Welcome into the vortex........

anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


all delivered from the beautiful Highlands of Scotland!






Wednesday 31 March 2010

Progress Report


There is something about being a certain age - in this case 57. You've been around long enough to live through social and cultural change, with the perspective that can give; yet still (hopefully) have enough fitfully functioning braincells to be able to reflect adequately on everything that's gone before....

History can be read in different ways. But, for me, one inescapable reading of the forty years of my sort-of adult life is the progressive suppression and removal by other means of any opposition to the status quo in the western world. This I suspect to be the main subtext to most of what has happened since I was a nice little boy running round the playground in shorts. While the communists tried to achieve this goal through salt mines and incarceration, the ubermensch of western societies has adopted a far more subtle and successful method: give the masses consumer goods to keep them quiet. Colour television; texting; microwaved tv suppers; holidays in Thailand; ring tones. Always something new and fascinating. The deliberate cultivation of mass mutton mentality (apologies to sheep), the final opium of the masses. Shop, shop, shop, turn on playstation and shut the f**k up! It's the strategy of the modern dominators, and it works superbly.

Just how successful the reality channel that the control system has us tuned into is, was driven home to me last christmas time. In the shop where I work, customers were busily beavering away until closing time, 4pm on the 24th. By the time I returned to the scene, 11am on Boxing Day, December 26th, the shop was already being mobbed again! After their uncomfortably-negotiated enforced day of rest on the 25th, the west's ideal families were back in force to do what comes naturally, as dictated by the dominators: spend, spend, spend. It was the controllers' dream come true.

This control system paradise is characterised by an absence of perspective and, paradoxically, any real choice (one of the system's buzzwords, which we are taught means 'good'). One unfortunate consequence of the falling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in the late 1980s was that all effective visible opposition to the western capitalist dream vanished in one fell swoop. With communist Russia around, at least people were aware that other ways of going about life existed, even if they weren't up to much. Younger people now grow up with no sense that it is possible to live in any way other than the western consumerist nightmare. All other possibilites have been eradicated; we are confronted with a single world philosophy, a true monoculture. Totalitarianism by default. And it's mainly crap.

It's not necessary to subscribe to full-blown conspiracy theories to realise that recent western history is characterised by the increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small clique, while equality and personal empowerment disappear, flushed away in the sewage system of falsely-free markets and a one-eyed misreading of Darwin's ideas of survival of the fittest. There is no doubt in my mind as to the unspoken, possibly sometimes unconscious, agreement on the way that things are and how they should continue; an agreement among a nexus of people of politics, business, the law, the media, church, and money. Once we spoke of 'the Establishment'; now I might talk of 'dominator complex' or 'control system'. It amounts to pretty much the same thing.

One consequence of this levelling out of perspective and disappearance of real choice is a certain bland 'sameness'. We all participate in the same culture, have the same interests, so nothing is really any better than anything else. Gordon Brown gives his opinions on 'X-Factor' contestants, and David Cameron listens to Lily Allen. Yes, we're all the same now, and we all agree that's a jolly good thing. Amazing.

A recent report - commissioned by the UK government! - confirmed that divisions between the haves and have-nots in Britain have widened since the 1970s. The most interesting thing is that, while forty years ago such a situation provoked miners' strikes, general political and economic unrest, and the eventual ushering in of S.M. Dominatrix Thatcher to sort it all out, today nobody bats an eyelid. Nobody cares. Life continues as normal. Anyone tried that new Vodafone mobile yet?

So the dominators can feel well-satisfied in their efforts over recent times. Even when their financial institutions lose billions of pounds, no worries: the taxpayers will pick up the tab. Yes, it's been a job well done.

Monday 29 March 2010

The Demonstration or Zen?


How to make a revolution? It's a question that's hounded me intermittently throughout my adult life. Its roots lie, I suppose, in a sense that there is more to existence than normally meets the eye; and, furthermore, what does meet the eye is inadequate and frequently not up to much at all. Some of my earliest memories hold this unmistakeable feeling-tone - though that's no great surprise for any small and sensitive soul growing up in the stuffily rationalistic atmosphere of late 1950s middle-class Britain.

Fast forward: Among the various scribblings still extant from my late teens and early twenties is a short piece entitled just this: 'How to make the revolution. The demonstration or Zen?' Is it politics and direct confrontation, or a change in consciousness? Confrontation and radical politics, I argued then, 'could be counter-productive', and 'a lot of people in these things don't seem to have their heads together any more than anyone else, and I can't see them heralding a new wise and peaceful society'. 'The ecological harmonious commune is a better answer', and 'the extreme is the inner trip, the voyage' - or Zen.

Even at this fairly tender age I had a certain amount of experience to base my musings on. A brief flirtation with communism took place in my mid-teens, but I saw through it pretty quickly. I moved into political anarchism, including a short-lived relationship with Oxford Anarchists, involving revolutionary graffiti under cover of midnight, and selling our broadsheet 'Carfax Comic' outside the college gates. However, I couldn't swallow anarchism's overly rosy view of humanity once stripped of its capitalist shackles. Plus, as stated previously, 'a lot of people in these things don't seem to have their heads together any more than anyone else...'

Thenceforth, 'sort your own shit out and create an alternative world as a microcosm of the ideal' became the watchword. I grew vegetables, became vegan for a while, and several years later helped to start a commune, in which money and other resources were pooled, everybody took turns in cooking, cleaning etc. This was great, except that we were all too young to commit long-term to such an extreme lifestyle; differences began to emerge, unlived lines of the soul-body which needed acting out before anything else could gel. I recall our visiting a plot of land that we had been offered a few miles north-west of Aberdeen. It was Easter time, the wind was blowing snow showers in off the North Sea, and I realised I was not ready to sign away the rest of my life to growing parsnips.

The revolutionary wheel had turned full circle from those earlier political aspirations. Fuelled further by psychedelic voyages to the distant reaches of outer and inner space, transformation of consciousness was undoubtedly the way to go. But how to do it? My life was disintegrating for a whole variety of reasons - the sort of stuff that happens when you are twenty-two years old and fresh out of the commune - and I needed some kind of framework to help stucture my angst and mystical aspirations. Buddhism seemed to most closely fit the bill and, in the tradition of a true renunciate, I gave away the last of my acid, sold my record collection for next-to nothing, and moved to London to do Buddhism western-style.

The Buddhist organisation that I was involved with for many years was one attempt to find a solution to the revolution problem. My original intention was to find a part-time job and spend the rest of my hours meditating and studying Buddhist texts. However, I soon found myself helping to set up a Buddhist-run healthfood business, and within two or three years I was teaching meditation myself and chairing a Budddhist centre. The effort to create a Buddhist world within the mainstream was in many respects laudable. The wheel gradually fell off, however. Any 'organisation' or 'movement' (as the Buddhist project labelled itself) is fundamentally flawed in its revolutionary impact, I have come to conclude. In particular, organisational hierarchy, even with the best will in the world, begins to mimic mainstream culture, with its overtly hierarchical pyramids of power. Thus political manoeuvering, strategies of power and influence, and pressure (sometimes subtle but there nevertheless) on the underlings to conform or be damned, all creep in. I am not 'anti-hierarchy' as such: it is impossible to be so, since the cosmos is composed of hierarchies. Life forms with different levels of complexity, humans with different degrees of experience, abilities and so on. But the minute a hierarchy is formalised, committed to paper, marks the beginning of the end of the revolution.

Neil Kramer has spoken recently of 'guerilla psychonautics', and guerilla-style is, I suspect, the way forward. Small cells, a web-like network of contacts and fellow travellers through outer and inner space, shapeshifting, impossible to pin down. Try to stamp it out here and it pops up somewhere else. Psychonautic Vietcong. No fixed or formal hierarchy, just direct communication of being.

And, as with shamanic cultures past and present, there is a secret weapon: knowledge and experience of multidimensional realities. Through this, the modern guerilla of psyche has access to ways of seeing and being that are beyond the reach of the dominators. Maybe life and world can be influenced more through their other dimensions than can ever be achieved merely through consensus reality. It's actually there in Buddhism too, in its more shamanic/Tantric wing at least; Milarepa the yogi, solitary in a cave, changing the world.

This is by no means my last word on the subject; it's work in progress. In the meantime, you can do worse than get out your rattles and drums, secret sounds and songs; meditations, divinations, mantras and yantras. Call up your power animals and spirit allies, bring out your sacred plants. Polish your antennae. These, in the end, could be the real tools of the revolution.

To be continued......



At this moment, in the parallel podcast world, we may stop to dream and be transported by the beatific first movement of Schubert's Piano Concerto in Bb major, D960. Ha!




Sacred Mountain


In many non-western cultures, the mountains are sacred. Westerners flock to Machu Picchu, go on pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, home to Hindu and Buddhist deities. There's Mount Fuji. Nearer to home, our ancestors created their own sacred places, in the form of stone circles, burial chambers, and the like. We can surmise that they too, like the Incas, Bon-pos, and other shamanic cultures, had their sacred spots among the mountains and wild places. Here you are closer to the sun, moon and stars. Here the spirits and deities appear more readily. Here access to the field of universal consciousness and multidimensional realities seems most likely to be granted.

Western mainstream sees things in a different light. A dark emanation from a conspiracy of scientific rationalism, Judeo-Christian (especially Augustinian) worldview, and Cartesian philosophy, it has several basic premises. Firstly, that all things and beings are fundamentally separate one from another. Secondly, that humanity is particularly separate, and irrevocably top of the natural world tree. Thirdly, that the ego subject is the only living reality, and that the world 'out there' is dead and devoid of soul.

A little investigation reveals all these premises to themselves be devoid of reality. Their consequences, however, have been largely disastrous. A set of assumptions which has provided the ideal context for the emergence and consolidation of our modern dominator-style cultures. For them, 'nature' (in itself a curious abstraction from total reality), with its mountains and wild places, is not the least bit sacred. Rather, it is there to be trashed for the dominators own not-very-human ends (primarily money and personal power). My former Buddhist teacher once related a story about walking through a forest with somebody, and remarking on the beauty of the trees. 'Ah yes' came the reply. 'Just think how much wood we can get from them.' Which sums it up nicely.

Certainly in Scotland (I believe a similar mentality exists elsewhere in the UK), the main aim of government seems to be to turn the Highlands into an industrial junkyard, littered with metal-and-plastic wind turbines - which do not save the planet, but simply line the pockets of energy company big boys - and lines of oversized pylons. 'Beauly - Denny' may not mean much to the majority of folk outside the Scottish Highlands, but it is the route for a line of massive pylons, to be built from west of Inverness, through part of the Cairngorms National Park, to end up near Stirling, on the edge of the Central Belt. It is not needed - anyone interested in details should have a peek at the John Muir Trust website for starters - but a dominator complex unspoken agenda deems that it must go ahead.

Incredibly, the dominators do not even seem bothered to keep up a facade of honesty and rationality. On the evening after the Scottish misgovernment announced its expected decision to go ahead with Beauly - Denny, Scottish misgovernment minister Jim Mather appeared on Newsnight Scotland. His performance was pathetic even by the usual abject standards of political conmen and conwomen. What precisely has been given the go-ahead? Could some of the transmission line be put underground? Who could decide about that? What is the process? Where? When? What do you say to the many people who claim that the transmission line is unnecessary, and a waste of money to boot? He was incapable of answering any of the questions; I would have felt embarrassed for him, did I not hold him in such contempt. It was the kind of interview (credit to Gordon Brewer, presenter, for a thorough demolition job) that should leave a person's political career in tatters, but no, it seems things continue as before regardless. The dominators appear to feel less and less need to justify their actions these days, and after all control system dominators are just that: in control through domination.

A final note on the fiasco: it was reported that all five major political parties in the Scottish parliament were in favour of Beauly - Denny anyway. So there was actually no debate to be had in the first place: colluders in the Cartesian fantasy. Funny. 18,000 - or was it 20,000? - people went out of their way to object to the project. In a world where the general rule is simply to just shut up and watch East Enders, that is quite a lot of people. Where is their voice? Oh, I almost forgot. Democracy really is a complete sham, and they don't have a voice. Sorry about that.

Here's a poem from the edge of the Cairngorms:


Carnage at Lynwilg

Even in their flight of death
birds go graceful

funny how the books never tell us
the birds and the beasts
and the rocks and the trees
must all go in beauty
it is their true way
not the one-eye Darwin way

Like an arrow they flew
silent across the morning sky
pheasants in the clearing
till clack-clack-clack
men with guns and gumboots
lined up for the kill
in the grounds of the Scripture Union
shot them down in profusion

On the hill, a woman in pink jacket
hard beating brown November bracken
in the warm morning sun
and out they came flying
dignified in white collars
knowers of the real gods
not like the men in white collars
and the counterfeit gods of the Scripture Union

On I scuttled
uninvited guest at the slaughter
to the mountain beyond

Snow hare, patron of the chill rocks
lord of the thin air, watches above me
and moves on

Across the valley snort grunt
fills the air
Deer stands still, eyes meet mine
Who feels most fear, deer or me?
Who most curious? Who
immersed most in the present?

Returning, they are gone
the big men, the bad men
the tough men, the rough men
with guns and gumboots

Air is still and silent
the forest empty
Till I catch sight of a white-collared one
pheasant escapee
I want to kiss him, offer congraulations
teach him how to survive
how not to fly at the shoot
but that is not his way

I move on, leaves squelch underfoot
a deer gazes into the sunset





Sunday 28 March 2010

Bouncing Bear


Are the dominators getting jittery? I certainly hope so. Whatever, this is just one gloss that can be put on recent events at Bouncing Bear Botanicals, which have been surreal even by the normally bizarre standards of mainstream society.

On Feb 4th 2010, the FDA (Food and Drugs people) raided the warehouses of BBB in Kansas, TSA (Totalitarian States of America). With guns drawn and handcuffs ready, they arrested a number of people, including owner Jonathan Sloan. They also seized various items, including a smoking blend called K2 (still legal at the time), miscellaneous seeds, cacti and other plant materials. Plus, er, a bunch of toads.

Various charges have since been levelled, including unlawful cultivation or distribution of controlled substances, including mescaline, DMT, LSA, possession of 'drug paraphernalia' such as plastic jugs. And the Colorado River Toads. Not to mention the removal of $900,000 (I think this is the amount, a degree of confusion exists in the various reports), so that it will be difficult for Mr. Sloan to get proper legal representation. They do that kind of thing in the TSA. Nice place.

Which is all very well, apart from the fact that, as far as I and anybody else can make out, BBB has done nothing illegal whatsoever. A look at BBB's website reveals it to be a vendor of a wide variety of plants, herbs, and natural incense (though, since the raid, the variety has become rather more limited: 'out of stock' denotes the removed materials). Among the products seized were a number that could conceivably be used for psychoactive purposes. The law, as I understand it, is clear, albeit strange, in the TSA, much as it is in the UK. To have in ones possession fresh or dried peyote, for example, or morning glory seeds, or plant material of the sort used in making ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew used for centuries, if not millenia, by Amazonian shamans, is as legal as growing tulips. If, however, you process these materials, and the cops find you with pure mescaline, DMT, or whatever - wham, bang, that's very naughty, sir, class A drug (as they are termed in the UK), off to jail with you, possibly for a very long time.

So, unless Mr. Sloan had a secret processing lab tucked away in a back room, which is highly unlikely, all the charges against him appear to be completely false, and make a mockery of the entire legal system.

The most likely explanation, it would seem to me, is totalitarian complex fear tactics. 'Listen, little boy. Don't get ideas beyond your station. We don't take kindly to the likes of you. So just be careful how you go, and shut the fuck up.' It's a message to all who dare to make available mind-altering plants and products to the wider population. We don't like you or your consciousness-expanding games. It's not part of our scheme.

The BB bust is reminiscent of what happened to Sasha Shulgin, legendary psychedelic research chemist and all-round good egg, in 1994, as recounted in the classic tome 'Tihkal'. Bullying tactics, including the senseless and unnecessary trampling of his beloved peyote cacti, offered years before as a treasured gift by a Native American chief.

For some time it has been clear to me that dominator culture has something special against psychedelics, or entheogens ('god- or spirit-facilitating') as they are often termed nowadays, that has nothing to do with public health or safety. Despite what periodic media hysteria would like people to believe, psychedelics, if used in the right circumstances and with the respect they deserve, rank pretty low in the dangerous drug stakes. People don't drop dead from ingesting LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, salvia divinorum, or the rest. They might feel strange and disoriented. They may meet God, or experience unity with the rest of the cosmos. They may sense that the world is alive, imbued with spirit. They could find the experience a scary ordeal, and vow never to repeat it. But they won't die.

In the UK, the government's response to the report of the Advisory Commission on Misuse of Drugs, which culminated in the sacking of Professor Nutt in farcical circumstances, destroyed any final shreds of credibility in UK drug policy. It was stripped bare, to reveal what it truly is: an instrument of mind control. When Nutt and his colleagues presented the facts, demonstrating that, though still capable of causing harm, LSD and ecstasy were statistically less dangerous than the state-sanctioned drugs of alcohol and tobacco, this was not what the control system puppets wanted to hear. There are, apparently, 'political' and 'cultural' factors involved in drug policy - though what these factors are, I have been unable, despite a certain amount of enquiry, to discover.

My suspicion is that dominator culture does not understand psychedelic potential, in the same way that it doesn't understand shamanic worldview. But it senses that there is something very threatening in all this. The dominators have a huge vested interest in material consensus reality, with its delusory notion of separate selfhood - it's what makes their world go round. The idea of other realities will be subjectively very scary, while objectively meaning an end to their own control agenda, which can only function within the constraints of the narrow world that they have been instrumental in creating.

Fortunately, growing numbers of people are seeing that the UK and many other governments' drug policies have no credibility whatsoever. We like to think that injustice with regard to personal worldview is something we read about in history; but it seems to me that the witch-hunt is still very much with us today. The irrational persecution of those who choose to make available or use entheogens is no different to the persecution of witches in medeival Europe. A witch was a person - usually a woman - who did not conform to the prevailing ethos; a person who penetrated multidimensional realities. A person who was a threat to the christian status quo. A modern entheogenic advocate is similar. Such people do not make very good citizen-slaves. Their explorations of world and consciousness may lead them to see things in different ways. They are not good members of modern 'spend, watch television and shut up, and don't think for yourself' society. Nothing so dangerous as an independent mind.

All of this wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't real peoples' lives we are talking about. The modern Inquisition doesn't burn people at the stake, but its consequences are barely more edifying. Casey Hardison, five years into a twenty-year sentence for producing psychedelics in his bedroom in Sussex. In the TSA, Leonard Pickard serving two concurrent life sentences without parole (what does that mean??? I didn't realise the authorities had such a handle on reincarnation). Victims of the war against people who use certain kinds of drugs.

You don't need to be a basement shaman or entheogenic enthusiast to see the glaring injustice in the situation, in the same way that you didn't need to be a slave on a plantation to realise that slavery was inhuman, or be a woman to understand that female inequality was not right. History will decide, I suppose, that this is indeed a Dark Age we currently inhabit. We hope, in the meantime, that Jonathan Sloan and associates can pull their lives back together as soon as is possible.

Oh, what about the toads? Apparently their skin and glands contain 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin, both controlled substances. Yum yum!


At this moment, with spirits flagging slightly, in the parallel world of Pale Green Vortex podcast we would sit back and listen to 'Ritual - Nous sommes du Soleil' by Yes. This would help us recall that, beneath all the dung, we are indeed bright orbs of light, each connected to all others. Typical of Yes, it is also a rather long piece, in which case it also gives us plenty of time for a nice cup of coffee.


P.S. Further personal research has revealed that 'yum yum' is hardly appropriate for the toads, since direct ingestion of the toad venom is likely to poison the subject. Anybody wishing to enter into a symbiotic relationship with this toad should apparently dry and smoke the secretions. Not something I shall be recommending - though there are one or two positive reports by toad fans on Erowid.....

Keep those antennae in trim!


One of the prime strategies for navigating the dangerous pathway of the bardo of daily life is to keep the antennae in top condition. There are days when I spend many hours with these ultrasensitive receivers on full alert, ready for a sign, a signal, an omen. Sometimes it is hope that is detected; maybe an intimation of the ever-present satori lying on the far side of the film created by delusory separate egohood. At other times it is faint suspicion: something's up. It is such vague presentiments that there's more to a situation than meets the normal eye that can open the doorway to new new, hitherto unimagined, horizons. To give an example, it was a succession of these hunches that led me to opening the Pandora's box of renewable energy policy in Britain, to discover that the area has been commandeered by dominator culture and a bunch of people who are as green as a pickled beetroot. More of that later, no doubt.

In common with most other things that are worthwhile, antennae maintenance requires practice, training, patience, and constant effort. Impeccable intuitive awareness is the key, itself greatly facilitated by living a life that is in accord with wider reality. Buddhism in its various forms is replete with preceptual guidelines for such living, but the basics are honesty, kindness, contentment, simplicity, and keeping the mind clear and bright; not too much alcohol-induced heaviness, for example.

With training, it will be possible to expand waveband reception, and tune into channels other than the one we imagine we normally function on. In particular, channels of greater connectedness and universality than the limited, separate-entity waveband that forms most of our waking awareness most of the time. It is this widening of conscious waveband reception that will constitute a vital part of reshamanising of western cultures. So take care of those antennae....

Saturday 27 March 2010

On the hill


'On the hill': a phrase found regularly in hill and mountain magazines, and bringing a glint to the eye of many a visitor to rural campsites, modest bed and breakfasts in isolated places, and hostelries in the middle of nowhere.

But what exactly is happening out there, 'on the hill'?

I alight from the train at a deserted station. I've been here before, and the map stays tucked away firmly in my pocket. As I pass through the forest, a wind animates the branches, and flecks of sunlight pierce the canopy above, playing on the rocks and decaying pine needles beneath my feet. I start to attune to this new world I am walking through, sensing its rhythms and ways of being. The eggshell boundary of ego begins to soften; consciousness starts to move to a different frequency where the rocks, trees, and rushing streams are all full of soul, all speaking their own distinctive language. Each stone, each clump of soggy heather, alive and unique, part of a world that vibrates, if only we would stop to look and listen.

I cross a raging stream perilously by stones left by a distant storm, then continue to climb. Worlds different to my own constantly manifest. A pair of deer on a distant horizon stand and watch, part curious, part afraid. Peat bogs, home to frogs, toads, tadpoles; pavements of ancient sandstone, mirrors for the piercing midday sun. Each its own vital realm, parallel to mine, separate yet strangely familiar.

Weird things begin to happen with height; here in Scotland's north-west Highlands, at about 600 metres. Consciousness begins to tune into a different wavelength; I succumb to a curious mixture of wonder, anxiety, and joy. It is as if the pull of element earth becomes attenuated. Strange realms of spirits, elemental presences, make themselves known. The air is clear and pure, even when the peaks are shrouded in mist. For myself, I feel the irresistible urge to utter strange, spontaneous, Tibetan-like mantric sounds. Different realities announce their presence, quietly but definitely. New dimensions, and the timeless void on a good day. Emptiness hums with significance, and intimations of shamanic realities on the mountainside flood the mind.

Every year, people go to the mountains and die. The hordes wonder why, and the newspapers hound their newly-departed souls for being 'selfish' and 'irresponsible'. I know why they go, probably better than some of them ever do, the avalanched ones, the clifftop tumblers. An uplink to wider consciousness; a birthright to be rediscovered, the goal of our striving; our homecoming, the shamanic apotheosis.