Category: psychedelics (major)

The Big Lie of Our Age

Many pseudoscientific writings speak of the parts of the brain that give rise to consciousness, as if the question of whether the brain does generate consciousness had already been answered in the affirmative

The Big Lie of our age is that the brain generates consciousness. It’s a lie characteristic of our exceptionally materialistic age, because in most other times in human history people have retained their intuitive awareness of the primacy of consciousness. In the modern West, however, it’s simply taken for granted that the brain generates consciousness, and the deleterious consequences of this belief are denied or explained away.

This Big Lie has come about as a result of a reasoning error that became fashionable in the wake of the Enlightenment. The idea was that religion had held humanity back during the Dark Ages by making scientific research impractical, and therefore religious dogma had to be discarded from the scientific reasoning process, and therefore all talk of a world beyond the material had to be abandoned, and therefore consciousness simply had to be a material property.

From this Big Lie a number of falsehoods arise. Many of these falsehoods are encouraged by the ruling classes because they make the plebs easier to rule.

For instance, the belief that the brain generates consciousness leads immediately to the belief that the death of the brain (alongside the inevitable death of the physical body) must inevitably mean the “end” of consciousness. Because if the body dies, and the brain dies with it, then the brain must logically lose its capacity for ‘generating’ or ‘maintaining’ consciousness and thus that consciousness must disappear.

This belief, while predicated entirely on a falsehood, leads to a number of other beliefs.

The most powerful of these is the belief that this life is all that there is. If the death of this physical body means the death of consciousness, then I cannot be held responsible for anything I do while in this place (i.e. Earth, more or less). Therefore, if I take money now in exchange for attacking another person, or if I murder, rob or rape, then I only have to get away with it for as long as this physical life endures.

Another odd idea that follows naturally from the Big Lie is that only creatures with brain structures similar to that which knows itself to be conscious can also be conscious. If the brain generates consciousness by means of some property inherent to it (such as a critical mass of complexity) then other creatures can only be considered conscious to the degree that they share these brain structures with the person thinking up the consciousness theory (after all, that person knows themselves 100% to be conscious).

One delusion is that mortal terror is an appropriately dignified response to mortal threats for a civilised human. It is if you believe that the brain generates consciousness, but if you don’t believe this it becomes possible to be genuinely courageous. After all, why subject yourself to mortal terror if you know that the contents of consciousness are ephemeral and transient?

Of course, the ruling classes are generally happy to have people believe that this life is all there is, for a variety of reasons. Not least of these reasons are because it discourages anarcho-homicidalist action by making people afraid of execution, and because it makes people greedy, aggressive and acquisitive as they try to cram an eternity’s worth of pleasures into one mortal incarnation.

It is ultimately because of this Big Lie that cannabis and the psychedelics are illegal. These drugs modify behaviour by making the user aware, however fleetingly, of a world beyond the material. In this world beyond are immutable moral principles, and it’s harder to pull the strings of people who are aware of these principles and believe in them. Such people tend to make their own decisions.

A common experience on psychedelics is to feel the material world slipping out of consciousness and to become aware of an entirely different world as seen through an entirely different set of eyes, but which is ultimately comprehended by the same consciousness. This often results in the tripper learning the lesson of the primacy of consciousness and how conceptions of time and space are illusions brought about by temporary separation from God.

It is because of the Big Lie that people who become privy to such revelations about the true nature of reality – whether by taking psychedelic drugs or through other means – are seen as having gone insane, and their revelations seen as chaotic nonsense of no value. After all, if a psychonaut comes to realise that the Big Lie is a big lie, then that psychonaut must be dismissed as a space cadet or schizophrenic lest this realisation catch on.

Thoughts of a Luciferian Occultist on the Occasion of His 36th Birthday

My life has been divided into four nine-year blocks that correspond to the four masculine elements of clay, iron, silver and gold. This has culminated in my own apotheosis as someone who no longer fears the death of the physical body. Such thoughts became apparent to me when I marked the occasion of having been around the Sun thirty-six times, and reflected upon the wobbly path that was taken.

The phase of clay, representing the first nine years, was when simple survival skills were learned. This phase is shared by all creatures that need to survive, right down to the dumbest herbivore. This is the phase that we are born into, one that is characterised by fear as we learn to balance our innate curiosity with staying away from dangers.

In the first nine years of my life I was little different to a sheep or chicken. Essentially all actions I took were reactions. Usually I was guided along by well-meaning adults, and usually I had no reason to not comply. In this phase a basic civilising process took place, and I learned to enjoy life.

The alchemical culmination of this phase is tin, which corresponds to the planet Jupiter. Like Jupiter, it is large, larger-than-life in some ways. It’s bombastic and narcissistic but it is grounded in a healthy affirmation of life and therefore is necessary before the next phase can begin.

The iron phase began when I learned to take competitive sport seriously. Here the enjoyment of life becomes strong enough that a desire to challenge oneself and others arises. This happened at about the same time as puberty began, and with that came a desire to kill other males.

This is the phase when it becomes useful for a child to learn a martial art, or when it becomes enjoyable to seriously develop a set of skills for a competitive sport. Fittingly for iron, during this phase I became a harder individual, but in becoming so I also became a more useful one, in the same way that tools of iron are much more useful than tools of clay.

Its apogee was an incident on a rugby field where I hit an opposing ball carrier so hard in a tackle that I broke my own collarbone on impact and was knocked to the ground. He and I had developed a grudge over the course of the game, hitting each other harder and harder in tackles to try to show off who was strongest. I was about 15kg lighter than him and resorted to a shouldercharge to make up for it.

Unfortunately, he saw he coming and put the shoulder in himself, and I came off second-best (in an odd coincidence, that player, Simon P. Murphy, went on to become the author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, published by this company!).

The incident taught me to appreciate the limits of the sphere of iron. It was effectively where I learned the limitations of aggression and violence, and that knowing how to guide aggression intelligently was much more important than sheer volume of aggression.

It represented a softening to something of greater value, and this was represented alchemically by the phase of silver. This was also where I learned the value of intelligence. On the rugby field it didn’t seem like intelligence was worth much, as it appeared to me mostly about strength. But knowing how to direct one’s strength, not strength itself, was the real ability of value.

This phase began around age 18 and involved going to university. At university it is expected that one has gotten over the testosterone-fueled dominance battling of the phase of iron and therefore that one can work on polishing oneself up.

For me, embarking on the path of silver began with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology, and with losing my virginity to a Swedish nursing student. Upon managing both of these things I developed an appreciation for what intelligence had to offer the world.

I learned to use my own intelligence to go travelling and work around the world, spending three years in Europe and a year in other foreign climes. During this time I learned a few languages, and upgraded my education to a Master’s degree, and by the end of this nine-year block I was capable of thinking logically and rationally.

Being able to think intelligently is an ability that dazzles those still on the level of iron or clay, and as such it corresponds to the reflective ability of sunlight off a mirror. But intelligence itself is not, by itself, necessarily an expression of the will of God.

The silver became, in itself, more alive, and this moved me into the realm of mercury. This was represented in the material world by doing a lot of bar work. Here I learned to become silver-tongued, and to crack jokes, and to parry insults into harmless banter, and to be glib and slick and easygoing.

Seven grams of psilocybin mushrooms, taken shortly after I turned 27, marked the end of this phase of silver and mercury. These I had been given by a hippie workmate upon expressing to him what I felt to be the mental health benefits of smoking cannabis, especially for someone like me who had long suffered problems from nausea and insomnia.

I recall, at the peak of the trip, standing before God and being asked how much I thought I could handle, and replying that I wanted the full measure. In that moment I became entirely reunited with God and understood that I was forgiven for all errors, past and future.

This experience obliterated my mind, and taught me that everything I knew was wrong. I had been granted a glimpse into the face of the divine, but because of my ego and attachment to false self I was not immediately able to manifest the knowledge that I had been granted in my everyday life.

I had two options: to abandon the shamanic path and dismiss the insights gleaned from psychedelics as delusions and insanities, or to accept the challenge of the phase of gold.

I accepted the challenge of the phase of gold, and this involved a willful refusal to allow myself to forget the insights that I had been granted at the peak of the mushroom trips, such as an insight into the true nature of consciousness, or the fact that the contents of consciousness could be represented as a Great Fractal.

The culmination of this phase was writing a manuscript called The Pyrrhonist, an exercise in questioning reality from first principles. This caused the complete disintegration of my entire personality and of everything I believed to be real. I systematically questioned every belief I had, even the most fundamental, and by the end of that process I had questioned the fundamentals of reality so thoroughly that I was mad.

At the nadir of this phase I spent ten days in a mental health unit.

This dark night of the soul served as an nitric acid, dissolving all of the less pure elements of my soul; I was completely humbled. I was forced to stand before the judgment of God and concede that the maintenance and preservation of my ego was a fool’s errand – not only did I make myself less happy, but everyone who encountered me got less out of it than they otherwise would have done.

At this point I had been completely broken, and was ready to rebuild.

This took another three years or so, and involved a kind of self-nurture that, ironically, I had been too selfish to previously allow myself, lest the softness made me weak. It also involved smoking a tremendous amount of cannabis, for the reason that this medicine prevented the pull of the body from dragging my frequency back down to clay because of pain and nausea.

I had to learn to accept that I was not and could never be judged by ephemeral concerns. I embarked on an attempt to purify my soul, which involved abstinence from all of tobacco, alcohol and women.

This last of the four nine-year blocks of my life ended this week, upon turning 36. It ended with my acceptance of the fact that I feel entirely at peace and that there is nothing, fundamentally to fear. I am absolved of all sin and can take my part in the play.

This, I feel, is the lesson of the element of gold. It cannot shine directly on people, in the manner of silver, because where people become blinded and dazzled by silver they become humbled by gold, and in being humbled they become resentful, and in becoming resentful they become destructive.

Gold, being the softest of all metals, can least tolerate that destructive will, and so it has to learn to be subtle. Its essence is therefore gentleness and precision. Working on the level of gold means learning to influence on the level of spirit, not just the level of mind (as is silver).

I feel that now, at age 36, a certain alchemical process has come to its end and that now I can live on whatever level of clay, iron, silver or gold is necessary for the environment that I am in, now that I know how to tune into the appropriate frequency.

If Speculative Fiction Genres Were Psychoactive Drugs

Every genre of speculative fiction has its own signature atmosphere: often a combination of fantastic, awesome, terrifying and bizarre. So do psychoactive drugs – and the two match up. This article looks at which drugs give a vibe that best matches the vibe from a genre of speculative fiction.

High fantasy fiction matches up to cannabis. Lord of the Rings contains a couple of sly allusions to cannabis use, most notably when Saruman admonishes Gandalf for his “love of the halfling’s weed” while explaining how Gandalf missed a clue that he should have noticed. The scene in the film Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf and Frodo sit above the drunken revellers and smoke some magical substance from a pipe is one familiar to most stoners.

Some of the experiences that Elric has in the Stormbringer series of novels by Michael Moorcock were also very likely to have been cannabis-inspired. There’s something about Elric’s experience of having an extremely powerful ally that couldn’t really be trusted that speaks to the paranoia that sometimes comes with the cannabis experience.

The sword and sorcery style of low fantasy matches up with psilocybin mushrooms. It’s unlikely that Robert E Howard took any magic mushrooms before writing any of the Conan the Cimmerian stories, but the protagonist’s many adventures in dark, subterranean caves and inside fantastic towers and castles are reminiscent of the depth and range of sometimes terrifying personal insight that often comes with mushrooms.

The Forgotten Realms universe of Dungeons and Dragons adventures, with their massive, dark forests full of elves and goblins also relates closely to the vibe of the psilocybin mushrooms experience. The reason why magic mushrooms enthusiasts are encouraged to try taking five grams in silent darkness is because it leads to exploration of a fantastical inner world, and going down into the subterranean to arise wealthier at some later point is a regular theme.

Most of what sells as science fiction could have been inspired by LSD. Stories like The Demolished Man, with a very strong psychological content, harken to the disintegrative effect that psychedelics can have on the personality. The main character of The Demolished Man, somehow between protagonist and antagonist, ends up having his personality completely demolished (and then rebuilt) as punishment for his crimes, reminiscent of how the psychedelic experience can destroy a person and then build them back as something stronger than before.

This sense of twisted psychology comes through also in the writings of Philip K Dick, who had himself tried LSD. Psychedelics might have inspired the plot of Ubik, in which the character Glen Runciter experiences a believable but bizarre reality while his physical body is “on ice” in a cryogenic chamber. Wondering if you’re really dead or alive is the kind of thing that LSD can make happen to you.

The almost schizophrenic belief in a hidden real world outside of this merely simulated one is a mainstay of cyberpunk literature, and is similar to the impressions one gets on DMT or salvia divinorum. For thousands of years, human shamans have been having experiences of dying to the physical world and being reborn to the real one, like Neo did in The Matrix. In that regard, The Matrix is really a retelling of the ancient mystery school teaching of death and resurrection, reclothed in 21st-century technology.

A description of what might be the spirit of the DMT experience is given in the ANZAC cyberpunk novel The Verity Key. In the chapter Mindknife, the protagonist Jonty Gillespie has his perception altered by ingestion of a drug called Cinque Nuevo, which briefly blasts his consciousness out of his physical body and into an entirely external dimension that is occupied by beings that take the form of balls of light, while mechanical constructs that might be metaphors churn around him.

The datura experience is pretty similar to what befell many of the unfortunate researchers in the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. A disquieting sense of things not being quite as they should be grows into an intense paranoia that leaps at every shadow and from there to total psychological collapse at the raw horror of reality itself. Alien beings that seem to have come to Earth just to torment you is the kind of thing you’re dealing with in either case.

Datura is also the kind of drug that fits the background of weird horror stories such as those in His Master’s Wretched Organ. Talking to grotesquely deformed entities like Mr. Creamfeather and eating tobacco cakes are the sort of horror that, once experienced, leaves a person never quite the same again. The concept of ordeal rituals that leave you wiser for having suffered come to mind here.

Others are arguable. The steampunk of The Rocketeer might suit opium, the boo-yah aggression of Starship Troopers might suit mescaline, and the gritty military noir of the Altered Carbon series might be the old classics of caffeine, nicotine and alcohol.

It might be hard to read any speculative fiction on most of these drugs, because a person on them is more likely to be occupied with the inner theatre of the thoughts in their head than a book in the external world. However, it might be possible to have a richer experience of reading speculative fiction after having tried some of them, because they could open your awareness to realms of thought previously unimagined.

When Cannabis Becomes Legal, Psychedelics Are Next

Almost all of the arguments for legal cannabis apply for legal psilocybin

21% of Americans now live in states that have legal recreational cannabis, and an overwhelming majority of them live in states with legal medicinal cannabis. It’s now obvious to every honest person that cannabis is a medicine, and that the recreational positives of it vastly outweigh the negatives. However, even when cannabis law reform wins its inevitable comprehensive victory, it won’t be the end of the struggle for cognitive liberty.

The struggle for cognitive liberty has been waged for several thousand years. It arguably begun when the first ever conversational topic became taboo – perhaps when some alpha male enforced a rule that meant his tribe were forbidden to speak of a certain subject. Since then, the forces of cognitive enslavement have only become more aggressive and more sophisticated.

In the New Zealand of today, we plebs are not even allowed to smoke medicinal flowers such as cannabis, not even if one of us has a severe medical condition that causes them to suffer badly. We’re not allowed to because the deconditioning effect of cannabis means that all of the shameless bullshit and lies that the political class have pumped into our heads for decades would be at risk of getting rejected.

Because the conditioning that enslaves us is profitable to the ruling class – as it makes us compliant, submissive and obedient – it is worth money. It could effectively be considered capital. This means that allowing the population cognitive liberty to question their own psychological enslavement, and the means to achieve this liberty, is a risk to the accumulated wealth of the ruling class.

This is true of cannabis, and is true ten times over for psychedelics.

Ultimate cognitive liberty comes from the complete destruction of the conditioned mind (or programmed mind). The behaviours that have been deliberately programmed into us have, and are intended to have, the ultimate effect of making us unhappy, because there is nothing more profitable than human misery.

This refers to the programmed behaviours that the ruling class force into your head at school, in the workplace, and through the mass media. They do this because your slavery is profitable, and because it allows them to impose a form of order on society that is beneficial to them. For these two reasons, the ruling class opposes the legalisation of drugs that allow cognitive liberty to flourish.

For example, it is known well enough by the people who need to know such things that smoking cannabis makes a person less desiring of, and less attached to, material possessions. This is because it has the effect of reducing suffering, which makes a person less likely to work long hours to save the money necessary to buy the crap that they mistakenly believe will make them happy. So reduced suffering means reduced profits for the ruling class.

Therefore, maximum profitability demands that the cognitive liberty of the people who might question this brainwashing be minimised.

When the Western World was first exposed to the power of psychedelics, we just shat our pants. We were in no way emotionally mature enough to deal with an entheogen that reunited our individual consciousness with that of God. Reuniting one’s consciousness with God is the same as absolution from all suffering, and we were in no way ready for that.

However, now that many of us are mature enough to treat cannabis as what it really is – a deconditioning agent that alleviates psychological suffering – we are starting to become aware that much of the suffering we endure on a daily basis has been forced on us from positions above us on the dominance hierarchy.

This means that the further we can decondition ourselves, the less suffering.

This fact was understood by Kevin Saunders, who is the man behind the recent Californian ballot initiative that seeks to “exempt adults 21 and older from penalties of possessing, selling, transporting, or cultivating psilocybins.” Saying that the ballot is “a natural progression from marijuana legalization,” Saunders relates a personal story of overcoming heroin addiction as a result of the deconditioning effects of the drug.

Psychedelics have incredible potential for alleviating all suffering arising from psychological conditions that are caused by excessive conditioning, in particular anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and addiction. Many people are aware of this, though they are currently shunned by the mainstream narrative, which has been set (as mentioned above) by those who profit from the suffering.

Over time, however, the truth will out, and this means that the legalisation of psychedelics is an inevitability.