psychedelics (major) – Page 6

20 Years Since Columbine: Are We Still Nihilists?

This week saw the 20th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. The massacre shocked a Western World used to adult serial killers, because we didn’t believe that high schoolers could also be capable of such evil. In the aftermath of the massacre, the consensus was that the motivation for the deed came from nihilism. This essay asks: are we still nihilists?

History can be thought of as a series of attempts to solve the basic existential question of what we’re supposed to be doing here on this planet.

For many centuries, we had religion, and the struggle between good and evil, chaos and order. But then we killed God, and (as Nietzsche predicted) this threw us back into Nature, and the world of eternal struggle. This played itself out in the titanic clash of empires that was World War One, and the following clash of nations that was World War Two. After three decades of trauma, we decided that we’d had enough bloodshed, and so we tried a new narrative.

The postwar consensus was based around pure hedonism. After three decades of deprivation, something as simple as being able to buy a milkshake or a cheeseburger on demand was seen as a great pleasure that demanded appreciation. Later, the number of television channels to which one was subscribed was the sign of material fortune. The problem was, of course, that hedonism is not an answer to spiritual problems.

The Columbine High School massacre was perhaps the first major sign that the postwar consensus had failed. The prosperity the Boomers enjoyed was based on the idea that material consumption was the reason for human existence. This was great fun, but it was only ever a distraction. It never solved the basic existential dilemma.

Klebold and Harris’s actions were an example of something that this column has previously called anarcho-nihilism. This is where one proposes to destroy the pre-existing system without offering any alternative system that might replace it. One simply destroys for the sake of destroying.

Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant were later examples of this phenomenon. Both men wrote entire manifestos that detailed at length their grievances with the world and the way it was being run. Enemy crimes were listed exhaustively, but neither man suggested much in the way of an alternative. Both will go down in history, but neither as a builder of nations.

Anarcho-nihilism could be said to be the challenge of our time. This isn’t the same as simple nihilism, which was the problem of previous times, because nihilism didn’t always lead to a violent assault on the old order. It usually led to simple suicide, which meant that the ruling class were not particularly bothered by it. Since March 14th this year, there have been more deaths to suicide in New Zealand than to terrorism, but the latter has taken up a hundred thousand times more emotional energy.

If we are to avoid going down the path of Breiviks and Tarrants destroying the whole world in a hail of bullets, we need to assert some kind of anti-nihilism that meets the emotional needs of the masses, while not repeating the mistakes of previous attempts at this.

An idea of what form this anti-nihilism might take can be seen in the various corners of cyberspace. In 1999, The Shroomery was only just getting started. Now it is one of the most popular counter-culture websites in the world, with an Alexa ranking in the top 30,000. Here it’s possible to find all kinds of discussions about aspects of spirituality that ordinary people would have trouble being able to comprehend – at least for now.

Any anti-nihilistic movement powerful enough to truly appeal to a great number of people will have to achieve a number of things. At a minimum, it must convince people that their actions in this world, and specifically whether or not those actions increase or decrease the suffering of their fellow sentient beings, are meaningful.

Achieving this may require the promulgation of the kind of sentiment that arises as a result of the psychedelic experience, the kind that is often derided as “hippie” or “new age” but which, if examined closely, answers with awesome clarity the questions of how we got here and what we’re supposed to be doing. This might require the reinstatement of something like the Eleusinian Mysteries, so that we can collectively revel in something beyond the material.

At time of writing, in 2019, it seems like not only are we nihilists, but we are destructive ones, and not only that, but the destructive and nihilistic sentiments are getting worse. That is certainly cause for alarm, but it’s also cause to take action, and to help promote an alternative. With enthusiastic promotion of psychedelic medicines for curing spiritual illness, it may be possible for us to finally overcome the threat of nihilism, and to allow a new spirituality to rise.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

Thoughts of a Luciferian Occultist Upon the Tenth Anniversary of His Apotheosis

On Boxing Day, 2008, I took a heavy dose of psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. It wasn’t a reckless decision. I had been a heavy cannabis user for some years already, and as a schizophrenic I was well accustomed to strange and sometimes terrifying thought patterns. It was about six o’clock in the evening.

Perhaps forty minutes later, I started to feel unusually good. The come-up had already become more pleasant than was possible with cannabis alone (much less alcohol). I felt so good that I decided to go over to my neighbour’s house to split the rest of the mushrooms.

Standing on the road outside my house, on my way to my neighbour’s, I started to feel unusually good. I was certain that this was the best I had ever felt in my life. It was a sense of exhilarating peace, in that all of my suffering had been abolished, replaced with an overwhelmingly confident sense that everything was going to be alright.

My neighbour and I divided up the rest of the mushrooms. After a while, he suggested that we smoke some weed to “kick it on a bit”. So we did. At about 8 p.m. the experience started to become unusual – I started to enter psychedelic space for real.

My ordinary vision started to be replaced by a shimmering field of reds, yellows, greens and blues. These colours took on more and more of my view, but when someone spoke, or if I moved my head suddenly, the room I was in would become apparent again. These colours were not simply placed on top of my ordinary vision, but were a higher-order interpretation of it, as if I was seeing elemental fire, air, earth and water.

Soon this vision collapsed from four colours into two: an electric neon blue, and black darkness. The neon blue was alive, and it seemed to reach out into the darkness as if by sexual impulse. It reached out with tendrils that curved into every available space, but not merely three-dimensionally – the electricity reached into every available space in a countless number of higher dimensions.

What I was seeing was the material world represented as masculine and feminine. This was an ancient Taoist secret: that the world is yang and yin, interdependent and meshed together so tightly that it is impossible to ever see pure masculine or pure feminine in a state of Nature. That I was able to see it was because my mind was rising through the dimensions, into metaphysical space.

Soon this vision also faded, and I was left with no sensations at all, just pure awareness. My mind no longer contained words, until I was asked how much of it I wanted to see. In my mind, I responded: “The full measure.” This is the Luciferian in me – I had waited my entire life, perhaps even several lifetimes, for this exact moment, and I knew what to do.

As if by lightningbolt, the Veils of Isis were lifted, and I looked directly into the face of God. What was seen cannot be described, for reasons that will shortly be explained. It is sufficient to say that the ancient Vedics were correct when they claimed that there is no such thing as space or time, and that behind Maya is absolution.

Looking into the face of God, I realised that everything I knew was wrong. It wasn’t that everything I knew was factually wrong, it was that reality was so fundamentally different to what I thought it was that every assumption had to be revisited. I was open to all possibilities – and in that state of maximum receptivity, and in the presence of God, some things were revealed to me.

There is no such thing as time and space. In the same way that twenty-five still frames a second gives the impression of a moving image, what we think of as time is closer to multiple universes flashing in and out of awareness. This happens so quickly that we think we’re actually moving around, but we’re really just jumping through the multiverse.

The multiverse is not merely a large number of universes. It is, in fact, a practically infinite number of universes, that are related to each other by way of a fractal pattern. This was called the Great Fractal, for the simple reason that it contained all possible perceptions. Maya, or the material world, is a fractal that contains every single possible universe, in every single configuration. Every universe that can exist, exists somewhere in the Great Fractal.

Now aware of this, I felt so profoundly different that I knew I had opened a door that would not be closed again on this side of the death of my physical body. I was now a master of the physical world, in that I could explain it from first principles of yin and yang. But there was more. Eventually I realised that it was necessary to spend some time with God – perhaps years.

As if on cue, knowledge came, about God. I had more-or-less been a materialist atheist up until then, despite considerable dabbling in Eastern traditions, so what came was shocking.

Consciousness is God. This is why it can fairly be said that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-wise. God is all knowing because everything that is known is perceived by consciousness, and God is consciousness. God is all-powerful because everything that exists has been created by consciousness, and God is consciousness. God is all-wise on account of the combination of the previous two.

It is true that consciousness cannot be described empirically. It cannot be sensed, and therefore cannot be described in terms of appearance, sound, taste or touch. Neither can it be measured. There is no instrument that can detect its presence or absence. Therefore, it cannot be a material phenomenon.

In understanding this, I understood the first line of the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Eternal Tao.” God, as consciousness, is the prima materia of reality. Therefore, God is more fundamental than any human conceptions that may be dreamed up, such as words and language. God is even more fundamental than yin and yang, and therefore there is nothing about God that can be said. Therefore, all the claims of organised religion as to the nature of God are false.

Consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world because consciousness is the prima materia. God is the prima materia. The first thing ever to exist was consciousness, and it is more fundamental than time, and therefore does not need a cause. Therefore, it is not necessary to suppose some kind of “creator” that “willed” consciousness into being.

The only thing that really exists is consciousness, and this is eternal and without blemish. Everything else is merely something that consciousness is aware of, and, because no two consciousnesses are the same, that which is apparent to one is not necessarily apparent to any other. Therefore, nothing material can meaningfully be said to definitely exist.

Because there is no material world, there is also no death. The realisation of this brought me immense elation; I realised that I had suffered awfully under the delusion that the death of my physical body meant the cessation of my consciousness. In reality, it is the consciousness that creates the material body, and therefore the death of that body – like the death of all bodies – does not impact consciousness.

The persuasiveness of the illusion of the material world is the reason for the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”. The hard problem only makes sense if you already assume the presence of a solid material world, inside of which consciousness arose. Explaining how consciousness arose within a material world is, indeed, a hard problem, because it’s impossible. The reality is that consciousness exists, and has dreamed up a world that is as close to plausible as possible, when viewed from the perspective of the conscious present moment.

All that exists is consciousness and the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is more fundamental than the contents of consciousness; the latter is dreamed up by the former. The contents of consciousness, for every individual, is a slice of the Great Fractal. Therefore, it is possible for any individual consciousness to experience anything whatsoever that is possible – it’s just a matter of navigating to that part of the Great Fractal, which may take several lifetimes.

Every possible arrangement of the contents of consciousness is being experienced by God right now, because God is split into an infinite number of consciousnesses. These are not inferior in any way to the original, or to each other. God is experiencing your life ten seconds ago, and ten days ago, and whatever decisions you will make ten days or ten years in the future are already being experienced by God, and forever will be.

Therefore, all of the other people in life are also God, in exactly the same way that you are. They all are consciousness, an extrusion of God into the material world, so that God might experience something. It is true that All is One. We may be separate – and even competitors – in the material world, but behind it all, everything that exists is on the same team, God playing at the experience of being God.

Becoming God is not a question of growing in power as if life were some kind of game of Dungeons and Dragons. There is no spiritual progress to be made, and there are no spiritual points to be earned. You are already God, perfect and complete; you just forgot. Apotheosis is nothing more than anamnesia, remembering something that has been forgotten.

The reason why you forgot – why we all forgot – is clear, if you consider what it means to never forget. Being God is a state of perfect bliss. It is the absence of all suffering and longing. Looking into the face of God, I also felt this complete absence of desire – and realised its drawbacks.

Sitting for eternity in a state of perfect bliss is extremely limited from an experiential point of view. It is boring. It is so painfully boring that it makes sense to dream up the material world, for the sake of having something novel to experience. Thus, you chose to forget that you were God because it’s more interesting that way.

The problem is that, because God is perfect and complete, any change to this must necessarily be a desecration. Because God is a state of perfect knowledge and bliss, the process of individuation into a human consciousness necessary implies the introduction of ignorance and misery. Awareness of this is why so many religious traditions have a conception of a “Fall of Man”.

This is also true of the Great Fractal. There is an ideal life, and there are a practically infinite number of fractally similar lives. All of the fractally similar lives involves imperfections in comparison to the ideal one. Each one of us has a unique pattern of suffering, much like how the fractal forms of other things within Nature are variations of one ideal.

The real mind-bender is that it’s better this way, with all the suffering, than without. Existence as God is so painfully boring that all the misery in the entire Great Fractal is preferable (at least temporarily, and for a change). This means that there is a higher order of morality than mere pleasure and suffering. God seeks relief from boredom, and therefore the suffering of individuals is a good thing, as long as that suffering entertains God.

Therefore, it makes sense for individual consciousness to get slung into the material world (or, at least, to appear to have been) and to fully adopt the illusion of being a particular creature, separate from the wider whole and with desires that work against that whole.

All of this knowledge was downloaded into my mind in an infinitely small passage of time, because God is more fundamental than time and therefore not subject to its laws. Had I not already been a Luciferian, and therefore somewhat prepared, this downloading of knowledge probably would have fried my brains completely.

As it was, it took four years for me to make any sense of it all, six years before I could think about it calmly, eight years before I could be happy about it and ten years before I could write it down. The distillation of the wisdom of those ten years with God is the essay that you have just read.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis)

We’ve Had the Great Financial Depression, Now We Have the Great Spiritual Depression

We’ve got all the money and stuff we ever wanted – but it’s not making us happier

Tyler Durden in Fight Club told Generation X that “Our Great War is a spiritual war.” This is the truth, and we have been too slow to see it. The narrative has changed since our parents’ and grandparents’ time: the major struggle of human life is no longer physical survival, but making sense of our lives.

Durden was speaking directly to Generation X because ours is a different story. The Great Depression that our elders endured, while terrible, was ultimately a financial one, and we were guaranteed to get out of it once the markets reset. What we have to endure is also worthy of the epithet Great Depression, only what we have to endure is spiritual.

This Great Spiritual Depression has been caused by a perfect storm of factors.

The first major factor is the rottenness of what passes for spiritual tradition in our culture. It’s obvious to any outside observer that the Christian rituals are empty and meaningless – this can be determined simply by speaking to the average Christian and hearing his hatred of other religions, of homosexuals, and of drug users. It’s apparent from that that Christians do not have any privileged access to understanding the mind of God.

A person who enters a Christian church to hear a sermon from a learned man is far more likely to hear something political about the need to obstruct progress on gay rights or drug law reform. If that person stays to talk to those who think they understand the nature of God, those people will say that a women’s place is subordination, and that anyone who doesn’t worship the Magic Jew will be condemned to an eternity of hellfire.

If there was ever anything spiritual in the Abrahamic tradition it has rotted away centuries ago.

The second major factor is that all of our cultural and political narratives are entirely materialistic. It’s materialist capitalists versus materialist socialists. Whichever side wins, we get materialism. Neither side has a solution to the problems of human existence that goes beyond accumulating more physical resources or power.

This materialism has arisen as a reaction to the fact that religion, in the guise of Christianity, retarded progress in the West for over 1,000 years. Because of this, the people and societies that developed an interest in discovering the truth naturally came to distrust anyone who spoke about non-materialist concepts. Moreover, most of the advances in alleviating human suffering made in recent centuries have come through materialist sciences such as medicine, engineering, biology, chemistry and physics.

The problem with this materialism is that people have been thinking in these terms so so long that most of us have forgotten that any other terms are possible, or even sometimes necessary. Emotional, intellectual and spiritual paradigms have all been forgotten in favour of who controls the most stuff. Even psychiatrists – supposedly doctors tasked with healing the soul – can only think in terms of chemical imbalances and pharmaceuticals.

As Terence McKenna was fond of saying, “the way out is back”. Westerners have historically shown themselves capable of exceptionally sophisticated metaphysical thought – one only need read Plato for ample proof of this. The solution is the revival of the perennial philosophy and the perennial, universal, cosmic religion, in a form that suits the world of today.

This will have two major benefits.

The first will be the return to each human being of their birthright to be initiated into the spiritual truths. Instead of being brainwashed from birth with some horseshit story about being specially chosen by God, virgin births or last prophets, and how God’s love is conditional upon obeying the moral dictates laid down by the political authorities of the time, people shall be instructed truthfully from the beginning.

This means that something like the Eleusinian Mysteries will have to be reinstated, and the ceremonial mass public consumption of psychedelics encouraged, but in a highly ritualistic and orderly manner. This will mean that the public at large will once again be connected with God, and all will know the truth. This will lead to our spiritual elders transmitting useful information to the youth instead of old Middle-Eastern stories that justify genital mutilation and slavery.

Because the spiritual elders will no longer be lying, there will no longer be cause for the men and women of silver to respond by going in the other direction. Thus, being a freethinker will no longer correlate highly with being a materialist (as it has for the past three or four centuries). People will be free to discuss metaphysical subjects without the assumption that they are dangerous fanatics.

The second major benefit will be to cause the coming of new political ideologies that are not based on materialism. These will transcend the ancient capitalist-communist paradigm. In other words, they will not be grounded in settling arguments about who gets what stuff, and who can extort what labour, taxes and rent out of who. These ideologies will be much better suited to meet the challenges we face because they will reflect reality more accurately and faithfully.

What exact form they do take is not clear, but it is likely that they will be grounded in reducing the amount of suffering in the world rather than the redistribution of resources. This specifically means reducing the suffering of sentient beings, through all of their thwarted desires.

It’s certain that cognitive liberty will play a central role here, as it has been the lack of cognitive liberty that caused this Dark Age in the first place. We can guess from this that the social sharing of consciousness-altering sacraments will flourish – not merely alcohol and cannabis, but psychoactives that are capable of a wide range of desirable effects.

Writing Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder

Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is an uncommon condition that arises as a consequence of permanent perceptual changes brought on by use of hallucinogens. There is almost no data on the prevalence of this condition, and some don’t even believe it exists. Nevertheless, this article will discuss how to believably portray characters with HPPD.

HPPD usually causes a problem because of visual disturbances that are akin to those that accompany a hallucinogenic experience. It’s common to see glowing halos around various objects, or visual trails that linger behind moving objects. It’s also possible to perceive objects as being much larger than they actually are, or much smaller. Some people even see a kind of “visual snow” between objects, like the static on a television set. Auditory hallucinations are also possible.

A character who has HPPD might appear kind of ‘spaced out’ to the other characters. Those other characters might suspect that the one with HPPD is, or has been, on a heavy drug of some kind. Because their perceptions are so vivid, a character with HPPD might be too distracted to pay proper attention to what’s going on around them. This could create a number of social difficulties for that character.

The author might decide that writing a character with HPPD is not very interesting if focus is placed solely on visual and perhaps auditory disturbances. It might be possible to tell a far richer and more engaging story by showing the reader some of the other lingering psychological effects of psychedelics, especially the deeper emotional and spiritual ones.

The problem with this approach is that one soon steps outside the bounds of the clinical – which is perfectly fine for the sake of literature, but it has to be kept in mind that the strictures of the DSM are distantly removed from what follows here.

Many psychedelic drugs have the capacity to break down a person’s existing perception of reality and replace it with something entirely different. This means that some of the persisting perceptions that arise from hallucinogenic drugs use are not so much sensual, but intuitive.

A common persisting perception from using hallucinogens is a belief that the material world isn’t real. Our culture is materialist; we take for granted that the material world is real and that the human brain generates consciousness. For the vast majority of us, it seems intuitively true that the material world genuinely exists and that the brain gives rise to consciousness, and this perception is so common that it’s taken for granted by most.

People who have HPPD might no longer believe in materialism. They may feel that, in the course of a hallucinogenic trip, they were granted a particular insight into the way the cosmos truly functions. Maybe they now believe that the world is a dream in the mind of God. A character who has had a change in perceptions relating to cosmic attitudes might find themselves coming into conflict with some of the other characters around them. Theirs could be a story of how easy it is to get ostracised from a community for having unique beliefs.

In practice, it doesn’t actually matter whether materialism is correct or not; a character who becomes a non-materialist as a result of a hallucinogenic experience will have extreme difficulty fitting into society in any case. They will frequently be rejected and mocking for being mentally ill. In particular, it will be impossible for them to convince a psychiatrist that their new belief is anything other than a mental illness. A character who thinks like this will therefore likely be an outsider to some degree.

Another common change in perception relates to the presence of a light at the end of the tunnel. Dovetailing with materialism is atheism – the two seem to follow each other closely. The vast majority of people who were raised atheist do not believe in the presence of a benevolent force that watches over their life with a desire to end their suffering. The cosmos is indifferent to human suffering and misery.

A person who has a strong experience with a hallucinogen can easily come to change their opinion on this subject. It might be that your protagonist has suddenly decided to believe in God – not the God of Abraham, but the benevolent, all-pervading force that gives rise and motion to the world. This might not be received well by the other characters in your story, especially if they are materialists, or if they believe in a dead God such as the Abrahamic one. They will probably think your protagonist is mad or evil.

This can make for an interesting story because of the contrast between the good feelings that arise naturally inside a person who has spiritual satisfaction, and the bad feelings that comes from the outside world as a consequence. Their social life might become much more difficult than before, on account of pressure to go back to the socially-approved way of thinking. This could push them into the arms of a new group of people, such as those who have also seen beyond.

These persisting changes in perception are much more subtle than the visual and auditory ones, but they might have just as large an impact on a person’s ability to live a normal life, primarily because of the social disruption just mentioned. In extreme cases, these changes in perception might make employment also impossible, leading to radical life changes that could lead anywhere.

Writing a character with HPPD is no easy task, because it is likely that most of the readers are not intimately familiar with the effects of hallucinogens and so will have difficulty relating to the often bizarre and surreal perceptual changes that accompany the condition. However, if executed skillfully, a tale with a character who has HPPD could be highly entertaining, insightful or even edifying.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.