Two days ago I heard about the decriminalization of psilocybin “victory” in Denver because it was being celebrated by some people in my social media sphere. Being the way I am, I questioned the assumption that this necessarily amounted to a good thing, and naturally I received a barrage of consternation and criticism.

This seems like a timely enactment of the principles I discussed in the last Liminal radio show, “The War on Truth,” as both an opportunity to express some of my anger (I hope constructively), and to experience, more viscerally, what I described as the ever-subtler and more insidious trap that is currently (I believe) being sprung for human consciousness. 

Here’s the cull from my arguments, followed by some invaluable insights taken from a Charles Upton Interview on the same subject (Upton is the only person I know on record who sees more or less eye to eye with me on this).

The full Faceborg exchanges are replicated after that, for those with the stomach for viewing an unedited exercise in futility.

After all that’s come out about CIA counterfeit countercultural operations, are people really celebrating the legalization of psilocybin & cannabis as a positive step towards social liberation? All these stoners who think they are smarter than the CIA – why, because they’ve OD-ed on all the drugs the CIA provided!

Fool us once, shame on the social engineers; fool us twice, shame on us.

Something I have consistently observed with entheogen users & advocates is they are top heavy and have suffered massive energetic disruption from all the “heaven-storming” of their own psyches. All conceptual knowledge but not at all rooted; and ego-inflation/possession comes out in accusations and rabid defense of their “mistress.”

People need to wise up—possession is possession. Volunteering for it doesn’t make it less so, and legalizing [unknown psychic infiltrants] is hardly a victory for humanity.

I’m not saying no one should use these plants, I am just not willing to put up with bullshit about it being “medicine” or heightening awareness; it’s an aid to dissociation just like alcohol & Netflix; if you need it, that’s fine. But sooner or later we all have to take reality straight.

I am not trying to bait anyone, but to call them to reason.

I am not, for the record, arguing against possible benefits of [occasional, and cautious] mushroom taking, or that they should not be legalized. But none of the ‘shroom-defenders  addressed the point that psychedelics have been heavily promoted, researched, distributed, and employed by “nefarious” government & intelligence organizations since the beginning and that most people in the western world have only been introduced to them because of those agendas. Does that not suggest the possibility that there might be unknown deficits for use of these substances? From my own experience and research, I now consider this to be the case. What is so hard about allowing that possibility, or that my perspective might come from something other than “regret and resentment,” or that my desire to share it might be motivated by genuine concern, & possibly wisdom?

What passes for progress in today’s world is a sad state of affairs. People may be celebrating a “progress” that has already been covertly sold to them for decades and only serves to boost one more market in controlled dissociation. The “people” & the powers-that-be are not nearly so different in their goals as people seem to believe. Those who behave like cattle [are asking] to be treated like cattle.

It’s curious how an awareness of and desire to avoid things that may do harm to the body & overwhelm the psyche is seen as sanctimoniousness; or how an attempt to present another possible perspective is seen as an attack. The nature of the defenses, when this mushroom-allegiance is questioned, for me, only confirm my impression that this is a bogus religion, complete with fanatical dogma.

Someone called me a bigot (!); someone else claims I support the Man because I am not celebrating legalization of aids to dissociation, when it is clearly in the interests of state power to do so at this juncture. And another says I need to eat more mushrooms to see the truth. I am starting to feel like Kevin McCarty at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It’s distressing & depressing. I honestly had no idea how far gone people were.

I may be invested in being right: aren’t we all? But I have no investment in believing that psychedelics messed up my nervous system & unbalanced my psyche; I have spent a decade righting the imbalance & it’s been painful and slow and humbling but, all told, worth it. I’m still stuck in avoidance patterns but at least they aren’t so grandiloquent & spiritualized or impactful on my body. I consider THAT progress.

I was hoping for some healthy skepticism based on what has been proven about the promotion of these substances by social engineers and mind controllers, and the unknown possible long-term side effects. Put those two together and anyone who isn’t very skeptical & cautious isn’t playing with a full deck.

Sometimes I do wonder if there isn’t an attempt to make it appear as though society is more tightly engineered than it is, of course; but I see too much evidence every day of how effectively we have been indoctrinated and how closely in line it is with goals laid out & set down long ago (cf Bertrand Russell). More importantly, how much of a “piece” it is—how prevalent the ideology of occultism/storming heaven is, especially in the younger generations, via transgender, transhumanism, secular satanism, and the new psychedelic movement. Bread and circuses in one. All part of the grand disembodiment project.

I guess this (partly) is why I have so small an audience base.

*

[This added the following day, taken from my response to a more recent comment:]

I would say that I didn’t really understand what disembodiment is until I began to have experiences of its opposite, of consciousness returning to the body, or arriving there for the first time. These only began some years after I gave up intoxicants, which I see as part of the reason for my body “waking up.”

The body has an optimum state in any given moment; this is going to relate not only to what we do with it, put in it, and what comes out of it in that moment, but also in the immediate and even distant past (starting with trauma-affect and corresponding toxins). Getting back to the baseline of the body means detoxifying, and that means, not only getting out the toxins still in there from years of abuse (of whatever sort), but reducing the amount being put into it on a daily basis.

Would we really want to have a conversation (or be married to) a total drunk? If not, why not? Do we want to live on a diet of M & Ms and Cheetos? If not, why not? If it’s all the same, why discern at all? And if it’s not, why reject the possibility that sobriety—abstinence from obvious and observable consciousness alterants—is a means to get back to the body’s natural, toxin-free state?

The main reason, as far as I can see, is because we like doing stuff that alters our consciousness and don’t really care too much about the cost for the body. And the more we do them, the less we are able to refer to the body in a toxin-free state, the less we have to ever reckon with that cost.

For myself, that’s not an option anymore. I feel the same way about talking to cannabis or entheogen users as I would assume most people do about talking to hopeless drunks. It is to less extreme a degree, sure, but for more or less the same reason: I don’t feel there’s the same opportunity for a genuine conversation-connection. Sometimes, this may be wrong (someone I did a podcast later admitted to have taken LSD, but it was a good talk nonetheless!). But I am OK with erring on the side of caution when drawing boundaries around this, because I have to draw the line somewhere, and because, in the past, I have erred on the other side. This is all part of finding the necessary balance for myself.

My primary influence currently in this regard is my ongoing association with Dave Oshana, who has very strict rules about not working with people who use obvious consciousness alterants. This isn’t a prejudice, as far as I can see, but seems based on an experiential awareness that people who are still self-intoxicating aren’t ready for an encounter with him, and because, at the same time, he is viscerally aware of being affected by their levels of toxicity. In other words, they won’t benefit to anything like the degree they might if clean, and he will suffer from close contact with them much more than is necessary or manageable.

Though I relate and even feel the same way, I can’t or don’t take such a hard line, because my own history (“karma”) seems to have resulted in attracting people who have histories of intoxication and addiction. But where I do draw the line is at working with people who are still invested in defending their intoxication as a legitimate means to get closer to reality, rather than something designed to delay a full encounter with it.

This sort of doublethink I find crazy-making and I lack the patience to navigate that terrain. It suggests to me that the person is too divorced from reality to even recognize the ways they are perpetuating their dissociation. That’s a problem, clearly, whether I am right or wrong, when it comes to communicating across such a divide.

***

Highlights from an invaluable interview with Charles Upton on the hidden cost of psychedelics:

It is highly interesting that psychedelic drugs burst upon the scene at precisely the same moment that the Second Vatican Council was abolishing traditional Roman Catholicism and deconstructing the sacramental order. It’s as if the grace of the Roman Catholic sacraments, while they were still intact, overflowed their specifically Catholic context and maintained a certain level of elevation in the “collective unconscious” of the western world, an elevation which was rapidly lost when that grace was cut off. Faced with a sudden unconscious or half-conscious sense of spiritual loss, and the stifling sensation that always results when the psyche is cut off from the plane of the Spirit, the western collectivity became susceptible to the temptation of psychedelics, which at the very least can provide (though not without extremely negative consequences) a horizontal psychic expansiveness which appears to compensate for, and sometimes actually counterfeits, the loss of a vertical spiritual elevation, while at the same time concealing the fact that such a loss ever occurred. Psychedelics, in other words, were a kind of Luciferian “booby prize” offered as compensation for the fall of western Christendom.

To syncretize different forms of the sacred, assuming that they were originally true Spiritual ways, not simply psychic “technologies”, is to relativize and subjectivize them and thus drive everything down to the psychic level while sealing off access to the Spirit; and this is tantamount to demonic invocation. And even if the practices in question are fundamentally psychic to begin with, mixing them can only generate further chaos.

LSD had permanently breached the natural energy-barrier or “etheric wall” between my material and subtle (not Spiritual) levels of consciousness—the microcosmic analogue of the “Great Wall” René Guénon speaks of in The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times [1953]. This left me with a lifelong over-sensitivity to psychic forces that has produced many experiences of great pain over the years, made it hard for me to meditate (too much psychic “static”), and caused me to be vulnerable to demonic attack. If any good came of this condition it was limited to an ability to “listen in”, as it were, to the councils of the demons, and find out something about what they are up to on a collective level, so that I can avoid certain of their influences and warn others.

…its function as a door-opener is often overshadowed by the fact that psychedelic experience is so intense that all later spiritual experience and practice tend to pale by comparison; you keep judging them, consciously or unconsciously, as to whether they “measure up” to LSD. . . In the Sufi view, the Spiritual Path is not the quest for higher consciousness but the purification of the soul from anything that would block the influx of higher consciousness. In light of this conception, experiences of rigor and abasement and contraction (qabd) are as important as experiences of spiritual expansion (bast); Ibn Ata’allah [d. 1309] even says that there is much more danger of violating spiritual courtesy (adab) with God in a state of bast than in a state of qabd—and to beg or demand that God bring back a past state as you remember it is certainly the height of discourtesy, besides being impossible. Furthermore, after LSD, it is very hard to overcome the illusion that God is an experience.

The hippies naively equated social control with a simplistic authoritarian repression; they rarely awoke to the fact that REAL control is based on co-optation, on the covert implantation of engineered beliefs and attitudes in the mass mind. The powers that be do not want heroes who courageously oppose them and die as martyrs; they would much rather find, or create, dupes who will obey their every command in the firm belief that they are following their own desires, their own creative expressions and “spiritual” intuitions, all in perfect freedom.

One other deleterious effect of psychedelics, which has clearly operated on the mass level (though not in every individual case), is that they broke down people’s protection against the surrounding psychic environment; first you “open up” too much, and then compensate by “closing down” so as to protect yourself from the painful influences emanating from your surroundings, including other people. Excess empathy ends in paranoia.

We probably could never have produced a society where millions spend hours a day alone before computer screens—while imagining that, via Twitter or whatever, they actually have thousands of “friends”!—if LSD hadn’t softened us up first; the isolation and excess introversion produced in part by psychedelics has effectively broken down the kind of social solidarity we need if we are to maintain our political freedoms and human rights; we are all too happy in our cubicles, or at least afraid to leave them.

Looking back over the cultural and spiritual “scorched earth” of the psychedelic revolution in the years since the 60’s, I shudder to think what they may have in store for us now. We should never forget that the CIA likely sponsored the mass dissemination of LSD as part of their MK-ULTRA mind control program.

Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass [b. 1931], was told by his Hindu yoga instructors, “You have a kundalini-blockage in your vishuddha-chakra [throat center] due to your past use of psychedelics”, supports this hypothesis. It’s as if LSD can act to breach the natural barrier between Nous/Intellectus, associated with the ajña-chakra or “third eye”, and dianoia/ratio, associated with the vishuddha-chakra, thus flooding the lower rational mind with material from the higher Intellectual mind; the lower mind becomes overloaded with this higher material, now expressed on a lower level, and ends by counterfeiting the quality of the Nous/Intellectus and thus blocking access to it. Consequently, if spiritual methods practiced and spiritual states experienced after LSD seem in some sense to lie in the shadow of acid, this may simply mean that acid is still there, casting that shadow.

It may in fact be the case that the use of LSD has the power to subtly damage the highest reflections of Nous/Intellectus, the “eye of the heart” [‘ayn al-qalb], in the individual psyche, just as the physical eye may be damaged by staring into the sun; the reason we almost never become aware of this damage is that it lies at a psycho-spiritual depth so great that we are rarely able to consciously return to it without once more ingesting LSD, thus compounding the damage. The use of powerful psychedelics may also produce in us a taste, or need, for deep spiritual experiences that we otherwise would never have sought out, and that may not really be proper to us, while at the same time preventing such experiences from translating us to the final station.

 

Full orgy of communication-failure at Faceborg

There are many secondary threads or offshoots, so the comments aren’t always in chronological order.

My original post: 

After all that’s come out about CIA counterfeit countercultural operations, are people really celebrating the legalization of psilocybin & cannabis as a positive step towards social liberation? Fool us once, shame on the social engineers; fool us twice, shame on us.

John Potash, Deborah Greene and 14 others

109 Comments

•  

Michael Goldman Do you think the CIA can control the psychedelic experience?

 

•  

Jasun Horsley They dont need to; the mushrooms already do.

•  

Michael Goldman Yes, they are quite intelligent.

•  

Michael Goldman Much better than synthetic chemicals in that respect.

•  

Jasun Horsley That’s a low bar, isn’t it. Why assume something is necessarily benign because it makes us feel good?

•  

Michael Goldman I didn’t say anything about feeling good. They are completely non-toxic however. Your mileage may vary as far as the experience.

•  

Jasun Horsley There are all sorts of toxins, including psychic

•  

Michael Goldman You’re just a bigot.

•  
• 1d

•  

Jasun Horsley Seriously? That’s your response?

•  

Michael Goldman That’s what you’re doing, you are expressing bigotry. You are prejudiced against mushrooms and those who treat them sacramentally.

•  

Michael Goldman If the CIA wanted them legal they would have been legal decades and decades ago, too.

•  

Michael Goldman This has been a long hard effort to liberate ourselves.

•  

Michael Goldman Don’t like them? Don’t use them.

•  

Jasun Horsley I am testifying to my experience. Here’s more: something I have consistently observed with entheogen users & advocates is they are top heavy and have suffered massive energetic disruption from all the “heaven-storming” of their own psyches. All conceptual knowledge but not at all rooted; and ego-inflation/possession comes out in accusations and rabid defense of their “mistress”

4

•  

Michael Goldman Bigot.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

•  

Steve Willner I suppose I enjoy the idea that just by pure willpower the people pushed back enough to make one stupid law unnecessary. The best thing isn’t the most recent vote.. just the fact that people know it’s possible to overturn just about any dumb decision if they have they Chutzpah to do so.

1

•  

Steve Willner like nobody is going to be truly liberated. That’s reserved for death. A good poop however and a marginal victory. These are the things people wait for with baited breath.

•  

Jasun Horsley It’s sad

•  

Steve Willner sure, I can see that. Nothing either of us can do about it.

•  

Jasun Horsley why not?

•  

Jasun Horsley I already have done quite a lot about it, whether it’s made any difference or not.

•  

Steve Willner well you maybe yeah, that’s why we all still love ya.

•  

Jasun Horsley Not all (see above)

•  

Steve Willner you deal with haters better than anyone I’ve ever known. I think you’re the best at it.

•  

Jasun Horsley Thanks – I will take that as if it’s irony-free, tho it’s hard to tell with text.

2

•  

Sean Alger Jasun Horsley 

… he might love you too. you are just putting him through uncomfortable paces…?

•  

Jasun Horsley I also think I confused him with someone else, Michael Goldman/Mark Golding. Have edited that response

 

•  

Jasun Horsley People need to wise up – possession is possession. Volunteering for it doesn’t make it less so, and legalizing is hardly a victory for humanity. https://auticulture.com/…/2016/10/27/the-serpents-promise/

 

The Serpent’s Promise, or: Drugs as Ritual Self-Sacrifice

•  

Alan Lilley I use cannabis regularly, but not the regulated stuff. I’ll always stand by this choice, but I have no overblown delusions of it bringing peace, love or godhood. Make up your own mind as an informed consumer and don’t trust the government grass…

•  

Jan Irvin “The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations.
But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.
To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome–and less expensive–if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modes of expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent. **Meanwhile the communards themselves use drugs like cannabis to foster social stability in a setting of relative nongovernance. When tensions or hostilities arise, marijuana or hashish is quickly produced and passed around; the anger literally goes up in smoke (McGlothlin and West, 1968).**

The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.[74]
~ Louis Jolyon West, Hallucinations: Behavior, Experience, and Theory. 1975. p. 298 ff.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley I’m not saying no one should use it, just not willing to put up with bullshit about it being “medicine” or heightening awareness; it’s an aid to dissociation just like alcohol & Netflix; if you need it, that’s fine. But sooner or later we all have to take reality straight.

8

•  

Alan Lilley Absolutely, it’s a form of escape, temporarily. It’s my choice, but I’m not handing anyone who hasn’t smoked a joint. Artificial relaxation in a world of imminent destruction. Counterproductive? Probably. The answer for mental health? Doubtful. I enjoy it, but I don’t take it too seriously. Good points, Jasun…💥

3

•  

Jan Irvin “The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. [etc.]

1

•  

Jasun Horsley 

 

1

•  

Jasun Horsley Look, I like them too; I like hippy Johnny. … But, if these guys, if they’re really so great, tell me, why can’t they at least take this place
and take it straight? Why always stoned?

4

•  

Alan Lilley Don’t get me started on “hippies”. I can’t stand them. I went to school with them and worked with them. They proselytize more than born again Christians and holy SHIT do they stink. When I sold pot, I tried mixing in some soap and mint just to see if it had any effect. Nope. Just the gut-turning stench of patchouli oil. I’m not a “hippie”, but I continue to use marijuana on a fairly regular basis. Im not stoned all day, every day, but it seems to help. I suppose so would tequila shots or opiates, so your point is taken…

•  

Steve Willner Not sure. Best answer is perhaps if you try and take a world head on which you know is insane and most of the time boring, why not hit fast forward? There’s no reward or victory any way you play it.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley There’s defeatist wisdom, and then there’s defeatist nihilism. Which are you articulating?

1

•  

Jasun Horsley Steve Willner Did you “like” your own comment? 😀

•  

Steve Willner For sure. Lol

2

•  

Steve Willner We’re in the midst of social media suicide . Mine as well dive in

•  

Matthew James Raymo love that song

1

 

•  

Alex Fulton you’re possessed whether you like it or not

•  

Jasun Horsley So why not volunteer for it?

•  

Alex Fulton if you want — but it is undoubtedly without question better to not have destructive prohibitive laws in place to prevent someone from making their own choices. all drugs should be legal, period.

•  

Jasun Horsley I am questioning it

•  

Alex Fulton then you essentially support the State?

•  

Jasun Horsley sigh; this is like talking to children

•  

Jasun Horsley the State is what is decriminalizing it, dude

1

•  

Alex Fulton sorry for taking your bait

•  

Sean Alger Jasun Horsley I’ve not looked… But I doubt it’s “decriminalization” it’s likely just legalization… w/ an architecture of control and regulation.

See Niki Friedrich Raapana and her recent fiasco w/ POT in AK.

It’s communitarian law in theory and practice.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley Alex Fulton I am not trying to bait anyone, but to call you to reason

1

 

•  

Brian Taylor Large doses can obviously be mentally dangerous but in my experience mushrooms are a re-embodying agent
(Suddenly cognizant of awkward asymmetry or graceless thoughtless gait like my legs are a bike I’m pedalling — suddenly cognizant of the need for and possibility of a more attentive relationship with my body)
(Shit I should be stretching more fuck why am I still smoking my lungs feel like crap but I block out that awareness most of the time Suddenly this industrial crap food isn’t appetizing at all)
Like I would avoid mushrooms because I knew the potential for awe and fun would be undermined by unignorable awareness of body-issues I’d been lazily ignoring.
On the body/mind split issue I think of mushrooms as a strong positive influence, actually medicinal to that specific issue.

Also I don’t see the nefariousness of a city declining to punish people for mushrooms. A major movie where the very popular comedians make it seem like mushrooms + Vegas blowout is fun — that’s a lot more questionable, guided-faux-rebellion promotion of consumerist-delirium …

6

•  

Jasun Horsley Perhaps the one paves the way for the other. If you need body intoxicants to make you more aware of your body, what does that tell you? I am not for the record arguing against possible benefits of mushroom taking, or that they should not be legalized. I’m astonished by how incapable people have shown themselves to be in seeing nuances and variables in this discussion. It’s creating a bifurcation, clearly. But none of the shroom-defenders have addressed the opening point that psychedelics have been heavily promoted, researched, distributed, and employed by “nefarious” govt & intelligence organizations since the beginning and that most people in the western world have only been introduced to them because of those agendas. Does that not suggest the possibility that there might be unknown deficits for use of these substances? From my own experience and research I now consider this to be the case. What is so hard about allowing that possibility, or that my perspective might come from something other than regret and resentment (cf Keith Zavatski) or that my desire to share it might be motivated by genuine concern, & possibly wisdom? (Read the article and answer those points, none of which are adequately countered by yours, IMO.)

3

•  

Keith Zavatski Jasun Horsley thanks for clarifying things here

1

•  

Jan Irvin https://logosmedia.com/Entheogens_WhatsinaName…

LOGOSMEDIA.COM

Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic…

Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic Spirituality, Social Control, and the CIA – Logos Media

•  

Brian Taylor It’s a big question. Too big for this wee medium really, but a few first thoughts (before I reread serpents promise):

As a McLuhanatic it’s an interesting question whether/when/how a ‘1st nature’ plant we didn’t invent becomes a ‘2nd nature’ technology/medium that obeys the laws of the tetrad…
… the pharmakon medicine that flips into a poison is an ancient example one of those laws, the “Reversal Of The Overheated Medium”…

Seems medicinal to me especially because we didn’t invent it, I could sooner accept that the level where a dose becomes an overdose is much lower than we think and that all the more spectacular effects are fundamentally toxic (though perhaps a relatively useful counter-toxicity like a probing artistic counter environment)…. I could sooner accept that than I could accept that it’s not medicinal at all… 
… or at least there is a real medicinal value somewhere in that category of substance… I think of iboga where apparently the experience is more focused on the uncomfortable self-examination aspect, a mirror that highlights one’s subconscious self-destruction and/or -debasement, with less or none of the loopy-giggly perceptual and mental effects associated with psychedelic fun. I would say maybe they’re suppressing that but Pinchbeck promoted it… 

As for “the CIA” (et al) psychedelia is a realm that they confronted as a potential resource / warfighting domain, a very tricky one, and they have done a hell of a job exploiting it… but I don’t think they have or could possibly have a ‘full spectrum dominance’ over that domain… they certainly patrol it but do not control it… though the degree of freedom may be less than we want to think… LSD and maybe even mushrooms could be overly dangerous or otherwise unworthy ambassadors of that realm and promoted for that reason… or just that the latter are promoted as best taken in ‘heroic doses’ least likely to result in bodily reconciliation, most likely to install lifelong traumatic cognitive chasms…
This whole idea of the ‘heroic dose’ — cruising for a divine bruising, psuicide bombing — plays into how McLuhan describes the ‘secret church of the antichrist’ in this piece: https://m.facebook.com/groups/714296128627740?view=permalink&id=1511985378858807

3

 

•  

Chris Scott Here’s my question, perhaps you can answer Jasun Horsley: if cannabis is “bad,” why is the government taken so long to legalize, to get the public hooked?

1

•  

Jasun Horsley Reverse psychology. Many people took to weed not just despite it being illegal but because of it. Creating controlled substances is part of creating a controlled opposition.

1

•  

Chris Scott Hmm, that doesn’t seem to work too well in Europe, especially here in the Netherlands. You can have pretty much whatever you want (same in Germany, with alcohol being legal at 16/driving at 18!), and it appears, to me, that this actually tends to take the taboo away, thereby alleviating the desire.

•  

Jasun Horsley You just confirmed my point. But the desire is already instilled, and legalizing then makes widely available and marketable to new generations. It’s a slow acclimatization plan, probably well known to marketers.

•  

Jan Irvin If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.[9]
~ Thomas Pynchon

2

 

•  

Jim Jamil legalize mdma

•  

Jan Irvin Criminalize stupidity.

1

• Haha

•  

Keith Zavatski It’s a personal physio/psycho/spiritual health issue any way you slice it. Not an issue for the criminal justice system. Free the captives! That’s a grounded/on the ground position rather than a privileged, top heavy conceptual one filled with personal regret and resentment.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley Yours is a very superficial one, probably founded in personal addiction and moral lassitude, Keith Zavatski; you seem to have fallen very far from a nuanced perspective as regards deep levels of psychosocial control. Once again, I’m flummoxed. Had no idea you had lost your way so badly as to prefer personal slights to informed questioning. What comes of spending too much time on Faceborg perhaps?

•  

Keith Zavatski Jasun Horsley I’m not trying to convince you of anything, I know that’s not possible. Your position is absolute. But I’m not even arguing the cost/benefits I’m just saying people should be allowed to make their own mistakes (if that’s what they are) without being imprisoned for it. As for personal slights- you just called me superficial, lost, addicted and amoral.

3

• Haha

Jasun Horsley Mirroring is a method

 

•  

Jasun Horsley Saying my position is absolute is an exaggeration, and again, seems beneath what I had taken for your intellectual level. After all we’ve been through, you seem to be relating to a virtual strawman of me created within the laboratory of your own (fill in adjective) mind.

•  

Keith Zavatski There’s nothing nuanced about claiming psychedelics and the whole counterculture are root and branch a plot by CIA. The original subject was the decrim of shrooms which you didn’t even clarify your position on til late in the game. I have no way of knowing how far your thinking has “evolved” in such matters unless you make it clear.

•  

Jasun Horsley That could be because you live & breathe on Faceborg, don’t keep up with my output, & your memory of past exchanges is eroding. Or maybe I am presumptuous in thinking that you would bother to even remember the nuances of my position and how experience-based it is, and always has been. You also may be – like all of us – quick to react because of inundation by extremists. In a certain sense, however, my position IS absolute, insofar as psychedelics absolutely do harm to the nervous system, without exception. This doesn’t translate to an absolute position against their use, however, only against uniformed, delusional, or unethical misrepresentation of their effects, not to mention the gross naivete of an *assumption of benevolence* regarding the spirits being imbibed & possessed by.

•  

Steve Willner Your position is more absolute than absolute vodka. That’s absolutely the truth. Also we talked about raising my allowance this month. I already promised to succumb to your experience, yet all I’m getting is $10 a month still. What gives with that internet dad?

2

 

•  

Jasun Horsley I am starting to feel like Kevin McCarty at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

2

•  

Sean Alger …just a reminder. It was your doubt cast on Castaneda (whilst I was reading it) that made me repent of the idea of going back to hallucinogens “as medicine”. We don’t always agree, but we can still inspire one another. For this I’m forever grateful. Thanks Jasun.

None of it is medicine folks. It gets you high–and–high often feels better than what the culture has installed in us.

2

•  

Jasun Horsley thanks Sean; if just one can be saved from the pit then it’s worth the trip!

•  

Jasun Horsley where is Jan Irvin when we need him!

3

•  

Jan Irvin Jasun Horsley I see you feel my pain, being attacked by the ignorant and uneducated. 

2

•  

Jan Irvin Sean Alger I’ve done entire series exposing Castaneda as a fraud. 

See also my database. …See More

APP.THEBRAIN.COM

•  

Sean Alger Jan Irvin I have! 

…and I thank you for that.

2

 

•  

Stephen Miles Lewis Yes, I applaud the legalization of liberty and freedom to make my own choices about how I alter my own consciousness. This never should have been an issue.

What the PTB do and have done with them (using unwitting human subjects for experimentation) is the antithesis of liberty and freedom.

3

•  

Jan Irvin “I applaud the CIA’s use of suggestogens to mind control me thoughtlessly and without further consideration. ” 

Brilliant. 

https://logosmedia.com/SpiesinAcademicClothing_MKULTRA

LOGOSMEDIA.COM

Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and…

Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99% – Logos Media

2

• Haha

Jan Irvin “What the PTB do and have done with them (using unwitting human subjects for experimentation) is the antithesis of liberty and freedom.” 
🤣😂🤣🤦‍♂️

Jan Irvin ” Psychedelic substances like ayahuasca create a state of hypersuggestibility in which persons are very open to being influenced by others. Many traditional cultures have utilized this condition to inculcate cultural values and behaviors in young people as they receive in…See More

 

LOGOSMEDIA.COM

Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic…

Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic Spirituality, Social Control, and the CIA – Logos Media

 

•  

Jasun Horsley What passes for progress in today’s world is a sad state of affairs. You may be celebrating a “progress” that has already been covertly sold to you for decades and only serves to boost one more market in controlled dissociation. The “people” & the PTB are not nearly so different in their goals as you seem to believe. Those who behave like cattle deserve to be treated like cattle.

2

•  

Jim Jamil Jasun do you at least agree that people shouldn’t be banged up for personal drug use?

1

•  

Chris Scott Jasun Horsley damn bro…getting a little judgy, no?

•  

Steven Rempel While I agree with your sentiments on hallucinogens being ultimately not useful to attain to the highest truths, and that more complex forms of sensual distractions or “skandhas” could certainly be sold to the populace through the medium or increased sensual acuity-from substances, are you certain that you aren’t holding too high a bar up for those who have never had anything that even closely resembles a genuine mystical experience ?? 
Comparing mushrooms to alcohol seems a bit disingenuous. I understand where you’re coming from, but such standards seem only useful for mystics, meditators, magicians, and monks. 

If escaping samsara entirely (or slipping past the eagle) is the goal, then yes, avoid such things. 

But perhaps the plan of social engineers will backfire in allowing hallucinogens to pass into the social fray ?? 
The neurogenesis potential from mushrooms moreso than cannabis. Neglecting the medical potential of cannabis seems a bit extreme. Obviously most users aren’t using it for these purposes but, try telling extreme epileptics that cannabis isn’t medicine, or those in the thralls of a minor psychotic episode that CBD won’t provide useful function.

I appreciate your stance for those of us involved in uniting the duality, for delving through the void, seeking nibbanna, samadhi, and standing between the pillars, but surely you can see the use (even sometimes by complete accident) that such substances could provide.

It surely was a tool- for some, for the toltec.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley One or two trips *might* be beneficial. Same with the occasional tipple. And no, I am not advocating banging anyone up.

2

•  

Jan Irvin Jasun Horsley If you think waking people up from suggestogens and MKULTRA is hard, wait until you attempt to tackle Islam and the “everything is the Jews and nothing but the Jews forever and ever, Amen” narrative. 

WAY harder than this.

2

•  

Jasun Horsley something to look forward to then 😉

2

 

•  

Chris Scott I mean…you shouldn’t be treated like cattle (but others should be), cuz, you’re woke, right…?

•  

Jan Irvin Chris, wake TFU. 

Believe it or not, Jasun Horsley is trying to protect you from MIND CONTROL. 

I’ve exposed this agenda for nearly a decade. Doing drugs is being treated like cattle. 

If you want to be woke, why not do a little study rather thanparroting dumb crap? https://logosmedia.com/SpiesinAcademicClothing_MKULTRA

LOGOSMEDIA.COM

Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and…

Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99% – Logos Media

2

Jan Irvin Jasun Horsley, I bet you feel like you’re in an uphill battle with a bunch of people who’ve never for a second questioned their beliefs on this and the fact that MKULTRA IS the counterculture… 

They were fed some bullshit, never thought about it further, and that’s all the thinking they need to do their suggestogens for “muh freedom!” 

🤦‍♂️😴

•  

Jan Irvin Being high on drugs isn’t “dumbing down” like from “dope”… it’s now FREEDOM! Freedom to be mind controlled by the CIA. 🤣🤦‍♂️

1

•  

•  

Jan Irvin “After all that’s come out about CIA counterfeit countercultural operations, are people really celebrating the legalization of psilocybin & cannabis as a positive step towards social liberation? Fool us once, shame on the social engineers; fool us twice, shame on us.”

Jasun Horsley, it’s as if I didn’t expose this already for nearly a decade, didn’t write articles on it, didn’t do nearly 200 shows exposing it all. 

You’ll be attacked by the stupidest for denying “freedom” – rather than trying to wake them up from mind control… https://logosmedia.com/SpiesinAcademicClothing_MKULTRA

NOW you feel my pain.

 

LOGOSMEDIA.COM

Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the…

Spies in Academic Clothing: The Untold History of MKULTRA and the Counterculture – And How the Intelligence Community Misleads the 99% – Logos Media

2

• Haha

Jasun Horsley It IS painful, but may be worthwhile. I havent had this much fun on Facebook since I questioned the transgender movement. (Irony)

2

•  

Jan Irvin I’ve been exposing this for nearly a decade… so I’ll leave you to your fun with the mind controlled dim wits. 

You may free a few from MKULTRA, but most are too bought into the narrative to even consider the fact that they got MKULTRA’d.

•  

Jasun Horsley When on Faceborg, face the Borg!

•  

John Potash I don’t have a strong opinion about legalization of drugs but I see 3 major organizations with incredible amounts of money and influence (partly from Rockefeller family). The Rockefellers also provided extra funds to the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra. These groups, MAPS, Heftter, and Beckley, have funded studies worldwide with the expressed mission of promoting psychedelic drugs. MAPS and Heftter have links to MK-Ultra and Beckley to Britain’s Tavistock. Many international studies show MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly) hurts memory. 4 studies show that LSD, or at least the strychnine (rat poison) it’s often cut with, causing some kind of mild mental damage. I’ve experienced losing memory abilities as have many I’ve counseled for a living. People I’ve counseled said they lost memory abilities from micro-dosing acid. The evidence I’ve found is that the CIA agenda has been racist and pro-war and want’s to hurt the minds of people who dissent from their agenda.

2

Jasun Horsley Highlights from an invaluable interview with Charles Upton on the hidden cost of psychedelics [etc.]:

On Psychedelics and/or Entheogens: Drug-Induced Mysticism Revisited

2

•  

Sonja Myllymäki I have personally worked with these medicine for about 12 years. I consider many plants medicines and teachers and not just psychoactive ones-or we could say that they are all psychoactive to some degree no matter how subtle. You are completely free to have your opinion and your own experience but you can’t qualify mine or that of the numerous people I know who have been helped by these medicines. They are not addictive. I easily go for many months without doing anything and without wanting to. 
I have sat with many indigenous people who consider them sacraments and did so long before the CIA or the 60s or the Catholic Church even existed. I know people who have been healed from crippling depression and PTSD, from stuttering, from heart ailments, from neuroses of all kinds and have found a way to open their hearts to their lives, to others, to heal relationships and to come to care deeply about this planet. Of course there are others who have gone astray. These agents will tend to heighten what is already present in a person and there are many troubling stories and some tragedies. That is life.
I applaud this victory in Denver not just because it is a win for cognitive liberty and clear push back against noxious and unnecessary drug laws, but also because it puts these medicines in the hands of people before corporations. This has been an interesting thread. I don’t understand your vehemence Jason but that’s ok. I would encourage you to watch some other less biased accounts of this work from people who are educated, coherent, and not caught up in conspiracy theories. There have been many conferences looking at this lately with academics and healers sharing their findings and ways of working. Honestly, plant people are some of the most grounded, humourous and open people I have ever met.

•  

Jasun Horsley I refer you to the Upton piece; I haven’t met these grounded people you speak of, not even once. & your equation with educated & coherent with “not caught up in conspiracy theories” suggests a massive bias of your own. Are you calling MKULTRA mind control a conspiracy theory?

2

•  

Gabor Dobos Jasun Horsley just a heads-up that you’re dealing here with someone who’s endorsing AOC’s “green” new deal aka. “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society”(promoting the leftist “progressive” agenda) and that on its own must really tell you a lot, doesn’t it?:)
Although I also have some actually profound experience with psilocybin I wholeheartedly agree that there’s something fishy to say at least around its legalization. As voluntaryist I’m against everything that is coming from the authority and so it’s a huge red flag for me that “they” lift the ban on the use of psilocybin. 
Call me paranoid but I believe that the program (itself) of any medicine plant can be altered (compromised?) and by that the “psychedelic society” profoundly manipulated/engineered. Whatever is about to become mainstream is highly suspicious to me at the same moment. 
The opposition, as always, meant to be successfully controlled by the dominants…

2

•  

Jasun Horsley Thanks for the heads up, Gabor.

 

•  

Sonja Myllymäki and btw i’m totally not into white powders or research chemicals, have grave misgivings about the surge in cannabis use, and think many, many people are simply not mature enough to even be thinking about psychedelics and would be much better served by committing to a regular meditation practice.

1

•  

Jim Jamil I wonder if this position is rooted in your recent desire to be more ‘in the body’, whereas things like psychedelics and astral travel are all out of body. Also I don’t think all psychedelics can be under one umbrella, just because of the disparate pharmacology of the substances themselves, one may have little relation to another. The only drug I would somewhat associate with the CIA is LSD, apart from that I just don’t see it. 
There is one guy though called Dan Winter who believes taking DMT erodes your bardo body.

 

Jasun Horsley Point 1: Yes. Point 2) Then you havent done the research (Wasson, Graves, etc); Point 3) Don’t know but sounds like a more idiosyncratic version of what Upton & I are talking about.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley to point2: https://auticulture.com/…/the-gates-of-hell-mkultra…/

The Gates of Hell: MKULTRA, Robert Graves, William Sargant, & Wasson’s Magic Mushroom (Occult Yorkshire 10)

3

 

•  

Jasun Horsley One think of note about this thread is that, of the 16 people who “liked” it, only two (Sean Alger & Gabor Dobos) have commented on the thread; the vast majority of commentators are people in disagreement. Not sure what that says about Faceborg, me, or the subject, but it is interesting.

*****

What sparked it:

Denver voters approve decriminalizing “magic mushrooms”

David Charles Plate

May 8 at 5:32 PM · 

Denver voters approve decriminalizing “magic mushrooms”

The measure would allow the use and possession of psilocybin mushrooms by adults 21 and older in Denver

24 Brian Taylor, Anadae Q. Effro and 22 others

53 Comments18 Shares

Comments

•  

Rye N Flint I want that necklace…

•  

Jasun Horsley Bread & circuses in one. All part of the grand disembodiment project

2

 

•  

Keith Zavatski Jasun Horsley we may have differing opinions but surely it should not be a crime.

3

•  

Jasun Horsley so you see this as progress?

•  

Keith Zavatski The less people in literal prison the better. Then we can work on the mental prison.

3

•  

Jasun Horsley Or now the soul prison is installed, let’s give them some social “freedom”? But what if the faux-social liberation is the way the soul trap is sprung?

•  

David Charles Plate freedom is a psy-op, let’s keep all mind altering substances, with the exception of alcohol, illegal, just in case it’s The Man trying to pull a fast one on us.

7

•  

Jasun Horsley sigh

•  

David Charles Plate you should go eat some mushrooms and listen to sigh-trance before warning everyone about how their freedom is in keeping psychedelics illegal.

4

Hide or report this

•  

David Charles Plate this was not a psy-op fyi

•  

Nicki Brand Jasun Horsley straight edge vs. vegan. which one misses wide in the most annoyingly sanctimonious way? discuss…

1

•  

Jasun Horsley I am not entirely sure of your point, tho I have noticed the irony of how vegans do untold harm to their own bodies with drugs while professing to care so much for animal bodies. The only people who consider my position sanctimonious in my experience are those who are dependent on mood alterants and reality distortants to provide meaning/relief to their lives but refuse to admit it. It’s curious how an awareness of and desire to avoid things that may do harm to the body & overwhelm the psyche is seen as sanctimoniousness; or how an attempt to prevent another possible perspective is seen as an attack. The nature of the defenses when this mushroom-allegiance is questioned, for me, only confirm my impression that this is a bogus religion complete with fanatical dogma. Someone on another thread called me a bigot (!); someone else claims I support the Man because I am not celebrating legalization of aids to dissociation when it is clearly in the interests of state power to do so at this juncture. And now Plate says I need to eat more mushrooms to see the truth. I am starting to feel like Kevin McCarty at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s distressing & depressing. I honestly had no idea how far gone people were. At least Willner admits it’s despair and nihilism driving his drug use. But by all means carry on – it’s clear that questioning the faith is a crime and the sentence is heavy stoning!

1

•  

Charlie Plate Seems less like questioning and more like concluding …

•  

David Charles Plate Humans have consumed psilocybin, the naturally occurring psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, for more than 10,000 years, unlike all the goddamn pharmaceuticals that hardly have a time trial. I never said you need to eat mushrooms to “see the truth”, my feeling is more along the lines of ‘pick your battles’. I don’t consider mushrooms a ‘drug’ in the usual sense as it isn’t addictive, at all, and have never seen anyone ‘dependent’ on them. Coke and heroin have killed close friends of mine, but mushrooms help assist people to lighten the fuck up, which was more my point and more of what the world needs now.

4

•  

Jasun Horsley I am not for the record arguing against possible benefits of mushroom taking, or that they should not be legalized. I’m astonished by how incapable people have shown themselves to be in seeing nuances and variables in this discussion. It’s creating a bifurcation, clearly. But none of the shroom-defenders have addressed the point that psychedelics have been heavily promoted, researched, distributed, and employed by “nefarious” govt & intelligence organizations since the beginning and that most people in the western world have only been introduced to them because of those agendas. Does that not suggest the possibility that there might be unknown deficits for use of these substances? From my own experience and research I have *concluded* that this is the case. What is so hard about allowing that possibility, or that my perspective might come from something other than regret and resentment (cf Keith Zavatski) or that my desire to share it might be motivated by genuine concern, & possibly wisdom? If anyone is willing to consider this possibility, here’s a piece that goes into some of the reasoning; Charles Upton has also written cogently on the subject, and also from his own direct experience. 

The Serpent’s Promise, or: Drugs as Ritual Self-Sacrifice

•  

David Charles Plate my knee jerk response is due to a bias I’ve developed after listening to people like Joseph Atwill calling psychedelics “soul destroyers” etc. which I have to admit I find downright laughable. Or Alex Jones raving about how the government is “pushing people to do Ayahuasca” without anything to back it up whatsoever. Good to know you’re not in that camp. I’m open to a discussion, but understand if you will, I’m pure Gonzo, all the way, and see far more benefits in such things than all the mood stabilizers so many people become reliant on. And though I like organizations like M.A.P.S. for education and have even volunteered for them along with speaking on a panel with the founder, I feel like making people pay outrageous amounts for psychedelic therapy can’t touch simply making them legal, like they were in ancient times and which I can’t help but believe aided in our development back when we didn’t have the same hang-ups. They are an aid, not a solution, obviously, hence my rebuttal concerning “making you see the truth”. Psychedelics don’t “make” you do anything, they do however open doors people may or may not choose to walk through.

2

•  

Jasun Horsley 

On Psychedelics and/or Entheogens: Drug-Induced Mysticism Revisited

•  

Jasun Horsley Jones is laughable but also not at all funny; witness how effective that sort of broad-stroke info-disinfo is at pushing people into camps and assuming things about one another. Joseph Atwill seems decent enough to me, as researcher and bloke. Soul destroyer may be a metaphor for what I discuss in my piece, disruption of integrity of the energy body via serious compromising of the glandular endocrine system. There may be ways to counteract & even neutralize these effects, but if so, you can be sure they won’t be included in the packaging now they are marketable as products. Even Castaneda’s DJ states it clear: “Power plants do untold harm to the body.” Key word being untold.

•  

David Charles Plate Albert Hoffman took small doses of LSD every day of his life since the 2nd time he synthesized ergot, lived to be 102 and didn’t stop working until he died. I don’t see any evidence to “untold harm to the body” with something so natural being used for thousands of years. With anything powerful there undoubtedly is a need for responsibility, yet as it stands, in a world where people have so much difficulty transcending even the most overt dualities, I have to say entheogens are far more helpful than the self help bullshit people make a killing on.Carlos Castaneda wrote fiction btw, he is not an authority on these matters, though his books are interesting.

2

•  

Jasun Horsley & Kirk Douglas is still going at 102, so what? Your dismissal of CC as fiction is opinion, not fact. (I don’t defend the books, but I know them not to be pure fiction.) I am sensitive enough to have noticed the damage these drugs did to my body; either you have a categorically different metabolism (ie., one of us is not human), lucked into a true elder circle that knows how to apply them safely (something I doubt ever existed, but certainly doubt exists today); or you just haven’t got your back tax bill yet.

•  

David Charles Plate CC said it was fiction, take it up with him. 102 to Hoffman who took a psychedelic every day for over half his life so what? It’s clear you made up your mind and I’ve taken well over 1,000 trips so there’s no convincing me of the dangers for a reasonable person, if someone wants to jump off a building I’m with Bill Hicks in the matter, welp, we lost an idiot

1

•  

David Charles Plate On an unrelated note, I shouted “I’m Spartacus!” to Kirk Douglas once btw, gave me a smile I’ll never forget.

•  

Mark Golding What a fascinating discussion, but the reason I am butting in is that earlier this year we created a fire circle where we sit, talk and debate (etc), within a circle of elder trees – trees that I had not specifically identified until after the fire stones and stump seats were moved into place. I liked that coincidence, and the resonance with ‘lucked into’ 🙂 You are both invited to join us.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley David Charles Plate CC never said it was fiction; 1000 trips, if only I’d known that to begin with I wouldn’t have wasted my breath! I might as well try & persuade a mushroom not to sprout.

•  

David Charles Plate https://notesonliberty.com/…/were-all-nothing-but-bags…/

NOTESONLIBERTY.COM

“We’re all nothing but bags of stories”: Carlos Castaneda as a…

“We’re all nothing but bags of stories”: Carlos Castaneda as a Countercultural Icon and Budding Post-Modernist

•  

David Charles Plate The Department of Anthropology took back his doctorate when they found out the stories were fiction. If this is not the only case of this happening, it is at least one of the only ones. https://newsmaven.io/…/the-fake-carlos-castaneda…/

 

NEWSMAVEN.IO

The Fake Carlos Castaneda – IndianCountryToday.com

•  

David Charles Plate For the record, I like Carlos Castaneda, just as I like Plato, but this doesn’t mean that I take Don Juan or Socrates to be more than an illustrative invention of their respective authors.

• 41m

•  

Jasun Horsley Nothing here about him admitting it. He railed against this interpretation to the end. “With my books, I’ve tried to present an option—that awareness can be a medium for transportation or movement. I haven’t been so convincing; they think I’m writing novels.” 

You Only Live Twice – Details Magazine – Carlos Castaneda Interview

•  

Jasun Horsley But you & Jan Irvin can bond over this, at least.

•  

David Charles Plate shortly before his death he acknowledged the fiction, I’m searching the internet for the source I found several years ago (hence my confidence on the matter), but I’m not seeing it.

•  

Jan Irvin Jasun Horsley Well, we can’t bond over Carlos Castaneda. his BS ended in a death cult and he worked for the CIA. Had ties to Gordon Wasson, etc. The man was a pure psychopath. In fact, I’ve spoken to a woman who’s ex husband’s wife was in the cult. 3 removed, but still crazy shit. I’ve already exposed the Castaneda cult. .. guy was no different that Jimmy Jones and there’s nothing there to be admired.

•  

Jan Irvin Mass murder is nothing to be admired unless you’re a psychopath.

•  

Jasun Horsley I don’t admire CC, except as a wordsmith; I am saying he never admitted it was fiction. My view is the books are as harmful as they are precisely because they can’t be dismissed as mere fabrication.

•  

Jan Irvin Castaneda worked in a CIA cell of 2 other academics… Barbara Myerhoff and Peter T. Furst… They all sold a bunch of horseshit.

•  

Jan Irvin It’s all weaponized anthropology.

1

•  

David Charles Plate “There is little or no evidence that the books are true, and abundant evidence casting doubt on the entire story.

Many things in the books are obviously false. The Yaqui don’t use peyote, and don Juan was supposedly a Yaqui shaman teaching a “Yaqui way of knowledge” yet Don Juan does not use yaqui words or concepts in his conversation or teachings.

But there are far more things wrong in the book, and its sequels. You can read the reviews of Casteneda’s first four books by famous ethno-botanist R. Gordon Wasson – Wikipedia. Wasson was an authority on hallucinogenic plants and fungi. He talks about how the species of mushrooms Castaneda used with Don Juan don’t grow in that part of Mexico, how Castaneda describes methods of preparation and use that were not used by any known shaman, etc. The reviews are here: wassonreviews1 – the first review is the most mild, the reviews of the next three books are scathing.

Here are some opinions by the anthropological community:

Professor Weston La Barre is one of the foremost authorities on Native American peyote ceremonies, and author of “The Peyote Cult.” He was paid to write a review for the New York Time Book review, but it that was too vitriolic for the times to print. La Barre denounced Castaneda’s writing as “pseudo-profound deeply vulgar pseudo-ethnography.”
Professor William W. Kelly, chairman of Yale’s anthropology department, told journalist Robert Marshall, “I doubt you’ll find an anthropologist of my generation who regards Castaneda as anything but a clever con man. It was a hoax, and surely don Juan never existed as anything like the figure of his books. Perhaps to many it is an amusing footnote to the gullibility of naive scholars, although to me it remains a disturbing and unforgivable breach of ethics.”
“I believe that basically the work has a very high degree of imagination,” Jésus Ochoa, head of the department of ethnography at Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology
You can also read the works of Daniel Noel, who spent 30 years studying with Huichol shamans (the Huichol are close to the Yaqui, and unlike the yaqui the Huichol use peyote.) He wrote the book “Seeing Castaneda.”
Castaneda’s other work does not fair better. Far from being Toltec or Yaqui wisdom, the Tensegrity material appears to be qigong (Chinese energy exercises) Castaneda learned from a famous Kung Fu teacher in California.”

Was Carlos Castaneda fake in his books?

•  

Jan Irvin Castaneda even admits to murder in one of his books.

•  

Jan Irvin David, we’ve already exposed the whole thing as fake.

•  

Jan Irvin Murder…

•  

Jasun Horsley There is a new book about him that includes the ties to CIA while not dismissing the sorcery; unfortunately it’s only in Spanish. 

La vida secreta de Carlos Castaneda

•  

David Charles Plate fake, but enjoyable 😉

•  

Jan Irvin Jasun Horsley do they cite our work since me and Fikes exposed the CIA connections? I’m the one who got the documents.

•  

Jasun Horsley I dont know coz I haven’t a copy; this guy was a member of the cult so has some inside info, allegedly.

•  

Jasun Horsley From Upton piece: “It is highly interesting that psychedelic drugs burst upon the scene at precisely the same moment that the Second Vatican Council was abolishing traditional Roman Catholicism and deconstructing the sacramental order. It’s as if the grace of the Roman Catholic sacraments, while they were still intact, overflowed their specifically Catholic context and maintained a certain level of elevation in the “collective unconscious” of the western world, an elevation which was rapidly lost when that grace was cut off. Faced with a sudden unconscious or half-conscious sense of spiritual loss, and the stifling sensation that always results when the psyche is cut off from the plane of the Spirit, the western collectivity became susceptible to the temptation of psychedelics, which at the very least can provide (though not without extremely negative consequences) a horizontal psychic expansiveness which appears to compensate for, and sometimes actually counterfeits, the loss of a vertical spiritual elevation, while at the same time concealing the fact that such a loss ever occurred. Psychedelics, in other words, were a kind of Luciferian “booby prize” offered as compensation for the fall of western Christendom.”

1

•  

David Charles Plate I don’t resonate with that supposition, seeing as how the last thing the church wanted was for the masses to partake in the *actual* rituals the leaders of church themselves took part in; rather they gave the masses diluted symbolic substitutes and actually preferred the masses to stay illiterate, etc.. It seems applicable to mention, my teacher of many years, Baba Hari Dass, who was also Ram Dass’ teacher, wrote on his board once (being a silent monk) that “western man was looking for a way to find God through materialism, and got as close as he could with LSD”. The idea being that, just as is the case with Samdhi, it’s not a matter of enlightenment vs. non enlightenment, it is a transmutative PROCESS, even the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali recommend the use of entheogens, but nowhere does it suggest that these will accomplish more than assisting the aspirant in establishing the lower levels of Samdhi. There comes a point where one transcends the need for such aides. That being said, there is no ‘skipping ahead’ by intellect, the only way beyond being directly through materialism i.e. the body. This is where I differ from the duality pushed by the church in my understanding, which is why I don’t buy into the “Luciferian booby prize” notion. It’s not a ‘prize’ to follow sensation as Vipassana experientially reveals, the church’s repression/sublimation and puritanical projection is not what’s needed, as is apparent in all their pedophilia sex scandals, which are themselves symptomatic of a deeper distortion.

7

•  

Jasun Horsley Funny how people “like” hearing what they want to hear; Upton’s piece, however (I suggest reading it all) is a more bitter pill to swallow. IMO, Upton demonstrates wisdom & personal integrity and his arguments are sound. Now watch the dearth of “likes.”

•  

David Charles Plate Hey, I’m not fishing for likes, I’ll check out your contribution in a bit, I wouldn’t stay friends with so many right wingers who I hardly agree with if your character judgement held water. I do realize such tendencies exist.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley Didn’t mean you were fishing, just that it’s a phenomenon; I may be invested in being right, aren’t we all; but I have no investment in believing that psychedelics messed up my nervous system & unbalanced my psyche; I have spent a decade righting the imbalance & it’s been painful and slow and humbling but, all told, worth it. I’m still stuck in avoidance patterns but at least they aren’t so grandiloquent & spiritualized or impactful on my body. I consider THAT progress. Re: the main subject, all I was hoping for was some healthy skepticism based on what has been *proven* about the promotion of these substances by social engineers and mind controllers, and the *unknown* possible long-term side effects. Put those two together and IMO anyone who isn’t very skeptical & cautious isn’t playing with a full deck. As far as Upton’s view being dualistic, do you practice non-dualism? I’d like to see what that looks like. Possibly the promotion of non-dualistic philosophies as more advanced is itself “Luciferian”?

•  

David Charles Plate One of the very first things I ever looked up on the internet were the disclosed, albeit redacted, MK Ultra files and couldn’t believe what was available, and by extension what they could be leaving out, being that what was included: keeping people in a coma, drilling holes in people’s heads etc. I’m well aware of the history of psychedelics, though I am not of the view that these agencies were in any real control of what they were doing. Words that I associate with MK Ultra are ‘backfire’ and ‘arrogence’ seeing as how they weren’t able to predict or manage someone like, say, Abbie Hoffman, which is why I shared the Pentagon photo above with the caption reading ‘this is not a psy-op’. The truth is the CIA had very limited control of the ultimate outcome of their efforts, their initial assumptions regarding the effects these substances would have on society turned out to be beyond presumptuous, as is evidenced by the timing on them pulling the plug on ‘acid tests’ corresponding to a type of activism they hadn’t anticipated which started to emerge in society. If you look into some of the many umbrella projects of MK Ultra you’ll find that they weren’t all nefarious, as is the case with Freemasonry as well. If one looks deeply into the ins and outs of these secret not so secret societies it becomes clear that they are not aligned with each other in the way that many theorists assume, they are in fact at odds as to what the ultimate aims of the mystery schools even are. Things are, in other words, far more chaotic than many would make them out to be. All that being said, I don’t see the point in imprisoning people for the use of psychedelics or how that would combat the intentions of the facets of MK Ultra which are of legitimate concern.

1

•  

Jasun Horsley Have you listened to Order of the Barbarians? Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t an attempt to make it appear as though society is more tightly engineered than it is, of course, but I see too much evidence every day (inc at this thread) in how effectively we have been indoctrinated and how closely in line it is with goals laid out & set down long ago (cf Bertrand Russell). More importantly, how much of a “piece” it is – how prevalent the ideological of occultism/storming heaven is, especially in the younger generations, via transgender, transhumanism, secular satanism, and the new psychedelic movement. I guess this is why I have so small an audience base. Anyway thanks for the exchange, I don’t feel it went anywhere (cf your last comment about imprisoning people, as if I was arguing for that!); but at least I got to understand better what I am/we are up against.

•  

David Charles Plate your statement “so you see this as progress?” indicated to me that you were not seeing the vote to not incarcerate people for mushrooms as progress. Was that a faulty inference then?

•  

Jasun Horsley No. But to infer that I am in favor of imprisoning people simply because I don’t see this as progress is an unnecessary leap, ironic coming from a supposed non-dualist. It’s there in your supposed analysis of MKULTRA as well; all jiggling parts but no functioning between them – no deeper coherence. But I have to bow out pf this, Mr Plate, again with thanks & respect. I don’t see it possible to communicate over a divide of 1000 trips. The mushroom has you & you are happy about it. It’s none of my business. This is your thread & your life, please carry on and forget everything I said. 🙂

David Charles Plate feel free to bow out of a debate you started, loaded with back-tracking. Your judgement and discounting of my contributions to YOUR threads is duly noted based on that I’ve partaken of the substance in question I’m sure adds to your fear based ‘Invasion of the body snatchers’ appraisal. I can see why it’s appropriate to forget everything you said, because if I go through it and find the abundant contradictions you’ll tell me I don’t recognize the ‘nuances’. So, I’m locked in a duality by not adopting your polarized positions you can’t seem to get straight? Gotcha, you carry on, I hope you learned something.

I realize you prefer to run away from this discussion, but a couple quick questions. So if you not seeing the vote to not incarcerate people as progress, would it have been progress for the vote to lose, or that the vote should never have happened in the first place? I’m not seeing the logic here, at all. You jumped into this with some really strong words and what I’m seeing is a wishy washy skirting away from your own stated master thesis you preached with such vigor. To write me off because “the mushroom has me” is a genetic fallacy you realize. If there’s no convincing me of your beliefs there’s no point in communicating? I didn’t realize this was a plea for me to join your cult.