April 30, 2011

Der Tod als zentrale Kraft von Machtbewusstsein

I like people who make me think

Elizabeth Gilbert: Being a genius or having one

Paul Stamets' six mycological solutions


I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium. The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it's extremely tenacious. This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. They're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature, the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the land masses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mycelium, so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs. Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday this is where we go to church. I'm in love with the old-growth forest, and I'm a patriotic American because we have those.
Most of you are familiar with portobello mushrooms. And frankly, I face a big obstacle when I mention mushrooms to somebody, they immediately think portobellos or magic mushrooms. Their eyes glaze over, and they think I'm a little crazy. So I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. We call it mycophobia: the irrational fear of the unknown when it comes to fungi.
Mushrooms are very fast in their growth: day 21, day 23, day 25. Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. In fact, we're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta, a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together. We share in common the same pathogens. Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. But here is a mushroom that's past its prime. After they sporulate, they do rot. But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium.
And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground. In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be more than eight miles of these cells. My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium.
This is photo-micrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory and then it begins the net. I've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I have thousands of electron micrographs, and when I'm staring at the mycelium I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. It inhales oxygen, just like we do. But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. And I present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes. And in these cavities, these microcavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. These are little wells. And inside these wells, then microbal communities begin to form. And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.

I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural Internet. When you look at the mycelium, they're highly branched. And if there's one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing - Internet engineers maybe call them hot points – there's alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. The mycelium is sentient. It knows that you are there. When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris. So I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit, and we now, being the top organism on this planet, are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.
Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. How is that possible? It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates. Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil. Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. So fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix.
This was first discovered in 1859. This is a photograph by Franz Hueber. This photograph's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 420 million years ago, this organism existed. It was called Prototaxites. Prototaxites, laying down, was about three feet tall. The tallest plants on Earth at that time were less than two feet. Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom. Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. All across most land masses. And these existed for tens of millions of years.
Now we've had several extinction events, and as we march forward, 65 million years ago ... most of you know about it: we had an asteroid impact. The earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth. Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, because fungi do not need light. More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. So the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a foregone conclusion, at least in my own mind.
The largest organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon. I couldn't miss it. It was 2,200 acres in size. 2,200 acres in size, 2,000 years old. The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. How is it that this organism can be so large and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us?
The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom. It bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt.

We were involved with several experiments. I'm going to show you six, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world. Battelle Laboratories and I joined up in Bellingham, Washington, there were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste. One was a control pile, one pile was treated with enzymes, one pile was treated with bacteria and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium. The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes, peroxydases, that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned six weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark, and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes re-manufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates. Fungal sugars.
Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. They're very large. They're showing how much nutrition that they could've obtained. But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life. Whereas the other three piles were dead, dark and stinky, and the PAH's, the aromatic hydrocarbons, went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks. The last image we don't have: the entire pile was a green berm of life. These are gateway species. Vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities.
So I invented burlap sacks (bunker spawn), and putting the mycelium using storm blown debris, you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that's producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration. So we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms. And I'll show you a graph here. This is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the eighth power. There's more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to the third power is around 1,000. In 48 hours to 72 hours, these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. Think of the implications. This is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris. And we can be guaranteed that we will have storms every year.

So this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. This is my wife Dusty with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis = Agaricon. It's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest, that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. as a treatment against consumption. This mushroom grows in Washington state, Oregon, Northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. May not seem that large, let's get closer! This is extremely rare fungus. Our team, and we have a team of experts that go out, we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year - we found one sample to be able to get into culture.
Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health. I've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites. And a few years ago, we received these results. We have three different strains of Agaricon mushrooms that were highly active against pox viruses. Dr. Earl Kern, who's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active. 10 or greater are considered to be very active. Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. There's a vetted press release that you can read, it's vetted by DoD, if you Google "Stamets" and "smallpox". Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview.
So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses. And so for the first time I am showing this. We have three different strains of Agaricon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. Here's the selectivity index numbers. Against pox, you saw 10s and 20s, now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. And we're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. We tried it against flu A viruses, H1N1, H3N2, as well as flu B viruses. So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index. (Applause) I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense. (Applause)

I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi, fungi that kill insects. Our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants. So I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. I did something that nobody else had done. I actually chased the mycelium when it stopped producing spores. These are spores. This is in their spores. I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form. And so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form. And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores. They gave it to the queen. One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever.
And then - a delicate dance between dinner and death - the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified and, boing, a mushroom pops out of their head. (Laughter) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. So the house is no longer suitable for invasion. So you have a near-permanent solution for re-invasion of termites. And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants. Then we tried extracts, and, lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. This has huge implications. I then received my second patent and this is a big one. It's been called an Alexander Graham Bell patent, it covers over 200,000 species. This is the most disruptive technology, I've been told by executives of the pesticide industry, that they have ever witnessed. This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores.

And so I came up with a Life Box because I needed a delivery system. The Life Box – you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference – you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agaricon mushroom. The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium. And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing – poten tially – an old growth forest from a cardboard box.
I want to re-invent the delivery system and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. If there's a YouTube like site that you could put up, you could make it interactive, zip code-specific, where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes.
You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water – I developed this for the refugee community – corns, beans, and squash, and onions. I took several containers – my wife said, if I could do this, anybody could – and I ended up growing a seed garden. Then you harvest the seeds – and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this – and then you're harvesting the seed garden. Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels ... I add mycelium to it, and then I inoculate the corn cobs. Now, three corn cobs, no other grain – lots of mushrooms begin to form. Too many withdrawals from the carbon bank, and so this population will be shut down. But watch what happens here. The mushrooms then are harvested, but very importantly, the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? And we came up with Econol.
Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary and you gain all the benefits that I've described to you already. But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels. So we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils ... these are a species that we need to join with. I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. Thank you very much.

Gene Matto

James Arthur

John Trudell

April 8, 2011

Christ himself is a powerful shamanic figure



01/01'06 CMN @ 6 min) Yes, this is one of the extraordinary mysteries that I found myself confronted most closely in this research. You know, it's difficult enough if you get 20 people together in a room and have them witness some event, it's difficult enough to get them all to agree on what they have seen. We know this from psychological studies: if 10 different people witness a crime, they will give 10 different descriptions of the perpetrator. But here is the bizarre thing: in experiences that our scientists define as non-real or illusory, the experiences that we call hallucinations, in those experiences people all over the world universally report the same experiences, and that is the experience of passing through into another realm which is absolutely real, convincingly, seamlessly real, which is inhabited by intelligent beings who seem to want to communicate with you. And these beings often take the form of half-animal, half-human hybrids. And overlaid against the perception of these beings, there are often geometrical patterns, grids, zig zags, wavy lines appear as well. And this is universal. It's found from people from all different cultures and at all different periods of history. It's documented in the painted caves from 35.000 years ago. This same experience, that people in modern lab research using hallucinogens to investigate human consciousness report, encountering exactly the same kind of beings, the half-human, half-animal hybrids, for example, that we find painted on the walls of the caves 35.000 years ago.

What it really tells us is that we must try to explain, why it is that people experience the same thing in this supposedly non-real realm. And one possible explanation for it – and that's the explanation that shamans all over the world offer – is that that other realm, that we enter in the altered state of consciousness, is in fact real. And that is why people see the same things, because they're going to the same places, they are projecting their consciousness into the same places. And this is what shamans believe, and the shamanic view of the universe and of reality is radically different from the view of western science. Western science believes, that if you cannot weigh something, measure it and count it, then it simply doesn't exist, it's not there. They must be able to approach it with their instruments and if they can't, it doesn't exist, it's an illusion. Shamans review things quite differently. They believe, that whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, we are tied up with the spiritual realm, and if we wish to deal with problems in this physical world than we cannot ignore that spiritual realm. And often the root cause of problems will be in that spiritual realm. So rather than sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that it doesn't exist, what shamans attempt to do is to become masters of that realm. They developed technics for altering their consciuosness at will, and the most widely used technic is the use of hallucinogenic plants. But there are other technics as well. And they enter the other realm, and they master it, and they deal with it and negociate with the spirits there, and they frequently bring back useful information of great value in this physical world, particularly to do with healing.

This is a bridge which helps people in western culture to understand what's going on here. Because now for the first time, thanks to quantum physics, which really goes back to the 1920s or so, thanks to the insights and discoveries of quantum physics, most people are aware that the existence of parallel dimensions is a very real possibility. Quantum physicists have powerful experimental evidence, indirect evidence, to suggest that these parallel dimensions exist. And one of the big projects of quantum physics is to crack open the parallel dimensions, to find a way into them. And that's what the largest scientific instrument on the planet, the Large Hydrogen Collider in Switzerland, is partly about, a multi-billion dollar instrument, designed to explore parallel dimensions.
Well, that's what shamans have been doing for tens of thousands of years.
They've been exploring parallel dimensions, and they call them spirit worlds, and they don't need a gigantic instrument to do it. They use the power of their own minds, the power that is inherented in their own brains. Perhaps what they are doing – we need to think of the brain as a receiver of information, as a receiver of consciousness – perhaps what they are doing is retuning the receiver wavelength, so that shifts them off – shall we call it – "channel normal" and puts them into another channel, where the information that they receive is real and is valid, but is not accessible to us in normal states of consciousness.

Yes, I think, there is no doubt about this. If you go back to the source of any of the great religions, you're going to find shamanic experiences. Now I realize, that this may cause offense and I don't wish to offend Christians. I just ask Christians to review this information with an open mind. St Paul and his Damascus Road Experience is of fundamental importance to Christianity and to development and spread of Christianity.
What St Paul experienced there was a classic shamanic experience: a blinding light in a sense of a complete change of his life, of a whole new flood of information came into his mind. And from that, much of the spread of Christianity owes its strenght. Christ himself is a powerfully shamanic figure. Most shamans around the world today believe, that they are partly from the spiritual realm, that they may have a mother or a father in the spiritual realm, and that they are connected to this world and to the spirit world.
And of course, Christ is the same kind of figure: he is partly divine and partly human, part spirit, part man. So I think, the connections are very clear and very obvious there.

The problem is ... we can find this in all religions, in the case of the Mormons, for example. What has Joseph Smith encountered but an angelic being, a supernatural being, who presents to him certain texts on golden tablets. The case of Mani, the Manichaen faith, he also had almost identical experiences. You can repeat this story again and again in religions: At the very source and heart of the religion is a profound experience that an individual or a group of individuals had in an altered state of consciousness. Then what happens is that the classic bureaucratic structures of humanity begin to impose themself on this original experience and within a few generations, the religion has moved away from direct experience of the spirit realm and substituted a class of priests in between us and the spirit world. And those priests are generally motivated entirely by this world, and religion then becomes an instrument of material oppression and control, and is co-opted by the political establishment, when in fact at the heart of the religion is a direct experience of another world. Those were relegated to myths, and, in fact, you find in many religions as they develop, they turn against the notion that those who follow the religion should experience altered states of consciousness. Many religions are vehemently opposed to altered states of consciousness, even though their own validity derives originally from an altered state of consciousness. But this is a normal process. This is what human beings do. Human beings are power animals, and any structure can be co-opted to the power interests of particular groups. And that's unfortunately what is happen with religions. And the great world religions today are all in my view very far removed from their shamanic roots, greatly to their cost.




Ja, das ist eines dieser außergewöhnlichen Mysterien, denen ich mich bei dieser Untersuchung besonders intensiv widme. Es ist schwierig genug, wenn man 20 Leute in einem Raum hat, die gemeinsam Zeuge eines Ereignisses werden, diese dazu zu bringen, überein zu stimmen in dem was sie gesehen haben.
Aus psychologischen Studien wissen wir: wenn 10 verschiedene Personen den Hergang eines Verbrechens beobachten, werden sie 10 verschiedene Täterbeschreibungen bekommen. Doch jetzt wird es ganz verrückt: bei Erlebnissen, die unsere Wissenschaftler als nicht real oder illusorisch definieren – wir nennen sie Halluzinationen – bei diesen Erlebnissen berichten Menschen überall auf der Welt alle von denselben Erfahrungen, und zwar, dass sie den Eindruck haben, in ein anderes Reich einzutreten, das sich absolut real anfühlt, überzeugend nahtlos real und das von intelligenten Wesen bewohnt wird, die allem Anschein nach mit dir kommunizieren wollen. Diese Wesen nehmen oft die Gestalt von Mischformen aus Mensch und Tier an, wobei die Wahrnehmung dieser Zwitterwesen oft von geometrischen Mustern, Gittern und Zick-Zack-Linien überlagert ist, Wellenlinien tauchen auch auf. Und das gilt allgemein. Das ist so beschrieben worden von Angehörigen der verschiedensten Kulturkreise und Geschichtsepochen. Es ist dokumentiert in Höhlenmalereien, die 35.000 Jahre alt sind.
Dasselbe Erlebnis, das Menschen unter modernen Laborbedingungen nach Einnahme von Halluzinogenen zur Erforschung des eigenen Bewusstseins haben, trifft z.B. haargenau auf dieselbe Sorte Halb-Mensch-Halb-Tier-Mischwesen, die wir seit 35.000 Jahren auf Höhlenwänden verewigt finden.

Es sagt uns, dass wir versuchen müssen eine Erklärung zu finden, warum das so ist, dass in dieser angeblich nicht-realen Welt Menschen dieselben Erfahrungen machen. Eine mögliche Interpretation dafür ist – Schamanen in aller Welt bieten diese Deutung an – dass dieser andere Bereich, den wir in einem veränderten Bewusstseinszustand betreten, tatsächlich real ist. Leute sehen deshalb dieselben Dinge, weil sie an denselben Ort gehen, sie projizieren ihr Bewusstsein an denselben Ort. Das ist, was Schamanen glauben, daher ist die schamanische Sichtweise auf Weltall und Wirklichkeit grundverschieden von der westlicher Wissenschaftler. Westliche Wissenschaft glaubt, wenn du etwas nicht abwiegen kannst, nicht messen und nicht zählen kannst, dass es schlicht und einfach nicht existiert, es ist nicht da. Sie müssen mit ihren Instrumenten darauf zugreifen können – geht das nicht, existiert es nicht und ist ein Hirngespinst. Schamanen betrachten Dinge ganz anders. Sie glauben, ob wir es mögen oder nicht, ob wir damit einverstanden sind oder nicht, wir sind verbunden mit diesen spirituellen Gefilden, und wenn wir Probleme in dieser körperlichen Welt bewältigen wollen, können wir diese geistige Dimension nicht ignorieren. Und oft wird die eigentliche Ursache unserer Probleme auf dieser geistlichen Ebene zu finden sein. Anstatt also den Kopf in den Sand zu stecken und vorzuschützen, dass sie nicht existiert, versuchen Schamanen dieser Realität Herr zu werden. Sie entwickelten Techniken, mit denen sie ihr Bewusstsein nach Belieben umwandeln. Die am häufigsten angewandte Methode dabei ist die Verwendung halluzinogener Pflanzen. Doch es gibt auch andere. Und sie betreten dieses Reich, und sie meistern diese Situation, und sie beschäftigen sich damit, und sie verhandeln mit den Geistern dort, und sie bringen nicht selten nützliche Informationen von hohem Wert mit zurück in diese körperliche Welt, insbesondere was Heilverfahren betrifft.

Das ist eine Brücke, die Menschen aus der westlichen Welt hilft zu verstehen, was hier vor sich geht. Weil jetzt zum ersten Mal dank der Quantenphysik – in Wirklichkeit geht das schätzungsweise auf die 20er Jahre im letzten Jahrhundert zurück – dank den Erkenntnissen und Entdeckungen der Quantenphysik die meisten Leute die Existenz von Parallel-Dimensionen als eine sehr reale Möglichkeit anerkennen. Quantenphysiker verfügen über beeindruckende experimentelle Hinweise, indirekte Nachweise, die nahe legen, dass diese Parallel-Dimensionen bestehen. Eines der ganz großen Projekte der Quantenphysik will die Parallel-Dimensionen aufknacken und einen Eingang finden. Zum Teil war das der Grund für den Bau des größten Wissenschaftsapparats auf dem Planeten, dem LHC in der Schweiz, einem Multi-Milliarden-Instrument, entworfen zur Erforschung paralleler Dimensionen.
Nun, genau das praktizieren Schamanen seit Zehntausenden von Jahren. Sie haben Parallel-Dimensionen, die sie Geisterwelten nennen, aufgespürt und ausgespäht und brauchen kein gigantisches Gerät um es zu tun. Sie nutzen die Kraft ihrer eigenen Psyche, die von Natur aus präsente Power in ihrem Hirn. Was sie möglicherweise machen, ist – wir müssen uns das Gehirn als einen Empfänger für Information vorstellen, als einen Empfänger für Bewusstsein – sie verändern möglicherweise die Empfänger-Wellenlänge, und das schmeißt sie aus dem – nennen wir es mal – "Kanal Normal" und steckt sie in einen anderen Kanal, wo die Information, die sie empfangen, echt und gültig aber für uns im Normalzustand nicht zugänglich ist.

Ja, ich denke, darin besteht kein Zweifel. Wenn man zum Ursprung egal welcher der großen Religionen zurückgeht, wird man auf eine schamanische Erfahrung stoßen. Mir ist schon klar, dass dies als Beleidigung aufgefasst werden könnte, und es ist bestimmt nicht meine Absicht, Christen zu nahe zu treten. Ich bitte Christen nur darum, diese Information unvoreingenommen zu überprüfen. Paulus' Damaskuserlebnis ist von fundamentaler Bedeutung für das Christentum, für seine Entstehung und Verbreitung. Was Paulus dort widerfahren ist, war ein klassisches schamanisches Erlebnis: ein blendendes Licht und der Aufruf, sein Leben komplett umzukrempeln. Eine völlig neue Flut an Information kam ihm in den Sinn. Diesem Schlüsselerlebnis verdankt die Ausbreitung des Christentums seine Stärke. Christus selbst ist eine machtvolle schamanische Gestalt. Die meisten Schamanen in aller Welt glauben heute, dass sie zum Teil von dem geistlichen Reich abstammen, wo sie eine Mutter oder einen Vater haben, und dass sie mit beiden, dieser und der spirituellen Welt, verbunden sind, und Christus ist natürlich auch so eine Figur: Er ist zum Teil göttlich und teilweise menschlich, halb Geist, halb Mensch. Ich denke, die Zusammenhänge hier sind sehr klar und sehr offensichtlich.

Das Problem ist ... wir treffen das in allen Religionen an, z.B. bei den Mormonen. Wem ist Joseph Smith denn begegnet wenn nicht einer engelsgleichen Gestalt, einem übersinnlichen Wesen, das ihm einige Texte auf goldenen Tabletts überreichte. Im Fall von Mani, dem manichäischen Glauben, machte der Gründer so gut wie das Gleiche durch. Diese Geschichte kann man bei Religionen immer wiederfinden: An der tiefsten Quelle und im innersten Herz der Religion trifft man auf eine profunde, mitreißende persönliche Erfahrung, die unter anderen Bewusstseinszuständen entweder von einem Einzelnen oder einer Gruppe gemacht wurde. Später dann beginnen die klassisch-bürokratischen Strukturen der Menschheit sich dieser Urerfahrung aufzudrängen, und innerhalb weniger Generationen hat sich die Religion von direkten Erlebnissen in geistlicher Umgebung fortbewegt und eine Priesterkaste zwischen uns und der Geisterwelt postiert. Und weil die Priester üblicherweise zur Gänze durch diese Welt motiviert sind, wird Religion immer mehr ein Instrument umfassender Unterdrückung und Kontrolle und schließlich durch das politische Establishment vereinnahmt, wenn doch eigentlich im Zentrum der Religion direkte Erfahrungen einer anderen Welt standen. Diese wurden rasch zu Mythen degradiert, und in der Tat, es trifft auf viele Religionen zu, dass, sobald sie sich entwickeln, der Gedanke, das Experimentieren mit veränderten Bewusstseinszuständen unter Anhängern der Religion zu fördern, verworfen wird. Viele Religionen sind sogar trotz der Tatsache, dass ihre eigene Geltungskraft ursprünglich von einem veränderten Bewusstseinszustand herrührt, vehement dagegen. Das jedoch ist völlig normal. Menschen sind Machttiere, und jede Sozialstruktur kann an die Machtinteressen bestimmter Gruppen angepasst werden.
Das ist es, was dummerweise mit Religionen passiert. Und die großen Weltreligionen sind in meinen Augen heute alle weit entfernt von ihren schamanischen Wurzeln, in hohem Maße zu deren Nachteil.

February 23, 2011

Jan Irvin


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website comments

12/02'10 PR 12) Origins of Money
A Virtual Round-Table Discussion by Brett Veinotte, Jan Irvin, Paul Verge, and Richard Grove

GM # 41 Stephen Zarlenga pt 1) Money's Dirty Little Secret
GM # 57 Stephen Zarlenga pt 2) Why Gold and Silver are not the Answer
GM # 67 Stephen Zarlenga pt 3) A Response to the Austrian School
GM # 88 Stephen Zarlenga pt 4) Silver and Gold

Gene Odening)
I will just say go research the Iroquois Confederacy for an example of the once working form of social order that worked until the "eastern, read middle eastern" thoughts of greed and elite-ism were introduced.
The "representative" had no choice but to comply with the tribes wishes. If the rep. voted and there was no total agreement his vote was invalid and then a new rep. was select and the whole process was repeated.
Many of the things you guys have gone over before are in the documentaries "Psywar" and "Human Resources". (There are questionable persons in these as well misnomer of the facts but still good stuff.)
Both are here at Metanoia free for download.

Monica Ballyurban)
I read with sadness both commentators' words.
Two obviously intelligent individuals with many interesting ideas. I learned much, so much. But somewhere lost in the dialogue between the two, was the concept of "agree to disagree".
I was born in America, to Hungarian parents, escaping Communist oppression in 1956 Europe.
I absolutely agree with the fact that the status quo of the European mindset is dangerous and will more than likely lead us down the road to human extinction.
It takes time to change. People need to hear new ideas, expressed with conviction, but also with compassion. Opposing sides need to come together to understand each other. I would like to think one day there will be a world where "we can all just get along". Perhaps there was once such a time, and perhaps it may come again. [...]
I read the articles and watch the videos on the Gnostic Media website every Christmas, to remember and learn about the great and sacred pagan traditions that are all but lost and forgotten.
Yes, some religious people cannot handle these ideas – that is why so much of religion has always been allegory, a way for the masses to understand at least something (also a way for those in power to control the masses of course, with fear and threats and guilt). The concept of gods and religions are a cultural construct. What is out there, the great spirit, exists and cannot be comprehended or described by any of us. No one is an authority. Perhaps when we leave this plane of existence we shall know "the truth" but only time will tell.
Europeans came to America ... and now look what we are doing: expressing ideas via the internet. Something good always can come out of something bad. We must always look at the big picture and focus on what good the future can hold, not just the bad. The world is not black and white.
I think one of the greatest tragedies of American history is the brutal, almost complete annihilation of the Native Peoples of this great land. Close behind that, is what the US did to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am glad I was not alive during both events, I do not know how I could have justified living in this country I was (to be) born in.
I am a botanist and honour the plants that sustain us. The sacred mushroom is truly special.
I have never used it, and more than likely, never will. It's just a choice I made. There is so much good in this world, and beauty. Let's learn from each other, and from this planet, if we can. Let's make it a better place, not worse. I have a poem in my room, that I have read everyday for years: [...] Wishing you all the best.

Albert) In a word, at 2 am with the prospect looming to get up in a couple of hours to assume my "cog space" in the wheels of the machine, awesome! Thanks gentlemen.


12/19'10 GM 97 – Mike Crowley: Secret Drugs of Buddhism

Jan) Everyone should pose for photos with a Tibetan Lama in a "sinner" T-shirt.
Not quite sure what that means ... fallacy of equivocation.

Evan Martin) Great interview, Jan. So fascinating.

Bram) Been listening to your podcasts for a few months now, and I have to say, it's great stuff.
The connections you and your guest make, with entheogens and other subjects, to all these various religions and philosopies, from christianity to Buddhism to psychiatry, all with the trivium in mind, are great. Appreciate your avoidance of tunnelvision (as many in your field only focuss on the drugs).
Thanks a lot for doing this, it's great inspiration for my own uni-research, and personal development.
Having lived in Cambodia myself – and having often seen the beautiful inscriptions on the both hindu and buddhistic buildings of Ankor Watt – this particular podcast was extremely interesting to me and I will def check out the book by Mr. Crowley. Also thanks for keeping the work of Mr. Allegro alive!
Greetings from the Netherlands, and keep on doing what your doing, it's much needed!

David L. Foster) Really enjoyable interview, Jan. I read Mike's Secret Drugs of Buddhism on-line quite a while ago and found it extremely thought provoking. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the mushroom hypothesis, but I don't believe anyone has suggested that the appearance of mushroom motifs both in art/esoteric texts and in consciousness may be not just literal but an anticipatory bio-empathetic neuro-phenomenon. That is to say, it may suggest (evidence of a sort of fractal archetype that points to) a universal process of hierarchical consciousness, as for example in Chakra/cakram symbolism. You may be interested to know about Geoffrey Samuel's Cardiff University research project – of course not all of us can qualify for £150,000 grants ...


01/31'11 GM 102 –Christopher Knowles: The Mystery Origins of Modern Music

February 11, 2011

A dream-worshipping Druidic society


Neil Kramer lopo

continuing with pt 3 (or playlist)

And though we can see in older classic spiritual texts, there is an observance that one should know oneself and that perhaps what is outside emanates only from inside, and if you really want to push that to the extreme you could say: there is no outside, there is only the inside. This gets me misconstrued, this gets me misunderstood over time, and this outer world gets depersonalized – this is the key to a lot of the work I'm doing.
This externilization process depersonalizes what is our responsibility. And we see that the world out there is actually starting to disconnect from us and we don't assume responsibility for it.
So, you know, there are exceptions to this. There are those that do push through. There are spirits who do question authority and who are kind of organically defiant and which will always push through this. And when you find these souls, sometimes they are political radicals, or the revolutionaries, or the philosophers, but when you push it to the fringe, you know, they are terrorists, or they're nutters, or they are excentrics, or the mentally ill.

And the degree and duration of one's investigation into reality can determine what severity of label you get. So when you get someone like David Icke, who comes out with all this fantastic information and then talks about higher dimensional entities and reptilians and so on, that's very easy for the control system to box him off, and put him in a certain place, and categorize him.
So we have to be very careful with the words we use.
I think if you had talked about transdimensional, hyperdimensional things fifteen years ago, it was very very suspect and it was very very esoteric indeed, whereas now, as the informed individual becomes more unacquainted and confident with science and particularly quantum physics and so on, hyperdimensional physics is very mainstream now, is very popular now, and the core concepts – not necessarily the mechanics of the mathematics, which is always best expressed as equations and these kind of really abstruse, you know, mathematical formulas and stuff, but the principles of it – we can all understand, we can all grab and get to.
My feeling is, the sort of no excuse anymore to remain in ignorance and I'm kind of quite interested in studying the Gnostics and the Gnostic system of information. And this is one of my favorites of texts within the Nag Hammadi texts that is called "The Book of Thomas the Contender," and it's just this one line in it that particularly enjoy, which really sums it up for me. And it goes like this:

"Woe to you who dwell in error, heedless that the light of the sun, which judges and looks down upon the all will circle around all things, so as to enslave the enemies. You do not even notice the moon, how by night and day it looks down, looking at the body of your slaughters!"

And to me this is a simple thing. It says, there is no excuse, people, for being ignorant. Do not dwell in error, do not move forward in shows and distraction – it' s not a way forward. And there is another line that says "woe to you who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish", which basically says: If you concentrate only on the sensual life – and by that I don't mean the erotic life, I mean of the senses, of the five-sense world – if that is where you are based, you are putting yourself in a perishable world and you're making a deity of a perishable world.
And I think pretty much that's an unacceptable way to behave anymore and why it is not our job to go around and wake people up and all that. And I'm really vehemently attached to the notion that the only thing we can really do if we accept this plenum, this Akashic Field ...
If we enlightened and better ourselves – to use a more mundane word, if we just want to keep it simple – if we concentrate on our own growth, that is the most phenomenal thing we can do to affect everyone else, because every thought you have, every emotion, every feeling, every impulse is automatically kind of holographically shared all the time with the entire field that stretches through the whole multiverse. Nothing is separated. Nothing is decoherent. We live in this hugely interconnected coherent universe. And again, that is a principle that the control system doesn't really want you to go into.
So those nuggest are took away in inaccessible science books or they're took away in () texts that only nuttish read, and that has to stop. And, of course, programs like this start to overturn that nonsense and show that this information is there for all of us and there is a kind of damn good reason for it.


pt 4 All these polarizations are so ridiculous now

I can see how that could be interpreted that way. There is a flipside to that, and it's this: The people who are here, now, are also taking the opportunity of the most extraordinary times of polarization that we have ever seen.
There is no clearer, more distinct demonstration of how reality unfolds from consciousness than living on this planet. And it is so polarized, it is so ridiculous, it is so brilliant, all at the same time, that eventually you either have to acknowledge, and understand, and move forward with that, or it will crush you. And that is what is happening on this planet.
So I would say, to some degree, that the amount of polarization that one sees – and by that I mean how things are collapsed down into opposites so often of peace and violence, and love and hate, and zero and one, and black and white, and whatever – those polarizations are so ridiculous now and, of course, we examine that tonality in programs like this as regards society, and civil liberties, and personal freedoms, and so on and so forth, but those are just human constructs, you know. I would say, no one has any rights, or liberties, or freedoms and yet everybody has rights, and liberties, and freedoms. You know, you're here, you show up on earth – good luck. That's it. There's no rights, there's no freedoms, there's no nothing.
So people get attached to that and social reform and radical political change ... for me that's a dead end. That is playing with the Jazz pieces that someone else has constructed.

That's right, yeah. And I would say: to a very great degree. Everything we do, everything we see, everything we feel, and all this information that we're imbibing, we have to bring it into the personal. We cannot afford to abstract things all the time, into this distant metaphysics, or this distant social common, it has to be brought into the personal, into what you actually do, into what you actually feel, into what you actually are.
So my kind of litmus test, my yardstick for the gnosis, and the wisdom, and the information that I come upon is, how can I integrate it into my own felt experience of life. And if I cannot, I disregard it, I reject it. Because the only thing that we have is our felt experience.
And it's important to understand, yes, I'm talking about, you know, the food you put in your mouth and the toothbrush with which you brush your teeth and all the rest of it, the nuts and bolts of reality. But consider this:

In Druidic times in England, the Druids contemplated the idea that experience on earth was a shadow and light experience, and the light experience was waking life and the shadow experience was what we call going to sleep and dreaming. And they placed equal volume on those two things, equal volume on those two things.
So did the Toltec sorcerers, so did many of the Gnostic seers. ("Jesus was a Toltec Sorcerer.")
We don't do that now in our society. Dreams are a bit of silly fluff that you just forget when you wake up. Dreams are like nonsense. Dreams are dreams – they are just not real. And that represents where we start to see a complete bifurcation of what is real and what is unreal. And it is important to acknowledge, as a very simple example, that obviously half your time you spend asleep and half your time you spend awake – whatever the percentage is of that it doesn't matter, but you get the point. There is a light and a dark. And that doesn't mean "good and evil", it just means light and not light. It means shadow, it means illumination, it means darkness. As anybody who is familiar with torture technics knows, one of the most cruel things you can do to a human being over an extended period of time is not give them darkness. To keep someone in a cell with a bright light in it is a very very subtle, but very very penetrating and horrible way of torturing somebody. We need darkness. We need shadow. It's part of our system. It's part of our ecology. It's part of our consciousness.

And so I think it's important to recognize that experience here begins to become richer and more important and more synchronous when we understand that this concept of light and shadow is central to the human experience. And it can be demonstrated by describing the old Toltec sorcerers, or shamans, or bruchos or whatever you want to call them. And when I say "sorcerer", again, I underline this, I'm not talking about like dark sorcerers or like, you know, you have a good magician and then a sorcerer is someone who is bad. I mean sorcerer just as one who is interested in knowledge, in knowing, in information. (I kind of quit that on a video recently when someone wants to look into that. It's important to get to the root of that word.)
So sorcery is a neutral thing. Sorcery is working with reality of fundamental level – that's all it means.

The old Toltec sorcerers used a limit what they would do in their waking life.
And they would be careful of what food they ate. They would be careful of wearing certain colours. They would be careful of going to certain places, because those energies in those places would reduce the amount of psychic energy they had to practise that sorcery when they were asleep.
And so they viewed life the other way around: that sleep was the real, important, juicy, exciting bit, and the waking life was just a functional bit. And yes, they would go out, and smell the roses, and walk under the trees, and eat fresh juicy peaches, and all the rest of it, and enjoy what is wonderful about life, but they treated that as very much the basic level of manifestation – high density experience of life.
The final life, the freer life was actually what happened when that consciousness, if you like, freed itself from the organism and assimilated it: moved, drifted, glided it – whatever you want to call it – back into the real field of creation where it is free, from where we came and to where we go. And this is an interesting counterbalance just to show how fundamental the constructs, how fundamental that fake browser through which we look is. So even the acceptance of the waking world as the real one and the dream world as unreal is bollox basically.
It's not like that at all.
And the only sort of interface we have between the two is so rare and is so obscure.
Really the only two methods we get to it is through these esoteric systems of meditation or through these questionable substances that in our society we just call "drugs" or "hallucinogens" which probably we could perhaps describe as "sacred plant medicine" or "entheogens" or whatever. In the 60s people call them "psychedelics". And these things pop up time and time again and it's a very decisive issue to talk about that.

And yet those two methods, meditation and entheogens, are perhaps the only clear ones we have as examples of how you can interface directly between a higher densitiy experience, i.e. physical experience, and a lower density experience, a finer, higher resolution experience such as in, what we would call, a "spiritual" experience, where you're dealing with energy of purer level.
Is very important one's intent in this – everything what we do is directed by our inclination, our motivation.
Our intent is the juice for this thing to occur. If you talk to somebody about Salvia Divinorum one person will say, yeah, this is just like teenagers take it and fall over the back of the sofa, and laugh a lot, and freak out, another people will say, well, it's a sacred medicine, not to be used lightly essentially. So again, the construct dictates, and upholds, and stears, and monitors what is the perception of a given thing, and even we ourselves ...

February 7, 2011

The news is horseshit


Neil Kramer lopo


02/23'08 Crossing The Rubicon: Breaking The Fake News Trance

"In terms of the awakening process, "Crossing the Rubicon" ("Alea iacta est") is a key revelatory stage when you realize, beyond any doubt, that the government is not your friend. The stark recognition that you have been living in a false paradigm created by someone else begins to sink in. It is here, at this bleak philosophical crossroads, where most people experience such a disturbing degree of cognitive dissonance, that they instinctively turn back. Too much to process and the implications are huge.
So even knowing that there is a greater truth on the horizon, they choose instead to return to the Control System, to the Village, with all its securities and comfortable certainties.
[...] They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their 'facts', they discovered that only 12 % of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn't be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these 'facts' had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12 % of the stories. The implication of those two findings is truly alarming.
Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda."

The news is horseshit. This can no longer be construed as unconventional, activist opinion anymore – it is plain, well evidenced, undeniable fact. We must seriously discipline ourselves (and those we care about) to stop being suckered by what we see on BBC and CNN, and by what we read in The Times or The Post.
A far better alternative is to seek out one's own news. Believe nothing unless you have done your own research. Use the Internet. Practice being a prudent and discerning researcher, employ equal measures of intuition and critical judgement at every turn. And remember, the Internet was not even widely available before 1994. There were no other easily accessible alternative news sources. You got your news from the TV and the paper or you got nothing. You could haul your ass down to a decent public library and spend a few days trawling through archive newspapers and microfilm. But rather unlikely. So now the Internet is here ... use it.


08/06'10 From Britain to Brazil

"Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian fantasy film "Brazil" satirized the debilitating apparatus of bureaucracy and how it completely dehumanizes the free thinking individual whilst being firmly supported by a zombified populous who absorb and repeat its disempowering memes without question.
If you're not familiar with Britain's particularly exasperating brand of totalitarianism, watch Brazil (The Directors Cut) for a crash course in pen-pushing authoritarian squalor. The film vividly illustrates Gilliam's own frustrations on a personal creative level (regarding the increasingly corporatized movie industry), whilst succeeding in portraying the cold-blooded machinations of an oppressive regime that has finally thrown off the tiresome camouflage of democracy. [...]

The modest island of Britain has been deliberately overpopulated with a combination of the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe and insensitive immigration policies that create poverty and ethnically specific ghettos that leave everyone dissatisfied. More than 70 million people are crammed within Britain's shores and it is, therefore, the perfect experimental platform for an infrastructure that is earmarked for global deployment. Nowhere in the world will you encounter more surveillance and enforcement cameras than in the green and pleasant land of Britain. Whether on foot or in the car, in the country or in the city, cameras track individual human movement.
On some motorways, driving beneath a particular camera array will see your licence plate automatically run against a criminal database and will measure your average speed over a given distance, automatically triggering the delivery of a sensationally alarming County Court Summons to your door if you fall outside the tolerance parameters.
[...] The surveillance infrastructure in Britain is not designed to keep humans safe, it is designed to keep them compliant. The inferred message behind the propaganda is clear: you can't get away with anything, so behave yourself and do as we tell you.

Disavowal of the shadow occurs when we perceive our own inauthentic actions and continue to do nothing about them. This is exasperated by surrender to the dominion of the ego, me-centric thinking and self-absorbed pleasure hunting or escape. This principle is vital to the conscious evolutionary shift that is required to overturn the old hierarchy.
The core teaching is simple: we are the shadow.
Each and every polarized negative entity that manifests in this world is our responsibility, our creation. The immutable flow from mind to matter, from consciousness to creation, does not allow us to disregard a given challenge. We cannot just let things go unresolved, try as we might. Negative energy patterns – destructive impulses concealed in dysfunction, fear and pain – cannot simply be abandoned. They must be faced and understood in order for their patterning to dissolve.
Ignoring a negative energy pattern ensures that it will return again and again. Each time it does, it gains density, it becomes harder and harder to reject, until finally it emerges as an inescapable crisis.
A single ignored negative emotional impulse may turn into a mild apathy in a relationship, which turns into discontent, which becomes dysfunction, finally resulting in separation and anguish.
This may occur over and over, until that incipient emotion is fully comprehended.

Short-circuit the escalation routine. Face the first negative impulse head on – as soon as it's identified. Whether it is embedded in one's psyche, intellect, sexuality, memory, dreams or wherever – face it and trace it to the root.
When the energy dynamic and its associated emotional patterning is understood, it will never return.

[...] Demon Cameron gave a speech on Monday 7th June 2010 at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, where he warned that Britain's "whole way of life" would be disrupted for years as painful measures to cut public spending would be introduced. Specifically, pay, pensions and benefits would suffer. In other words, the reason people bother to work at all – to earn money – will become even more constrained. The problem is, that this ludicrous political battle cry of "it's time to tighten our belts for the good of the nation" doesn't work anymore. Firstly, because there is no nation to speak of. Britain is now technically a unit within the emerging European Superstate, following the obscenely undemocratic Lisbon Treaty which neuters the last vestiges of Britain's self-governance. Secondly, because no-one with more than two brain cells firing actually supports the political process anymore. It is quite simply absurd. The reason people still choose to engage with it is because they're not sure what else to do. What are the alternatives? What exactly can be done?

[...] One does not have to look very hard to see that owning luxury items and displaying fashionable brands is nothing more than psychological chicanery. A brand is a cultural accessory. It's not simply the logo and jingle of a company that is determined to create the very best 'fabric conditioner' possible. A brand is designed precisely to fit demographic profiles – appealing to a well mapped social sub-group with clearly defined income, education, age, health, ethnicity, location, political opinion and cultural expectations.
A particular fabric conditioner advertisement may be targeted at 20-40 year old mums who like Madonna, Bacardi and coke, don't read, but watch a lot of television. Everything about the branding, from the product name, the colours, the music, the lighting, the words used, the editing and the advertisement duration are chosen to trigger an inclusive social response from the target sub-group. In the end, it's all just "buying stuff you don't need, with money you don't have," as the late George Carlin liked to term it.

[...] The credit based economy collapsed a long time ago. Slickly marketed frauds like futures trading, derivatives markets, sequestering emerging third world markets, printing non-existent money with no real-world value and the perpetual fabrication of international conflicts have propped up the Capitalist machine for years.
The fake credit crunch is merely the public-facing advertisement for the unchecked centralization of political, economic and military power. Delusions of discord with North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are diversionary sideshows for the uninitiated. Regardless of politics, religion or geographical origin, all political figureheads are receiving orders from the same masters. They sit at the same table. Obama and Cameron do as they are bid, as do Ahmadinejad and Putin. Some know it, some don't, but that is quite irrelevant to the success of the grand conjuration. Even apparently independent lovable rogues like Hugo Chávez and Viktor Yushchenko, when we dig a little deeper, are either directly connected to, or controlled by Control System enforcers like the CIA, George Soros' Open Society Institute and the Bilderberg Group. Even more arcane shadow organizations lie beneath the surface. The trail is well documented and available for all to uncover. You really do have to do the homework yourself to appreciate the actuality and penetration of these entities. Ignorance of them is no longer an excuse: the data is out there.

[...] The dissonance lifts and we can focus on being who we actually are, rather than getting lost in the mouldy NWO puppet show. Ultimately, the Control System knows its influence is waning.
The grip loosens and the game nears its end. We are witnessing the final spasms of the beast.
The magnificent human spirit has been unduly suppressed over the last few millennia. Now that time is over. We ascend once more. Reject their fake media hype and stop using their corporate services. Discard their fear memes and erase their counterfeit history. Extricate yourself from their politics and laugh at their sinister melodramas. They hate that most of all – not being taken seriously. From the Control System's perspective, there is no greater fusion of terrifying characteristics in a human being than authenticity, humour, creativity, sovereignity, defiance and love."


Something fresh from "The Cleaver": 02/17'11 The Path Of One

"The world of academia does not resonate too strongly with many who walk the path of conscious and spiritual growth. [...] from a shadow perspective, it's relatively straightforward to hijack the academic edifice.
After all, if you can sequester the system, you can effectively steer all those who study under it.
In the West, the academic paradigm is still perceived as the ultimate hub for establishing scholarly credibility and continues to serve as the empirical arbitrator of accomplishment and consensus reality.
Here in the US, I have noted that there's still a great deal of fuss made about sticking Dr. in front of someone's name. Billboards, TV and radio commercials, books and business cards are plastered with such academic titles. Dr. Somebody is wheeled in as a talking head for some garish infotainment show, so as to offer an 'expert' view of politics, science, history or whatever. Many people buy it, hook, line and sinker. [...]
To put it bluntly, lots of people from many different walks of life believe that academic qualifications = authority. After all, who knows better?
Faith in the academic edifice is beginning to crack in some European countries, most notably England. [...]
Even the most serious, free-thinking and well-intended scholars will often find themselves pulled into a vortex of insularity, prejudice and separatist specialization. It is the way of things in academia, particularly if you need approved funding for your work. You have to play the game, or else risk getting sidelined or even booted out. Collectivism is rewarded over independence, compliance over distinctiveness. [...] in such a rapidly changing and disinformation-saturated world, we cannot rely on academia to assist with our knowing.
We have to do it for ourselves.

[...] Being an autodidact does not mean having no formal education at all. It simply means that it is not the chief source of one's learning. [...]
In my own life, I have routinely acknowledged that the most insightful people I have met have all been autodidacts. In some instances, the breadth and penetration of their knowing totally eclipses any apparently corresponding academic mindset. The opposite side of this equation has also proven true: the professors and Cambridge graduates that I have conversed with, at length, have been some of the least discerning and most blinkered folk imaginable. [...]
The great privilege of the autodidact is that they have a totally free hand to do whatever they want. [...]
No concept is too far out, no subject is taboo, no creative tangents are considered a waste of time and belief systems are often gratifyingly upgraded or even totally jettisoned. [...]
It is incumbent on the independent scholar to hone a range of skills to endow their studies with the integrity, balance and penetration required to formulate empowering knowledge. Specifically – the ability to employ critical reason and discernment. To correlate and corroborate. To weigh any given idea against the consensus reality tunnel and one's own personal reality tunnel. To use intuition. To watch how a notion moves through our belief systems and intellectual apparatus. What remains? What changes?

Another key difference between autodidacticism and academia is the value placed on direct felt experience. [...] Anyone can read books, hunch over a laptop, visit a few temples, libraries and museums. But none of this constitutes real, juiced-up, direct encounter. The autodidact naturally places a far greater emphasis on the practical application of their knowledge than the academic. After all, they're playing very different games. [...]
Ascertaining the truth of a thing is always a strange and slippery business. [...] We can overlay a thing against our inner knowing and feel the essential veracity of it, judge its usefulness as a positive tool for perceiving and articulating our own reality tunnel. To call something 'true' in this way, is simply a piece of functional shorthand.

So what happens when the trueness of a thing diminishes? When it became clear that many of Carlos Castaneda's accounts of his sorcerer's apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus were factually inaccurate and even total fabrications – it changed the nature of his work for many people. Believers were disheartened. Skeptics were delighted. When I first read his works, it was very pre-Internet, and I had no idea of any of this. I read the classic six books and thoroughly enjoyed them. They spoke deeply to me. I have re-read them many times over the years. To this day, what is remarkable about them is how full of real gnosis they are.
Despite the lo-fi anthropological value, I nevertheless find them to be truer than most other texts I've ever read. Just how the hell Castaneda came across such fabulous wisdom is still a mystery. Perhaps it was all an intentional double-bluff from the beginning, orchestrated to protect the real source of his teaching? Who knows. I'm just glad he put pen to paper, and decided to share it.

[...] The further I walk down my own path, the wider I have to set the boundaries for what is real. It works both ways. What was fantasy, becomes actual. What was solid reality, becomes incongruous fakery.
'9/11' being a textbook example. Most people don't want to seriously study the events of '9/11', because in the back of their minds, they can feel the latent domino effect of collapsing belief systems. The real story of '9/11' is so off the map, that even the solemn ramifications of prior-knowledge and high-level treachery, pale compared to the issues of wider reality manipulation. Too weird.
Certainly, as we become more conscious, we become less susceptible to illusion. Garbage constructs begin to fade and eventually dissolve altogether, with very little 'mechanical' effort from us. Even more significantly, with heightened awareness and a cleaner mental platform, we are able to channel greater resolutions of energy.
We can go deeper with our knowing. Deeper into ourselves. Deeper into the universe.

It's intriguing to watch how a thing can move from one reality filter to another with such fluidity – contravening the human boundaries of truth, belief and existence as if they didn't exist at all. As I stated in an essay from May 2009, diverting all ones energies into the question of whether a given phenomenon is authentic or fake, may be missing the point. Many of the dozens of phenomenological koans that are routinely investigated in the alternative/esoteric field, go right to the heart of our complicity in the simulated reality construct we labor under. They exist to teach us not to judge whether something is real or not – but rather how it interacts with our own consciousness. As in quantum physics, consciousness itself changes the nature of the thing perceived. We really do have to take a long hard look at the operational value of consensus, received wisdom, peer acceptance and criteria for truth. This plays to the strengths of the autodidact, unshackled as they are from the chains of academic accord or the dreary guidelines of normality.

The real discipline of the independent thinker and the spiritual warrior, lies not in their scholarly capabilities and education, nor even in the anchoring of their knowledge into felt experience – it is in their willingness to transform their own consciousness. To change. This means letting go of things that we think we need, things we have become attached to, things we suspect might even be essential parts of us. More than anything else, it is this clinging to self that prevents us from moving forward. We sometimes forget that we are not the avatar."

I highly recommend nearly everything that Mr. Kramer lets loose in written or spoken form.
02/18'11 CCA via Facebook)
A very original but as well even-keeled article: Wow, I am not a bit less impressed than I hoped I would be!
Congratulations, these are excellent observations that come with yet carefully thought-through conclusions (as they can be appreciated by my humble level of apperception of what's really going on).
Thanks anyway for sharing such sophisticated statements. *still blown away*

February 5, 2011

Neil Kramer


lopo)
02/07'11 The news is horseshit
02/11'11 A dream-worshipping Druidic society

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08/19'10 Radio interview on red ice) Owning the Dystopian Daydream

pt 1 (or playlist) Nobody should be necessarily trying to wake anyone up

@ 4 min) And what's most disturbing about it is the () acceptance of the society that completely goes along with this apparatus that, you know, ceaselessly lays itself down upon the people.
So most of the time, if you go to somebody in where I derive from, so to speak, England, and say, what do you think of the Fascist state apparatus that is gradually been, you know, reaching its tentacles into our everyday lifes, most people just look at you as if you come from another planet and they don't really understand what you're saying. And even if you use less provocative language and say, don't you think that the government has overstepped the mark in terms of its reach into one's personal life and its desire to shape everything that we do and all the things that we can't do, people don't really see that very often.
And I'm aware that these are big, sweeping generalizations I'm making and, of course, for your listeners and for people who research and study these kinds of topics it's not quite the case 'cause people are obviously more informed. I'm talking about Joe Public, the normal guy in the street.

As long as the system consistently frames what it is to be a human being, which is always focussing the individual on what they have, then the individual will always concede to the principles that the system puts upon them.
("Bruce6000" 11/03'10 That's a good indication that people are just soaking up Government Language, abstract language. Ephemeral language comes and goes but it's supposed to be describing something that is real, something that is tangible. And what is real and tangible about what happens with the government is that there's always a gun in the room. There's always somebody pointing a gun at someone, that is draped over with language, and patriotism, and propaganda, and all other kinds of government nonsense to get you to accept it as a pragmatic reality. You can't win against abstract, nonsensical sentimentality.
[i.e. no child left behind, IRS, social security, collateral damage, national debt, law enforcement, social reform, sobriety checkpoints ...] In other words, as long as the masses accept as a pragmatic reality the abstract language that comes down from government and through mainstream media, drugs will never be legalized.)
So as long as they continue to go to the supermarket, and put petrol into their cars, and watch television, and freely walk around the streets, and go in a restaurant, or go on holiday for two weeks to Portugal, or whatever, then they're quite happy. And if you measure one's personal life on that basis things are much the same as they were a generation ago. If, however, you start to look out personal freedoms and personal liberties from a more abstract and more zoomed-out level it's completely different now, completely different now.
So ten years ago, the landscape to me from where I perceive, from what I look out is unrecognizable from what there is in 2010, and it's certainly distinctly different from when I was a child or a 7, 8, 9, 10 years old kid.
Things are incredibly different. So, the social, the financial, and the morale of the people is different. Is definitely a more pressurized sense of consciousness being held in place. And again, people don't think in those terms.

It's difficult to describe that to those people and, to be quite honest with you, I rarely try it. It's not something I'm interested in doing. I consistently say this and nobody should be necessarily trying to wake anyone up. You just play your own game and you work on your own consciousness and we'll come to this later in the session, but in so doing that's the best way you can wake people up, and I'll explain that fully later. But even in casual encounters with people just down the street, or on a train, or in restaurants, or in the supermarket, or whatever, you got a sense of conversation of what people are focussing and what people are doing. And, of course, a lot of our friends and family have a distinct disdain for this kind of information because it makes them essentially feel uncomfortable and it's not something they really want to talk about. So one of the control system's little deceits, one of its little tricks is to keep people comfortable. And when you do that, as other researchers have point it out, you don't necessarily need this over level of control, it can be relatively covert. But the interesting sort of corollary for that is that when people are comfortable they're less likely to get upset about increasing numbers of speed cameras and surveillance cameras and all these different taxations and stuff.
They just see it as part and path of modern life and that's the way things are:
'Oh well, you know, let's just get on with it and make sure we're trying keep a few dollars or a few pounds aside to mitigate any problems that might happen.'

The main thing here is: people need to recognize – and again, we are talking about two distinct types of people: People who concentrate on self-awareness probably have already recognized this but people who do not, who only move within the social and the culture () that has been the default reality construct for them ("Countries create their own mythical reality construct about how they see themselves and how hey want other countries to see them."), they're not aware that they live in an artificial construct. They are not aware that the world they live in is derived from, you know, a fantasy essentially, is derived from a fake matrix that is not strictly representational of what we actually have before us. So you have to draw people's attention to analyze this machinery and to look at these complex systems of management, but as soon as you talk in those terms people think, 'yeah, whatever ... sure, yeah, I think, I'll just go on and get a pizza and a beer instead and watch it out later – that might be good – and go on watch "Battlestar Galactica" instead.' Which is, you know ... I like those three things as well and it's nothing wrong with that. By design, the construct kind of normalizes the perception of everything and everybody and it becomes, as I might say, the default gravitation for those individuals who decide not to generate reality from their own field of creation. ("This is constantly underpinned by mass media acquiescence to government propaganda. TV commercials are morbidly graphic in their insistence on human compliance with these anti-human diktats. [...] Why do so many fine British citizens put up with this fascist nonsense?") So there is a distinct disowning of reality: They say, 'well, reality is just this big space that we all get put into and reality is as reality is and there is nothing we can do about it.


pt 2 A despiritualizing effect on the human psyche

And the reason most people choose not to generate their realities is simply because they don't realize that they can. Now, all this information is not in the public scope of normal libraries, and television, and broadcasting and so on – it's not there. And the slivers of knowledge and wisdom that do filter into the public domain are just far too oblique and fragile for a mainstream-cultural saturated mind to take hold of, let alone understand. And that is the deceit. So I would say, the propagation of the constructs into a consensus belief system is a sort of primary edict of the control system. Is not an elected thing! And its parameters are instilled into us from birth. And we call this normality.
'It's normal. This is normal.' Taxation is normal. You know, erosion of civil liberties is normal. Having deseases is normal. Going to the hospital is normal. Watching television is normal. And that is the trick of the control system.
So we're trained in this completely homogenous apparatus, its procedures, its policies, its conventions and so on. And even for the intelligent people who look beyond the surface of this – nevertheless we imbibe its science, its religion, its legalities, its restrictions – everything is labelled, recorded and filed. And this is where we start it to connect to "Brazil": This conditioning, this construct, is echoed through all hopes, if you like, of the system.
It didn't just only come through the literature and the media but it comes from our parents, from our schools and universities, our workplaces, and even the mouths of our friends and family, as we said earlier, and certainly through the media, but it's everywhere. Everywhere we look this construct stares back to us.

And I would say the danger is, the prolonged exposure to this has what we could summarize as a despiritualizing effect on the human psyche. *)
It makes you just into a biological machine and it reduces you down to just nuts and bolts and, of course, that is an aspect of us.
And when we talk about metaphysical concepts, we always have to acknowledge that we are multidimensional in the sense that yes, perhaps we do have a metaphysical higher dimensional, spiritual aspect, but we also are an animal. We're also of flesh and blood and we sweat, and piss, and shit, and eat, and fuck, and all the crude, gross material level things that all () animals do – yeah, we do those things. But when you despiritualize somebody, the play, the creation, and the charme of existence begins to evaporate and people acknowledge at deep level in their hearts that they're living lifes they do not want to live. The families, relationships, jobs, finances become disfunctional, become untrue.
So wether somebody's life is completely off the rails or completely on track, life does not satisfy anymore and perhaps it never did. And the only respite from this sort of perpetual gloom really is this fleeting relief that is afforded by distraction and sensual pleasure, and we all know what those things look like. And yes, we all partake in those things from time to time: whether it's just a nice night hour, few beers, TV, movie ... all those things. They're all good things, but when they are offered up as the only respite, as the only reward for living live, something is going terribly wrong. And so even the most cynical hedonist who leads a life of total debauchery knows deep in his or her heart, the sort of squalor of this sensual infusion is a very very poor surrogate for what should be a very inspired acceleration of life.

I mean, to a lot of people it's very esoteric to say we generate or own reality.
And the Reductionists or the scientific mind will say: 'Well, what did you mean by that? Give me evidence for that, I want to need to know more about that.' And you can point people in certain directions for this.
And I spoke recently about this notion of what perhaps can be called the "Akashic Field" which is ... Akasha is like an ancient sort of Vedic idea, Sanskrit word really for this field of interpenetrating ether, which perhaps is what it was called in Victorian Occultist times. Which was obviously immediately upturned by classicists or the scientists: 'What are you talking about? There is nothing there.' But as times gone by, we recognize this thing is like the sort of vacuum field and we could say that this field is sort of like a plenum that is the basic platform for all wave forms to communicate through the universe and it is full, it is full of stuff.
And rather than perceiving space and reality as this huge black space with a load of things in it, it isn't quite like that. And we see that this field has this ability to generate, and conserve, and convey information. And as I have said recently that Heisenberg said that, you know, reality is build as a mathematical, not a material structure ... And so when we understand that you start to think okay, so we're not talking about a world of objects, we're talking about a world of information.
A world of potential.
A world that is encoded with kind of mathematics basically. [...]

*) "Marrying the Unconscious, as Adriana Mazzarella, author of "Alla Ricerca di Beatrice, a Jungian interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy", told me during the English lessons she took from me while preparing for her seminars on the book in the US, puts the person in a position of having to deal with not just what to do, but the why of our having been put in the midst of all this strife on the planet. Marrying the Unconscious is not a choice, but a dreamt declaration of what the psyche in its autonomy is doing.
The redemption of the individual on a one-by-one basis sets the stage for the overcoming of this stage of humanity where the kind of strife that many here lament, but many here lament without an apparent grasp of why we were born into this. As Gurdjieff said, outer freedom, the freedom to be in the world doing as we would really wish, is premised on inner freedom, what we get as a result of his or others' spiritual exercises, e.g. self-remembering to the point of actually hearing the voice of conscience directly, yielding to that voice.
Most of what he taught as practice is remarkably similar to Jung's alchemy, and, of course, it had to be as alchemy represents the mixture of Egyptian alchemy with imagery and understanding of the Jewish Christians who remained outside the church, breaking with it in the 4th century in the dispute over where the chief church of Christendom should be with the pope, who wanted it to be in Rome, while they wanted it to be in Jerusalem.
Gurdjieff's teachings also represent that combination of the Jewish Christian mysticism with Pythagoreanism in Syria. All of this was taken back to the West by the Muslims who added the "Al-" to the -chemy of the study of the Egyptian chi, a word which had something to do with Matter, our Mother, the Earth and by Knight Templars who influenced Dante, according to Dr Mazzerella.
All of the great religions are highly flawed interpretations of a more universal system, which can be found in Jung and Gurdjieff."


It isn't the code itself, it is a representation of it. And what the control system does is a very simple thing, but it's very profound: It only gives you one browser to look through, and it says, this is the browser, this is the interpretation of reality that you will use. There is no other, this is it, we control that translation and everything that you see through our browser, through our matrix is it – that is it. That is the default construct.
What we need to do is recognize that the point of being here on this planet, the crucial point is to explore, is to discover, is to unfold, is to create. And anyone who doesn't see that has missed the point I would say. And whatever your religious system is, whatever your philosophy, whatever your science is, surely those are the human principles that define us. The browser therefore is our own creation.
We create, we should create our own browser. We should create our own translation devices, our own filters, to either remove them or add them, and decide how we interpret the code that is there. And so it's a very important thing for people to realize that they unfold their own reality. We're responsible for this reality that we see before us. So what occurs and translates for each of us is entirely dependened on what emanates from our own consciousness.


pt 3 That darkness, that emptiness that you see is you

And the most damaging thing that one can do in this world is not be aware of that, because when you're not shaping your reality you're basically living in someone else's. Someone else('s) is shaping it for you. So it's like the default setting is the control system reality.
They are bunking on the fact that – to a high degree – most people, for the entire duration of their lifes, never truely question the reality, the constructs. They don't feel this impulse to explore it, peep behind the curtain, to look at it. And sometimes when occasionally somebody does do that, it's such a cultural and psychic discomposure that any sort of inquiry is immediately dropped and never returned to again in any sort of meaningful way.
Culture, however colorfull, and rich, and beautiful it is, often dissuades people from doing that. So the fail-safe of the system is that it deters people from walking what I would prefer to as their ascendant path of evolution.
And this dissonance that they put in arises really when the construct is questioned by anyone who inquires after it. And initially what they see is, it's a mirror, and it mirrors back into them and it shows them their own darkness. This leads into other areas that I will detail a little later, but when you first examen the construct, that darkness, that shadow, that hole, that emptiness that you see is you. It is the mirror of you. So for people who dwell solely within the constructs, unacquainted with their own inner landscape of their own psyche and their own spirituality, they're really unprepared for any sort of () that may involve any degree of self-reevaluation. And this emptiness in their own psyche is simply too much to handle. So they retreat and they go back to the complete undisrupted terrain of the constructs, and that is what the construct relies on time and time and time again.

The follow up can be found here: 02/11'11 A dream-worshipping Druidic society

January 20, 2011

Graham Hancock



WuWeiTV) Shamanism, Aliens, and Ayahuasca playlist & Quest for the Lost Civilisation playlist

12/27'07 Fingerprints of the Gods pt 1

January 17, 2011

Christian Rätsch


Pilz als Entheogen pt 2

@ 5 min) Die Intention ist ein unglaublich wichtiger Bestandteil in der psychedelischen Erfahrung.
Zum Set gehören aber auch die Dinge, die in unserer Kultur vermittelt werden, d.h. kognitive Strukturen, die wir als Kinder erlernen, mit denen wir unsere Welt erkennen und wiedererkennen können. D.h. wir nehmen mit der Erziehung kulturelle Werte auf, und wenn die dominante Kultur sagt, psychedelische Visionen sind Einflüsterungen des Teufels, dann haben wir ein ganz schönes Erziehungsproblem. Wenn uns gesagt wird, Pilze sind etwas Heiliges, etwas Göttliches, etwas, was uns etwas schenken kann, was uns Einsichten geben kann in uns selbst und in die Welt, ist das ein völlig anderer Beginn. Die kulturelle Prägung, die uns widerfährt, ist viel mächtiger, als man gemeinhin denkt, denn die kulturelle Prägung ergibt sich aus allen Informationen, die man von Menschen in seiner Umgebung, die man durch Medien und durch Institutionen bekommt. Und wir müssen diese Informationen verarbeiten und bauen damit, mit der Verarbeitung dieser Informationen, unser Weltbild, was unserer Kultur entspricht, auf. Wir handeln immer aus diesem Weltbild heraus – sich davon zu lösen ist extrem schwer. Aber sich darüber klar zu werden, dass es sowas überhaupt gibt und dass es schwer ist, das zu überwinden, ist der erste Schritt hin zu einer Lösung.
Nun gibt es in unserer modernen Kultur natürlich verschiedene kulturelle Gruppierungen, verschiedene kulturelle Szenen – man hat früher von Subkulturen gesprochen – in denen eventuell Meinungen über Pilze ganz unterschiedlich sein können. Die Freaks finden Pilze voll geil, und die Christen finden Pilze teuflisch, dämonisch oder so. D.h. wir sind in unserem Weltbild in jedem Fall verunsichert, weil es viele Widersprüche unter den verschiedenen kulturellen Strömungen gibt. Und wenn wir das wissen, können wir uns auch bewusst dazu entscheiden, welches Weltbild wir eigentlich haben und was das mit uns macht. [...]
Sprache ist keine objektive Wirklichkeitsbeschreibung, sondern eine Fülle an Codierungen möglicher Wirklichkeitsaspekte. D.h. es ist gut, sich über Sprache klar zu werden und sich z.B. auch darüber klar zu werden, wie nennen wir diese Pilze. Wir hatten verschiedene Worte, die uns heute morgen vorgestellt worden: Fantastika, Psychedelika, Psycholeptika usw. Wenn wir so einen Begriff benutzen, dann entsteht in unserem Geist sofort ein Begriffsfeld, das unsere persönliche Erkennung davon widergibt.


50 Jahre Pilzerfahrung pt 3

"Religion [also der Schrift- und Sprach-Glaube] ist das Gegenteil von Spiritualität" (spiritueller Erfahrung, spiritueller Bewusstseinsverfasstheit). Hört, hört!
Im Wesentlichen liegt der Unterschied, glaube ich, zwischen Bewusstseinsuniformierung (Begrenzung/Einengung), und Bewusstseinserweiterung (andere Bewusstseinszustände).

"Religion ist das Gegenteil von Spiritualität" – ich will's nochmal anders sagen: Wem es bei religiösen Empfindungen um Bewusstseinserweiterung geht, d.h. um spirituelle Abenteuer, die das spektakuläre Wegbrechen des gewöhnlichen Wahrnehmungshorizonts im Grunde erst ermöglicht, kommt an "Zauberpilzen" oder anderen natürlichen Phantastikas nicht vorbei. Dagegen ist diese ewige Interpretationshuberei sich priesterlich gebender Schriftgelehrter nicht nur ein müder Abglanz, sondern in erster Linie gezielte und mittlerweile extrem ausgefeilte Frömmigkeitspolitik – eine Frömmigkeitswissenschaft, wenn man's genau nimmt, mit dem gleichermaßen banalen wie brutalen Ziel zu herrschen. Geist und Wille zu beherrschen über die Phantasie.
Mit seinen Exerzitien hat Loyola meiner Meinung nach sowas wie die spirituelle Essenz aus dem römischen Christianismus extrahiert, mit der Absicht daraus maximale politische Wirkung zu schöpfen.
Denn wenn er sagt, "der Mensch muss sich selbst in die Hand bekommen und dazu ist es nötig, sich der eigenen Phantasie zu bemächtigen, die den Willen bestimmt," heißt das im Klartext, der menschliche Wille lässt sich kontrollieren und steuern über die Phantasie.
Walter Veith nennt die Professe der SJler-Bruderschaft, die Jesusritter des römischen Imperiums, deshalb zurecht "the masters of imagination".