Category: psychedelics (major)

How to Not Sound Crazy When Talking About Your Psychedelic Experiences

It’s hard to talk about the world beyond to people who aren’t familiar with that range of frequencies

Even though the Internet has led to a sharing of shamanic knowledge completely unprecedented (and impossible) for any other point in the world’s history, it hasn’t filtered down to the mass consciousness yet. Probably it never will – the men of silver and iron and clay cannot be expected to concern themselves with what lies beyond this veil. This essay gives some tips for talking to them about the world beyond without sounding insane.

The most important thing is to have a feel for what the person you are talking to is likely to be able to handle. This means that you have to look for clues from what you already know about them to give hints about what they already believe.

The easiest way to sound crazy is to express a belief that does not accord with consensual reality of the mass consciousness of the people around you. This is true whether you are in meatspace or cyberspace. The lower the intelligence of the person you are speaking to, the less likely it is that they will have challenged any belief widely-held by the people around them.

It is in this will to challenge consensual reality that most people judge sane from insane. All you have to do is to assert that things are not as they are commonly believed to be, and some people will start to consider you crazy. Essentially you only have to contradict the television, or in other cases the radio or FaceBook.

You might start a conversation with a suspected normie by questioning the narrative that you are fed by the network news, or by the broadsheet papers. Even that is enough to sound pretty crazy to most people, who are on the level of “they couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.” If a person is on this level they are in no way ready to handle the idea that the government has lied to them about psychedelics for the sake of making them easier to control.

A useful tactic here is to point out how the governments and mainstream media of Anglosphere countries colluded to sell the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in order to manufacture consent for the Iraq War. It’s possible now, though, that a person remembers those times differently and will choose to remember it in a way that denies this collusion.

It pays to be wary of the fact that most people are materialists, which implies that they believe that the brain generates consciousness, and that upon the death of the physical body this consciousness somehow “disappears”. These people consider all kinds of religious ideas like karma and God to be superstitions, and the bitterest contempt is reserved for those religious who believe that the consciousness survives the death of the physical body.

Unfortunately, this belief is also one of the major insights of psychedelics – perhaps it is this psychedelic insight that forms the foundation of most religious beliefs.

Psychedelics are hard, and integrating their lessons extremely hard

Mathematics is the way to get at people who are the hardest to reach. Expressing a sense of awe and wonder at how, for example, the Fibonacci sequence reoccurs in the state of Nature is a good way of getting a person to ask themselves whether there’s something other than sheer chance going on. Other ways are to express similar sentiments about the non-reoccurring nature of pi or the import of Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

The way to talk about it so that it makes sense is by talking about previous beliefs that you once held that you either questioned or abandoned after taking a psychedelic. Usually this makes it possible to apply logic to dismantle one erroneous idea after the other, and it’s seldom necessary to mention that this destruction of illusion was achieved by means of psychedelics (any insight that psychedelics have brought you can be plausibly credited to either meditation or a near death experience as well).

For example, a psychedelicised person might be able to conduct a conversation with a normie about the boundaries of the human body, and how it’s not clear where inside ends and where outside begins. The very idea of selfishness starts to unravel if the idea of what it is that one might be selfish about is challenged, and by such means light can shine through.

This column believes that the ultimate goal of consciousness expansion is apotheosis, where an individual consciousness reunites themselves with the universal consciousness and becomes privy to certain mysteries, such as that there is no such thing as time and that the death of the physical body does not impact the true self.

Contemplation of this alone is liable to induce a psychiatric breakdown in a lot of people. Most people are so utterly terrified of the concept of their future death that they have pushed the very idea of it into a deep, dark part of the mind, only to be ventured into in an emergency. Even fewer people have looked deeply enough into their own minds to have made a surgically precise distinction between consciousness and the content of consciousness.

Starting with such subjects is probably too much. Most people will declare you crazy for talking about them rather than risk psychosis by dwelling on them.

Questioning the materialist dogma that the brain generates consciousness is the quickest way to be seen as crazy. This dogma is taken by many to be the absolute, inviolable and axiomatic truth of reality and conversation along these lines is likely to make materialists fear or despise you.

The best thing is probably to declare skepticism of the claims of a mutual enemy. The Government, the Church or Big Business can all serve as excellent mutual enemies. Skepticism of the claims of these mutual enemies might then be generalised into skepticism about other claims and dogmas.

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.