Automatic Speleology and Electric Sheep

Two different, but also similar fascinating experiments based on algorithms.

Automatic speleology is an almost psychedelic and at the same time somewhat disturbing meditation concept, based on the fragmented modern human generated world we inhabit.

Electric Sheep is a fascinating fractal screensaver, which morphs over time based on algorithms and fractals generated from all over the world. It provides us a view into a realm of binary based fractal collective unconciousness, as it dreams in the time we are away from the computer.

Electric Sheep has been such a successful experiment, constantly evolving, that it leads to the question, how long will it be when the psychedelic experience will be fully replicated in virtual reality?

Automatic Speleology
Electric Sheep

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The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

In 1960, Timothy Leary set up an infamous institute at Harvard to experiment with psychedelic drugs. An exclusive excerpt from Don Lattin’s new book on how lifestyle guru Andrew Weil and other freshmen started tripping.

“Yes,” Leary said, “Huxley was the trailblazer. You know, I didn’t have a clue as to the potential of this research until I had my own experience with psilocybin mushrooms over the summer. At its core, you have to understand that this is not an intellectual exercise. It is experiential. It is, and I’m almost embarrassed to say it, religious. But it is more than religious. It is exhilarating. It shows us that the human brain possesses infinite potentialities. It can operate in space-time dimensions that we never dreamed even existed. I feel like I’ve awakened from a long ontological sleep.”

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. By Don Lattin. 272 pages. HarperOne. $24.99.

via

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H Plus Magazine

The Fall 2009 Issue of h+ Magazine features Erik Davis on Dollhouse, Tweaking Your Neurons, The Psychedelic Transhumanists, Sex and the Singularity, Jonathan Coulton’s Inner Squid, and more.

Read it online in the current H+ Magazine.

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Neil Krug

WHITE FLIGHT
Originally uploaded by neil krug.

Neil Krug's Photostream takes a psychedelic look back as he makes current photos look decades old.

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History of the Psychedelic Movement

History of the Psychedelic Moment

Cartoon And Coloring Book

The History of the Psychedelic Movement: Cartoon and Coloring Book. Published by the Neo-American Church, which was one of the three LSD groups within the Millbrook Estate. Art Kleps was the Chief Boo Hoo who subscribed to the following principles

Very few copies of this book are in existance. Art Kleps himself didn't have a clean copy. I will also include and email of a correspondence between the cop and Art Kleps in 1996. Kleps also stated that the remainder of the inventory was lost in Vermont.

EXTREMELY RARE BOOK. US $750.00

link | also see the Boo Hoo Bible. (via)

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Will Harvard drop acid again?

Will Harvard drop acid again?

Interview with John Halpern

Before we head into his office at McLean, Halpern wants to take a walk in the woods that surround the hospital’s Belmont grounds. It is a crisp spring morning, and I half expect Halpern to pick and ingest some lichen, or start scraping some bark off a tree that he would brew into a psychedelic tea. Eventually we find our way to his office, where I imagined would be cushions on the floor, or maybe a giant statue of Shiva or Vishnu. What I see instead is the office of a typical Harvard professor: wall-to-ceiling papers, books, and journals. And while the screen-saver on his computer monitor is decidedly psychedelic, there is nothing here to suggest I am in the den of a mad Harvard scientist, hell-bent on dosing the collective American consciousness with LSD. In fact, when I mention the ghost of Leary and his legacy, Halpern smiles and says, “Well, we have seen how not to do it, haven’t we?”

It’s true Halpern is giving MDMA to dying cancer patients who are suffering from related anxiety, but he explains that these are not take-home medicines. The same would be true of LSD if his study of that drug is approved, which he hopes will happen sometime this year. First he must deliver protocols to McLean’s Institutional Review Board. If these are accepted, he can go to the FDA to get its approval to use LSD in a clinical trial. [More...]

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Wonderwall

WONDERWALL (1968)

An eccentric, lovable scientist falls in love with the girl next door - in an unusual way. Set in 1960's London, Wonderwall tells the story of a reclusive professor who becomes obsessed with a stunning model called Penny Lane. A psychedelic fantasy steeped in voyeurism, this film features a musical score by George Harrison with musical contributions from Eric Clapton and Ravi Shankar. Dutch designers The Fool, were set designers for the movie.

I like this film; but I like strange, psychedelic films so view it with caution it that's not your usual fare. It may remind you somewhat of Jodorowsky or Fellini. It's been showing on television lately and you can also get it at Netflix and at Yahoo!.

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Bogus Science - The LSD-Chromosome Scare

Bogus Science - The LSD-Chromosome Scare

Fraser Clark reminds us of the 1967 scare that Science Magazine published about LSD causing chromosome damage.

"THE HIDDEN EVILS OF LSD", screamed the Saturday Evening Post, Aug 12, 1967.

"By evening, the charge that LSD could break chromosomes was in all the nation's media." Peter Stafford: ‘Psychedelics Encyclopedia.’

But the entire story was basically a government-funded scam based on the examination of a single patient!

When I had my first child, my Mother was mortified that my previous lsd use (not while pregnant) would produce a deformed baby because of the bogus stories that started in 1967. It didn't.

Somebody wanted a whole generation to be scared straight. It worked about as good as those warnings on a pack of cigarettes do.

link

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Acid Logic

Acid Logic

When I was younger and did boatloads of cocaine, I also ran 6 - 8 miles a day. And I did lots of weight training and cardio. In fact I was compulsive about exercise back then.

When I did lots of acid (and other psychedelics) we grew our own food and began living and eating organically and chugged it back with vitamins. Especially Vitamin C and B-12.

The rumor was that Vitamin C was potentiating the acid. The acid logic was that the healthier you were, the cleaner and better the lsd experience.

It's just strange that in the presence of psychedelics or cocaine I idiotically felt compelled to balance it with what I believed to be a healthier lifestyle.

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The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Welcome to the bizarre universe of Alejandro Jodorowsky, a monstrous talent whose alchemical insights and sublime freak-outs epitomize an era of rare cinematic enlightenment-- provocative and psychedelic on a grand scale.

Thanks to the end of a bitter 30-year feud, the deranged, gruesome films of Jodorowsky have finally been released. (The films we've previously seen have been poor quality bootlegs.)

Amazon has a May 1, shipping date for this DVD package with El Topo, Fando Y Lis, and The Holy Mountain. It also includes a DVD of Jodorowsky's never-before-released first film, La Cravate and the La Constellation Jodorowsky doc and more interviews, scripts and such.

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Secret Drugs Of Buddhism

Secret Drugs Of Buddhism

Mike Crowley and his excellent work on the Secret Drugs of Buddhism. First is an introduction and a brief synopsis of his adventures leading up to his engagement with Buddhism. A lama is asked if psychedelics have been used as a secret practice. He answers, "How would I know if it was secret?" Mike Crowley elaborates an idea which many of us have long suspected.

Read more | via

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Goa Gil at Deerfields

Goa Gil - May 19, 2007 - Deerfields (Asheville, NC)

Atlanta Psytrance and Those People Productions welcome Goa Gil back to the Southeastern US, on his second rite of passage as your shamanic guide, for an extended journey into the heart of Primordial Bliss.

Join us in a regional gathering of the tribes as we celebrate as one primal force Goa Gil's sonic transmission of cutting-edge psychedelic trance across Deerfields, a 940-acre private retreat in the sacred Appalachian Mountains. Beneath the skies, on earthen soil where nature abounds, we will dance by ritual fire as the ancients once did -- guided by Goa Gil in Redefining the Ancient Tribal Ritual for the 21st Century through the Trance Dance Experience!

link

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Utopian Bliss Balls

Utopian Bliss Balls is a product exclusively available at Azarius. They are derived from the real Bliss Balls from the sixties, made of psychedelic LSA seeds and bee wax. This modern variety contains Hawaïan baby woodrose (Argyreia nervosa), fo ti tien (Centella asiatica), damiana (Turnera diffusa), ginseng (Panax ginseng) and bee pollen.

Very popular in the sixties among hippies and artists in California. Azarius gives them a brand new look! Made with the traditional ingredients like the Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds and damiana. Gives you an LSD-like trip.

Never heard of them, but it's sure got a great name.

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Nena Von Schlebrugge

Uma? No. It certainly looks like Uma Thurman. It's Nena Von Schlebrugge, Uma's mother, as she gets ready to wed Timothy Leary. (She later divorced Leary and married Tibetan scholar, Dr. Robert Thurman.)

Nena was 28 when she met Leary, who was then 45, at his annual Fourth of July party upstate in Millbrook. According to Robert Greenfield (who recently wrote a bio of Leary), she told the mind-altering Harvard professor that she "wanted to go to India to seek ultimate wisdom, not to mention the secret sexual practices of the Orient."

"They took LSD and three days later they decided to get married," recalls Leary's ex-girlfriend Peggy Hitchcock.

Their Millbrook nuptials were a "phantasmagoric, magical mystery tour, the first real big coming-out party for all the A-list, jet-set, high-fashion beautiful people from New York who had recently discovered LSD," writes Greenfield. "Guests lined up to present the newlyweds with hash, grass and psychedelic mushrooms, as well as snuffboxes filled with LSD and cocaine." The wedding cake was crowned with the Hindu deities Shakti and Siva having sex.

You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You
By D A Pennebaker
1964, 12 minutes, Black & White

Watch Video (Quick Time)

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Blood Tea and Red String

"a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet" - Dennis Harvey, VARIETY

Equally obsessive if far more oblique, Christine Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String is the fruit of a 13-year process, a stop-motion fable as beguiling as it is baffling.

Crammed with overdetermined images of birth and death, Blood Tea concerns the struggle between a trio of grasping albino mice (done up like the coachmen in Alice in Wonderland) and a group of half-bird, half-wolf critters known as The Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak. Cegavske's debt to Jan Svankmajer is obvious, but the film more closely resembles one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's psychedelic vision quests as re-realized by Ladislaw Starewicz.

Cegavske's ultra handmade style (she did the menacing crows in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things) is the opposite of every trend in contemporary animation, and worth lauding for that reason alone.

The DVD was released this month and I am very curious to see it.

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From The Inbox: Tons of good reading material for you to devour on company time

* The first trailer for Factory Girl is out. The movie will be released in December. Plot Summary: A beautiful, wealthy young party girl drops out of Radcliffe in 1965 and heads to New York to become Holly Golightly. Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol, Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick. Interesting casting: Mena Suvari as Richie Berlin.

* The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers represents a global alliance of prayer, education and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next seven generations to come.

* Music Makes Your Brain Happy - As a rock producer, Daniel Levitin worked with Stevie Wonder, the Grateful Dead and Chris Isaak. But the music business began to change, and a disillusioned Levitin turned to academia, where a career in neuroscience beckoned.

* PsyComp Academic - Featuring a searchable database of UK and USA University courses that offer an orthodox opportunity to study fields related to the psychedelic compounds. Examples of the types of course are pharmacology, neuroscience, cognitive sciences, anthropology, chemistry and many more.

* Matrixmasters New Podcast Listings from the Palenque Norte lectures at Burning Man2006, featuring Erik Davis, Rick Doblin, Earth & Fire Erowid, Alex Grey, Jon Hanna, Daniel Pinchbeck, Ann & Sasha Shulgin, and many more.

* The Biography Project is an ongoing volunteer effort to catalog and document the contributions of authors, artists, scientists, film makers and other culturally influential individuals on underground culture in its various forms. This is direct response to the unfortunate lack of accurate and comprehensive information on the net regarding Popsubculture

* Pleasure chemical - For years, the brain chemical dopamine has been thought of as the brain's "pleasure chemical," sending signals between brain cells in a way that rewards a person or animal for one activity or another. More recently, research has shown that certain drugs like cocaine and heroin amplify this effect ? an action that may lie at the heart of drug addiction.

* Shematrix is a body of diverse and courageous women who serve as gatekeepers for the Rite of Initiation, which happens within a 3-day journey. For women, this is known as The Gift -- A Woman's Rite to HerSelf and for men, The Grail -- A Hero's Quest to the Self.

* The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, dedicated to ensuring that humanity safely adopts increasingly powerful technologies, including genetics/biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.

* Ritual - In Lila, the Journal Of Cosmic Play -- Explorations into Shamanism and the Transpersonal Vision, the Bricoleur explains what he thinks are the most accurate descriptions of a "Ritual".

(most links via gaiamedianews monthly newsletters)

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Friday Random Ten - Shuffle 'em up and show us your ten. I'll show you mine...

1. Moon Occults The Sun - Espers
2. For What It's Worth - Buffalo Springfield
3. Waiting Phase One - Porcupine Tree
4. Hyper-Ballad - Bjork
5. Rejoicing in the Hands - Vashti Bunyan & Devendra Banhart
6. Green Pasture - Growing
7. Winters Love - Animal Collective
8. Pandora - Cocteau Twins
9. Black Wall - Six Organs of Admittance
10. Monkey Man - Rolling Stones

Neo psychedelic music is garnering so much roar; not for pushing the envelope so much but for crawling up inside that envelope and mailing it back to 1969. Like the sounds I heard when I spent yards of time stoned in front of the 8-track. Go ahead. Jump in. (listen) You'll have a safe warm place to land.

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From the INBOX

GreyLodge Podcasting Company is pleased to announce our new alliance with the incredible avant-garde resource UbuWeb.

2nd Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Peru in June. A gathering of scientists and healers. Link

The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis by Paul Levy is now available for purchase online. Link

Ovi Magazine - 'Promises' is the theme of Ovi 14 and has all the usual cartoons, illustrations, poems, fiction and radio shows, along with a few extra Ovi peculiarities.

Alternative Press Review - Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream - www.altpr.org. In my opinion the absolute best snapshot into the daily news.

Tons of good links in the Gaia Media Newsletter.

* The Church of Reality is a religion based on the practice of Realism, believing in everything that is real. Their motto is, "If it's real, we believe in it."

* Adventurer and writer Kira Salak reports about her ayuahuasca experiences for National Geographic. Read her story and see a short video clip.

* Starhawk and Donna Read, the makers of the film Signs of the Times, about the life and work of Marija Gimbutas, have organized a series of Goddess Salons.

* The German group LightRiders are working hard on a 2 to 3 hour DVD project "The Spirit of Basel", featuring the Saturday night concert with "Akasha Project", "Stars Sounds Orchestra", and "Guru Guru", including short excerpts from the major spoken presentations. Have a first glimpse with their Teaser.

* The Vernal Equinox 2006 issue of The Entheogen Review contains "Reflections on Basel" by Jon Hanna and João Serro, but also an article entitled "Halperngate" by Jon Hanna.

* Surrealartforum is the largest Surreal, Fantastic, Psychedelic & Visionary Artist Links Gallery on the Internet. An incredible collection.

And more...

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GAIAN MIND SUMMER FESTIVAL

June 22nd-25th, Four Quarters, Central PA, USA

Just added! Daniel Pinchbeck is one of the leading voices in today’s counter-culture and is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, which has given him a higher profile among those interested in alternative religion and spirituality. He will be speaking at GMSF2K6 in support of his forthcoming book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. more…

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John Halpern: an informant for the DEA?

-- by Jon Hanna

"I've recently penned the article "Halperngate" for the current issue of The Entheogen Review."

"Since this article deals with a lesser-known snitch, John Halpern, who has also been a psychedelic researcher largely supported by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and who still frequents underground events (he will be part of a team at the 2006 BOOM Festival's crisis tent), I feel that it is important for the psychonautical community to have the opportunity to read about Halpern's past choice to repeatedly provide testimony to the DEA related to the arrest and trial of Leonard Pickard and Clyde Apperson, who were ultimately both convicted of LSD manufacture." A PDF of the article is posted at:

www.entheogenreview.com/halperngate.html

"Information about the availability of the hard-copy of this issue of The Entheogen Review will be posted at their main site after 4/12/06; this issue (Vernal Equionox 2006) also contains some reviews of the LSD conference in Basel, the H.R. Giger museum, and a Swiss absinthe bar. As well, there's an ayahuasca article from Peter Gorman, and network feedback notes on the psychoactivity of Pedicularis species, Kaempferia galanga, Atropa belladonna, and DOC. Plus there's an events calendar, my "Sources" column reviewing the latest in psychedelic art, entheobotanical vendors, and book dealers, and a remembrance for Carla Higdon, who passed away earlier this year. See www.entheogenreview.com for more information on the journal."

Interesting.... and probably not the only one in the psychonautical community.

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