinrich’s
historical survey [[ASIN:0892819979 Magic Mushrooms in Religion and
Alchemy]], Entheos journal, and the dispute between Wasson and Allegro about
the Plaincourault fresco ([[ASIN:1439215170 The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of
Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity]]).

The game is up, for the status quo academic Establishment. Their effort to
censor out psychoactive drugs from the mainstream of late antiquity is
thwarted by this book. Scholars who care about their future reputation must
cease their alliance with the distorting forces of suppression of the
psychoactives aspect. Those who care about aligning with the facts of the
matter and are looking for longevity, need to divorce themselves from the
status-quo denial of the evidential facts, and work toward building a
drastically revised model of antiquity.

People make the false statement that there is little or no evidence of drug
use in antiquity. Hillman goes beyond merely asserting that scholars would
easily locate ample evidence if they began looking for it. He demonstrates
that scholars have already run into ample evidence, but are censoring,
deliberately ignoring, and deliberately mistranslating the evidence, in a
cover-up.

The effort of proving that the ancient evidence describes the visionary
plants themselves, too much follows the lead of the status-quo academics. A
continued heavy critique of the academic status quo is needed, but without
letting the status quo define the boundaries of the investigation.

This book aims to adequately prove the case that psychoactive drug use was
entirely normal and mainstream and ubiquitous in late antiquity. This book
doesn’t aim to be comprehensive in fleshing-out all use of psychoactives in
late antiquity. The field of entheogen scholarship needs expanded follow-up
volumes that put less emphasis on convincing the skeptical academic
Establishment, and more emphasis on comprehensively laying out more
connections between late antiquity, the culturally integrated use of
visionary plants, and the deeper interpretation of mythemes.

This book opens up a call for serious scholarship that engages the extent of
drug use in antiquity. Serious, substantial scholarship will need to go
beyond Hillman, beyond the sheer assertion and proof that visionary plants
were used, into explanation of mythemes that describe the experiential
content of the resulting mystic altered state. Hillman’s political focus on
personal freedoms needs to be expanded into the realm of altered-state
mythemes such as the death of the king, and gods as rulers — connecting
personal altered-state experiencing with social structures and governance,
as was done in the thoroughly drug-saturated culture of late antiquity.

Attachments :

In my book review of David Hillman’s The Chemical Muse, for altered-state
experiential phenomenology, I cited Benny Shanon’s book Antipodes. I could
also mention “The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience” by
Ralph Metzner ( <http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1579830005/>
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1579830005/ ). I categorize Metzner as a 20th
Century-only writer, not attuned to entheogen history, but he writes on Page
81 in his article “Molecular Mysticism”, in the book “Gateway to Inner
Space: Sacred Plants Mysticism and Psychotherapy”, Christian Ratsch (Ed.) (
<http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1853270377>
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1853270377 ): “In my earlier writings, I
emphasized the newness of psychedelic drugs, the unimaginable potentials to
be realized by their constructive application; and I thought of them as
first products of a new technology oriented towards the human spirit. …
my views [about their novelty] have changed under the influence of the
discoveries and writings of cultural anthropologists and ethnobotanists, who
have pointed to the role of mind-altering and visionary botanicals in
cultures across the world.”

Thus the writers about psychedelics in the 1960s made a fatal strategic
misstep in treating psychedelics as new, modern, and unprecedented. Didn’t
the 1960s know that “our own” religion was based on entheogens? No. Who
wrote the first book focusing on psychoactives in Western religion, in the
period of Late Antiquity? John Allegro did, not Wasson, who did his best to
suppress such a consideration about that era. As the first scholar to try
historical speculation about entheogens as the basis of a religion in Late
Antiquity, some of Allegro’s bold postulates will remain standing, even
while his premise of an anti-drug Roman culture rested on the incorrect
status-quo assumption-framework and bolstered the existing, incorrect model
of drug attitudes in Late Antiquity.

Also, James Kent’s book draft Psychedelic Information Theory (
http://www.tripzine.com/pit/ ) is surprisingly phenomenological for a
self-described hard-science approach. My first phase of research used the
cognitive phenomenology approach, but lately I’m focused on entheogen
history, explained by entheogen phenomena, rather than on entheogen
phenomena in isolation. So recently I’ve been on the lookout for
specifically entheogen *history* scholars, and tend to think of
contemporary-only entheogen researchers as uninformed, as continuing to make
the same mistake Metzner made in the 1960s. But really now, I’m calling for
an integration of present-focused entheogen theory together with
historically focused entheogen scholarship: both are needed, to inform and
complete the other. We need to combine the present-day phenomenological
perspective of James Kent, Benny Shanon, and Martin Ball with the historical
perspective of David Hillman, Clark Heinrich, and Carl Ruck.

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>>As the first scholar to try historical speculation about entheogens as the

basis of a religion in Late Antiquity, some of Allegro’s bold postulates
will remain standing, even while his premise of an anti-drug Roman culture
rested on the incorrect status-quo assumption-framework and bolstered the
existing, incorrect model of drug attitudes in Late Antiquity.

That incorrect model is finally overthrown, I feel, with David Hillman’s
book The Chemical Muse. That is why I took a hiatus from my several-year
hiatus to read and review his book.

Attachments :

Yahoo,

Don’t delete this group. I am on hiatus and will be posting to this popular
scholarly group in a year or two. This is an important archival weblog and
it will continue with new content before too long.

— Michael Hoffman, group owner. Since 2001.

I attended an Esoteric Book Conference recently. After I told him of my writing against Wasson for limiting Amanita to the writing of Genesis but no later, a man involved in Inner Traditions publisher (a leading entheogen publisher) briefly showed me a book announcement that’s in preparation and will appear in their next catalog and their online site.

The book is about how bodies of Christian saints in the Middle Ages were used as psychoactive mushroom farms. I don’t know if such an idea should be read literally, but books about visionary plants in Western religious history are valuable and in some sense, needed. We should not, however, make proof and evidence our central concern. We should make good ideas our central concern, such as theoretical elegance, theory coherence, and explanatory power.

I approach the hypothesis of a cannibalism aspect of entheogen-based religion the same way as the hypothesis of sex or astrology: it is possible to incorporate and connect any themes, given that, per Benny Shanon, entheogens induce a metaphorical mentality, but we should keep the emphasis on visionary plants, the experiential phenomology that visionary plants induce (emphasized by Shanon, overlooked by Ruck), and on metaphors as such. Grof, for example, overuses literal birth-trauma; he should instead approach that theme primarily as a metaphor for entheogenic experiential phenomenology.

— Michael Hoffman

From the Bodies of the Gods: Psychoactive Plants and the Cults of the Dead
By Earl Lee
http://store.innertraditions.com/isbn/978-1-59477-458-4
May 15, 2012
256 pages
6 b&w illustrations
Imprint: Park Street Press

Publisher’s description:

The origins of modern religion in human sacrifice, ritual cannibalism, visionary intoxication, and the Cult of the Dead

Explores ancient practices of producing sacred hallucinogenic foods and oils from the bodies of the dead for ritual consumption and religious anointing

Explains how these practices are deeply embedded in the symbolism, theology, and sacraments of modern religion, specifically Christianity and the Eucharist

Documents the rites of Cults of the Dead from the prehistoric Minoans on Crete to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Hebrews to early and medieval Christian sects such as the Cathars

Long before the beginnings of civilization, humans have been sacrificed and their flesh used to produce sacred foods and oils for use in religious rites. Originating with the sacred harvest of hallucinogenic mushrooms from the corpses of shamans and other holy men, these acts of ritual cannibalism and visionary intoxication are part of the history of all cultures, including Judeo-Christian ones, and provided a way to commune with the dead. These practices continued openly into the Dark Ages, when they were suppressed and adapted into the worship of saintly bones–or continued in secret by a few “heretical” sects, such as the Cathars and the Knights Templar. While little known today, these rites remain deeply embedded in the symbolism, theology, and sacraments of modern religion and bring a much more literal meaning to the church’s “Holy Communion” or symbolic consumption of the body and blood of Christ.

Documenting the sacrificial, cannibalistic, and psychoactive sacramental practices associated with the Cult of the Dead from the prehistoric Minoans on Crete to the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews and onward to early and medieval Christian sects, Earl Lee shows how these religious rites influenced the development of Western religion. In particular, he reveals how Christianity originated with Jesus’s effort to restore the sacred rites of Moses, including the Marzeah, or Feast for the Dead. Examining the connections between these rites and the mysterious funeral of Father Sauniere in Rennes-le-Château, the author explains why the prehistoric Cult of the Dead has held such power over Western civilization, so much so that its echoes are still heard today in our literature, film, and arts.

About the Author
Earl Lee is a professor at Pittsburg State University and the author of several books, including Raptured, Drakulya, and Libraries in the Age of Mediocrity. He lives in Pittsburg, Kansas.