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!






Monday 31 October 2011

Sacrificial Lambs


Eden Court is the number one venue in Inverness for the arts: music, theatre, independent cinema all proudly gathered on the banks of the River Ness. Eden Court was noticeably devoid of high culture for three days just over a week ago, however: it was closed to the public while staging a very special event indeed. Though notably lacking in good jokes, the theatre undoubtedly saw plenty of buffoonery, generously provided by a veritable gaggle of court jesters. Experts in the performing arts were there aplenty, intended to deceive the unwary, and with ambition and intrigue fit for a Shakespearian historical drama. The event: the annual conference of the Scottish National Party.

Delegates were treated to a special welcoming party on the Saturday, as folk from various anti-windfarm groups across the length and breadth of Scotland met outside to protest at the Scottish misgovernment's crazy plunder-a-hill policies. I decided to go along. It would, in fact, have been hypocritical not to have done so, given the ferocity of my own objection to these metal-and-plastic monsters that are now bestriding some of the most marvellous wild locations in Europe. The result of my own investigations over the past several years, reported in part on Pale Green Vortex, is that large-scale windfarms possess no redeeming features whatsoever. They are promoted by, and benefit, three groups of people only: as a publicity stunt by politicians wishing to appear 'green' on the world stage; by energy companies and landowners who stand to make a fast and easy buck from government policies; and by those infected with a delusional, abstracted notion of 'environmentalism', as distinct from the real thing.

With their high-fives and victory fist-waving, the leading lights of the Scottish National Party demonstrate a worrying triumphalism. And, because they are driven by ideology - independence at any price and renewables at any cost - they can be blind to the pragmatic concerns of ordinary human beings. Put another way, they are dangerous people. They will be undone by their hubris in the end, I am confident; history seems to teach this lesson. But in the meantime, Scotland is subject to their shrill cries of 'Scotland for the Scots', while simultaneously blighting the lives of many who happen to live within their domain.

The SNP version of independence for Scotland seems firmly bedded in what, following John Lash, I refer to as the victim-perpetrator mindset. And as a grand ideology, independence, like all Big Ideas, transcends the individual. It follows, therefore, that it has its own sacrificial lambs. And foremost among those lined up for slaughter in the name of the Great and Good Cause are those who cherish wild places as a vital source of spiritual nourishment. At the head of the queue, as many of Scotland's upland and rural areas are destroyed, are those who happen to live there in the first place.

People tend to inhabit rural places for two main reasons. Either they are born there, or they move there because they find the rhythms of nature and the countryside more conducive than those of the Big City. Whichever way, to suddenly find your chosen way of life shattered by an army of enormous turbines waving at you from a nearby horizon or right on your doorstep, as a result of a decision made hundreds of miles away and in which you have played no part, is shocking. I am fortunate enough not to gaze at a bunch of turbines from my bedroom window, but many of the people gathered outside Eden Court now suffer this fate. And simply moving away often proves impractical or downright impossible, since nobody wants to buy a house next door to an industrial junkyard.

One of the placards being carried at Eden Court posed the question: 'Does independence mean dictatorship?' In the SNP version of events, most likely 'yes'. Even local democracy stands no chance in the face of the juggernaut of SNP-driven central government. Critical example: many decisions on windfarm applications are initially made by local councils. If turned down by the local bodies, they may be taken to central government by the energy companies. Get this - every single large-scale application refused by Perth and Kinross Council (which includes within its remit some of the most quintessential of Scottish landscapes) has subsequently been given the go-ahead by the powers-that-be in Edinburgh. So the more local form of government, which might just be a little more in touch with the realities of the location concerned, is held in total contempt. We have a situation of complete disempowerment by Central Control. Otherwise known as 'modern democracy'.

The terms of discourse of modern politics are such that everything which endows human life with true value is excluded. Matters of soul, heart, and spirit; of our intimate and intrinsic connectedness with the non-human world. These are strictly off the map, in general, and specifically when decision-makers discuss windfarms. Even the vague and cliched 'quality of life' gets short shrift nowadays, treated as a luxury, when finance and economics are presented as being so pressing. Times of apparent economic difficulty actually suit the political classes very well, since they can concentrate their materialistic minds exclusively on what comes naturally to them: food, water, property, employment, division of resources. They are on home ground.

Delegates strode in and straggled out. Some were courteous, accepting the leaflets offered to them, while others marched brusquely by. One or two stopped to engage in 'heated discussion', and a few more quietly, almost conspiratorially, whispered that they agreed with us. The protest had excellent front-page coverage in the Press and Journal, one of the local newspapers, which hopefully brought the scam to the awareness of more people. Thanks go to the reporter and photographer for this. As I walked home from the demo, I realised that I had been touched quite deeply by a mixture of sadness and inspiration. Sadness at the needless destruction of landscapes, wild nature, and the lives of those living proximate to them. Yet inspired by the tireless efforts and courage of people fighting for what is of real value to their souls, and for the soul of the natural world of which we are part.

Photo: Oast House Archive

Monday 24 October 2011

The Gagging of Casey Hardison


Photo: Casey Hardison, entheogenic activist (Erowid, Brighton Argus)

Readers of Pale Green Vortex will already be familiar with Casey Hardison, sentenced in 2005 to twenty years in jail for producing psychedelic-type substances at his home in leafy Sussex, southern England. On September 22nd this year, Casey received a letter. I paraphrase freely, but this is the gist: 'Mr Hardison. We are finding your persistent correspondence with us on the subject of the legal status of various drugs increasingly tiresome and irritating. We are unable to stop you in your tracks rationally, as the logic of your position is irrefutable. Therefore, we have no option but to simply issue an order to shut you up. Yours, etc.'

Yes, folks, this is what those great western values of freedom of speech and democracy have come to after all these years: we don't like what you have to say, so shut up! It's as simple as that. During the course of the past seven years, Casey has consistently stood up for truth, honesty, liberty, and equality. At his trial, he did not do as criminals are expected to do - bow their head in shame, mumble something about seeing the error of their ways, and hope for a lighter sentence. Instead, he asserted his right to freedom of consciousness - cognitive liberty -, and argued that the 'War on Drugs' is in fact a War on Consciousness. As evidenced in the Operation Julie trial 25 years beforehand, such unrepentant behaviour is guaranteed to antagonise the powers-that-be, and result in a suitably harsh sentencing from an affronted man in a wig.

Instead of shutting up and lying down on his prison bed, Casey has devoted his time and considerable energy to delving into UK drug laws in great detail. The fine print of his investigations can be found through either the freecasey link on Pale Green Vortex or the Drug Equality Alliance website. I suggest that anybody concerned about freedom and discrimination in modern western society should take some time to look carefully at this information. But in summary Casey has argued that, on the basis of scientific evidence of their relative potential for harm, the socially and culturally acceptable drugs alcohol and tobacco are currently under-regulated, while various other substances, such as ecstasy and LSD, are over-regulated. The current scheduling of drugs does not mirror their relative dangers in the slightest. This is not personal opinion, but fact - see the work spearheaded by Professor Nutt for starters - and is not what you would expect if the purpose of law was to protect the individual from the effects of dangerous substances.

Furthermore, Casey has suggested that alcohol and tobacco, being drugs with a certain potential for harm, should logically be placed alongside other drugs under the strictures of the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971. The special status that they enjoy is based on cultural factors - even the government has admitted as much -, and in effect discriminates against those who may which by personal preference to use other drugs instead which are no more harmful. This does not mean that alcohol and tobacco should be prohibited: this act simply provides the framework for regulation in one form or another of a variety of substances. Casey's argument has been wilfully misrepresented, however, and on September 22nd an 'Extended Civil Restraining Order' was duly placed on this individual who dares to repeatedly point out that the emperor wears no clothes. By the time the Order expires, Casey will most likely have been conveniently deported to the USA after completing his jail sentence.

As the 1960s and early 1970s, years that shaped much current UK drug policy, fade into distant memory, ignorance can no longer be held up as an excuse for the continuing disconnection between the legal situation and reality. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that another agenda is at work. The Casey Hardison fiasco is further evidence that the prime purpose of law in modern 'democratic society' is not, as might be supposed, to protect the rights and freedoms of the individual, and to ensure fairness. A main function of law, in fact, appears to be to protect and perpetuate a particular version of reality. It also serves to advance the interests of the few at the expense of the many - but this is simply one aspect of that particular version of reality. There is no other possible conclusion that can be drawn from a close examination of the facts that we are confronted with, and it is vital to grasp this realisation if we wish to understand much of what happens in the world today.

A hallmark of the 'reality' that we are fed as the one and only reality is its strongly hierarchical configuration. The greatest enemy of the pyramid-of-power dominator culture spawned by this version of reality is anything that reveals other, wider realities, with their other, more positive attendant realms of consciousness. Dominator culture is terrified by the stance of Casey Hardison like it is terrified of nothing else; widespread access to other realities and forms of consciousness will be its undoing, and it will do anything within its power to suppress this knowledge. And while access to other realities can be afforded by a variety of means, the quickest and most reliable is with the assistance of psychedelic-type, or entheogenic, plants or substances. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion, but ask any Andean or Amazonian shaman. And on the subject of one of Casey's products, Andy Roberts summarises neatly in 'Albion Dreaming': 'At its most potent, LSD gives the user no option but to examine and challenge all accepted notions of perception, thought, identity, culture and the nature of reality. The danger to the Establishment must be that if enough people used LSD there might ....... be a revolution that could threaten how life in Britain is lived.' (Chapter Thirteen, 'Revolution in the head'). Just so, Andy, just so. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

Producers of psychedelic-type substances generally get a bum deal - particularly if they are caught. No mention in the New Years' honours lists for their excellent products or services to humankind. Andy Roberts bemoans the lack of public protest when the Operation Julie defendants were tried and sent to jail, but I wonder what the point would have been: I can't see how it would have helped the chemists in any way. Manufacturers (or alchemists, depending on your take on reality) such as Casey Hardison and some of the Operation Julie defendants were primarily motivated by idealism, but this was outside the frame of reference of Judge Niblett's consciousness in the Hardison case, when he could only envisage greed and profit as motives. He could only envisage greed and profit because they are the currency of his version of reality! The truth is that thousands, if not millions, of people have had their lives quietly enriched and enhanced as a result of the substances that came out of a farmhouse in rural 1970s Wales and a room in rural Sussex. The acid chemists have helped improve countless more people's lives, opened more eyes, than have all our politicians and High Court judges put together.

When Al-Megrahi of Lockerbie notoriety was returned to Libya by the Scottish Misgovernment, he was accorded a hero's welcome on his coming home. Will a true man of courage and unflagging positivity receive a similar reception when deported to his native US soil? Probably not. But Casey certainly should be.....



Thursday 6 October 2011

Bring On the New.....


Visionary art by Alex Grey

In his seminal presentation for ARC 1,'Guerilla Psychonautics', Neil Kramer briefly goes into the notion of 'neophobic shutdown'. This, he explains, is the condition of refusal to entertain new and strange ideas and angles on life, reality, etc. Neil suggests various reasons for the defences going up in this apparently irrational manner. There's fear, built up and played upon by the media. Previous investment: if we have spent all our life buying into a particular version of reality, backing out can pose a threat to our very identity. Then cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable and potentially depressing feeling of holding conflicting ideas about life simultaneously. Finally, Neil enumerates our inability to focus for any length of time. Fast cut edit in the media has led to attention deficit disorder being the modern norm, with a consequent inability to evaluate new information.

For myself, I have the opposite tendency. If anything, I am a neophile. Strange, unorthodox notions attract me like a bee to a honeypot, while most of 'normal' is old, tired, the same old fraudulent song played over and over again. It's an attitude I've had since an early age. I loved my parents, but I had no wish whatsoever to emulate the kind of life they led - even more so for my aunts, uncles, and grandparents. 'There must be more to life than this' was an intuition of mine even in infancy; which was accompanied by its darker corollary, the sense that a 'normal' life is stuffy, limited, and (to turn Buddhist for a moment) unsatisfactory. Then the 1960s arrived with an explosion of the new. Musical sounds that had never been dreamed, yet alone heard, before hit the radiowaves on a weekly basis. I was tailor-made for the era.

Pale Green Vortex is liberally sprinkled with ideas to make a neophobe's blood curdle: the multidimensional nature of existence, the entheogenic origins of our sense of the sacred; archons and nature spirits; partnership cultures as an integral part of our heritage. Not to mention the windfarm scam and global warming fraud as two of the least ecologically-enlightened topics on the political, social, and economic agenda. It may well be that some of these notions prove without foundation. But, in the spirit of a review of Terence McKenna's pioneering 'Food of the Gods', which declared that 'if only a fraction of McKenna's thought is true, he will someday be regarded as the Copernicus for consciousness', if only a handful of themes explored on Pale Green Vortex have real substance, this is enough to force a radical revisioning of what life and consciousness are about.

So, on to this article's neophobic spine-chiller, which concerns the function of the brain and its relationship to consciousness.....

Modern science, it would seem, now understands a good deal about how the brain works. Interestingly, though, with regard to 'what is consciousness?', it has failed to make much headway at all. Which is a polite way to say that it still hasn't a clue. There is a telling 'editorial note' provided by one Professor Richard Gregory in the New Penguin English Dictionary (2000) which sits on my bookshelf. 'The human brain is the most complicated structure known, with its 100 billion nerve cells, each with around 2000 connections' is its boggling factual introduction. But the note ends with this frank yet ominous statement: 'How it generates consciousness remains mysterious.'

Just so, just so. It's a magnificent giveaway of the mainstream 'scientific' assumption that gets in the way of any real understanding. That the brain generates consciousness is the only way that modern science can conceive of things. This is the necessary reflection of its model of the universe as made up of separate units of matter and other stuff that are, of themselves, by-and-large dead. From a shamanic and psychonautic perspective this view is totally ridiculous. The shamanic, psychonautic universe is alive, its separate units actually inextricably interconnected. This worldview proceeds from a direct experiential rather than theoretical basis, that of anima mundi, the world ensouled. Consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is a 'given' of reality itself. As John Lash writes of those specialists in reality and consciousness, the initiates into the Mysteries of Eleusis: 'They realised that the entire cognitive field of human beings and of all sentient life is set up and supported by the external world, a projection of the living intelligence of the planet.' And, as David Abram says in his article 'The Perceptual Implications of Gaia': 'the psyche is a property of the ecosystem as a whole' (quoted by John Lash, 'Not in His Image', ch 16).

The brain turns out to be, not so much a generator of consciousness as a receiver. And we can take this further. Not only is it a receiver, but it can tune into different channels given the right circumstances. Prime among the aims of shamans, tantrikas, Gnostic telestai, psychonauts, and others is developing the ability to tune into other channels of reality for reasons of gnosis and healing. To expand the analogy: there is, it seems, a default channel to which we are tuned as human beings from early on. This is 'channel normal',' channel survival'. While familiarity with this wavelength is obviously important, it is commonly presented as the only one, and anybody protesting this viewpoint is dismissed as either dangerous or mad - or both. But it is like having a television complete with satellite dish and capable of receiving a hundred stations, only someone has hidden the remote control and all you can watch is BBC One. I submit that any quest for wholeness, wisdom, or whatever, will be futile, or at best seriously compromised, without experientially embracing the multi-channelled nature of consciousness and the universe.

This realisation that the relationship between brain and consciousness is not as often assumed can create a good deal of soul-searching for the best-qualified minds educated within the paradigms of mainstream science. One such example is Stanislav Grof. Classically-trained in psychiatry, he became a leading figure in the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy until this became legally untenable. He went on to develop the technique of holotropic breathwork ('holotropic' meaning 'moving towards wholeness') as a powerful means of opening the doors of the psyche (or tuning into other channels of consciousness, to use the model in this article).

In the Preface to 'When the Impossible Happens', his personal memoir, Grof relates the following: 'My initial encounter with holotropic states was very difficult intellectually, as well as emotionally challenging. In the early years of my laboratory and clinical research with psychedelics, I was bombarded daily with experiences and observations for which my medical and psychiatric training had not prepared me...... I was experiencing and seeing things that...... were not supposed to happen......' And later: 'After I had overcome my initial conceptual shock, incredulity concerning my observations, and doubts about my own sanity, I began to realise that the problem might not be in my capacity to observe or in my critical judgement, but in the limits of current psychological and psychiatric theories and of the monistic, materialistic paradigm of Western science.' And in the Epilogue he concludes: 'I now believe that the universe was created and is permeated by cosmic consciousness and superior creative intelligence (anima mundi) on all its levels and in all its dimensions.' Newtonian worldview, bye bye.

Another such example is Dr. Rick Strassman, who was privileged to conduct the first legally-sanctioned research on consciousness and psychedelics in the USA for 20 years during the 1990s. As he describes in his interview with Graham Hancock in 'Supernatural', he tried very hard to explain away his volunteers' many strange experiences under DMT (which include numerous encounters with alien beings) through more orthodox models. He tried the idea of subjective hallucinations, followed by Freud's notions of the unconscious and Jung's archetypes. But his volunteers were all unimpressed. Eventually, he was forced to treat their experiences 'as is': 'It was then I began allowing myself to consider that DMT provides a portal into alternative dimensions of reality.' And he says further: 'The receiver model is just that. The brain receives information at the level for which it happens to be tuned at that particular time.'

With the subjects of multidimensional consciousness and the brain as organ of reception rather than generation, we have stumbled into an area wherein lie some of the greatest fears of the Control System, including the hornets' nest of current inquisitorial approaches to psychedelic (entheogenic) usage. All for another time.......

With thanks to Nilo for mentioning to me Rupert Sheldrake, so inadvertently reminding me of the theme of this blog piece.