Allspace in a Notshall

Found this interesting article on Reality Sandwich today talking about Terence McKenna and his lectures on his DMT trips.  It’s a fascinating read, but due to some of the author’s conclusions, I’ll have to read the article a few more times.

Here’s a controversial excerpt, bolds are mine:

I find Terence’s reflections on his DMT experiences to be valuable and insightful for a very different reason. When analyzed from the perspective of what I call the “Entheological Paradigm,” Terence’s experiences do not present us with an intrepid explorer discovering new realms. Rather, we are presented with a clear picture of an individual who is unable to recognize himself in the mirror of tryptamine consciousness. In short, Terence’s experiences boil down to one fundamental truth: They are the experiences of someone who is consuming very powerful entheogens, yet is failing to recognize the projections and creations of his own ego while in that state. From the perspective of unitary consciousness, Terence appears to have never managed to transcend his ego and therefore appears to have failed to realize the genuinely true potential of the entheogenic medicines he ingested.

When this perspective is understood, it becomes immediately clear that virtually all of what Terence has to say about DMT experiences are projections of his own ego. Terence has not explored some other realm or brought back valuable information for other would-be explorers, as he imagined himself doing. Instead, he explored the confused projections of his own ego and never achieved anything close to clarity about those experiences. Ultimately, Terence brought us deep and abiding confusion, and his confusion has subsequently been eagerly and whole-heartedly embraced by countless others in the entheogenic community. For the information that Terence brought back to us to be of any real use at all, it will be as a clear example of the mechanics of ego-projection, self-imposed confusion and reification of ideational realities. In my estimation, Terence shows us the complete opposite of DMT’s true potential. By understanding how this is so, we can begin to develop a clearer picture of what DMT is genuinely good for, and what it is not.

It’s actually a rather scathing view on McKenna, but I will say that it’s nice to see the flip side of opinions on McKenna. Personally, I’m a huge fan of his and have collected and listened to, multiple times, any and all video and audio materials I could get my hands on. But I also like to think that I’m open-minded enough to see how other people might not view what he had to say in the same light that I do.

Anyway, give it a read, especially if you’re a fan…

Found this very interesting article talking about the forefront of consciousness in regards to the internet’s influence and more particularly that of the website 4chan.  Link at the end.

I’ll admit that I’m not a 4chan fanatic but I do visit there occasionally so the article intrigued me enough to spend a bit of time there.  I really like some of the things the author, Jason Louv, brings up in his article.  I’ll post some of my favorite tidbits below:

Yet what the media has failed to grasp is what 4chan can tell us about where we’re headed. The Chans aren’t the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us. At this point there should be little doubt that the Internet is mutating the human species into something completely different. Therefore it’s instructive to look at the most extreme, freebased forms of the Internet to see where we’re going — and 4chan is that freebased version of mankind’s new drug of choice.

In the last decade, we’ve seen the increasing acceleration of information (a la Terence McKenna and Moore’s law) heralded as the key to new business development, though it has, in fact, so ruined our attention spans that it is almost impossible for modern man to get any kind of productive work done. We’re too lost in the datastream, too focused on taking in new information to complete a task that takes more than a few minutes, at best. I think a direct correlation can be made, for instance, between the rise of social media and the fall of the economy. The kaleidoscope of the Internet is more endless, more distracting and more mutating than even the most potent psychedelic drugs could have ever prepared us for. And 4chan is the ultimate, final trip.

What is happening here? The escape from the constraints of the flesh? The escape from the constraints of being human? The inevitable purge following the collective unconscious’ information binge? With the Internet we can now erase space and time, erase the restraints placed on the mind by matter. But what for? Once mankind set sail to explore the limits of the human world and to discover the frontiers of the planet. And once mankind plunged into himself to discover the limits, or lack thereof, of his own nature, through inner experience. But this is a new world, one bereft of the luxury of such meaningful activities. And in this new climate, the collective entity known as Anonymous has found a new frontier, and set out to discover the limits of boredom itself, mining the darkness for glittering jewels to bring back to the rest of us.

The thing that I don’t agree with is here is Louv’s assumption that our attention spans are being wiped out. I’d prefer it if he said that our attention spans are changing into something else. My attention span has not withered at all; only now it’s more fine-tuned to move from bits of information to bits of information. The idea for me is to make the conscious decision to engage my entire attention span at my choosing.

I can scan Google Reader headlines at an alarmingly rapid pace, but as soon as I come across an article I feel I should read, it’s just a simple shift in attention span to focus on a single article. I can then switch back to headline mode at ease. This is where I think we’re headed: the rapid ability to process huge amounts of information in order to find the relevant information to us at once.  This is the new evolution we’re currently involved in.  Some people are calling this dumbing-down?  Hardly.  There’s simply way too much information at our disposal to be considered dumbed-down.

Read the article “Lost in the Filth Simalacrum”.

MAPS has made available PDFs of The Psychedelic Review, a journal on all things psychedelic back in the 1960′s and 70′s.  It’s really a gold mine of information with some great material by the giants in the field at the time.  Definitely a must read if you have any interest in the subjects whatsoever.

There is a fascinating article in this month’s issue of Mother Jones about the brilliant and inspriring work of fungi-fanatic/mycologist Paul Stamets.  I’ve been a subscriber to Mother Jones for a few years and I was excited to see on the cover this month the headline “Flu-Fighting Fungi.”  I knew it was going to be an article about Stamets and I was correct.

I actually got to see him give a talk about a lot of what’s featured in the article at the Denver Green Festival earlier this year. It was an amazing speech and I’m glad I was there.

I was also able to pick up his latest book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World and am still plowing through it.  It’s incredibly dense with mycology terminology but makes up for it with its beautiful photography and artwork.  It’s a must buy.

The article itself is a well-done 5-page layout.  I tried searching around for it on the net but it’s simply too new to link to anything.  So I’ll go ahead and type out a few small subjective highlights.

In the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident–or, as he might put it, divine intervention.

A few months earlier, the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Institute for Tuberculosis Research sent Stamets its analysis of a dozen agarikon strains he’d cultured in his own lab. The institute found the fungus to be extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments.

Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. “The problem with the psychedelic scene,” he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, “is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don’t get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem.”

I’ll provide a link to the article as soon as it becomes available on the Mother Jones website.  But I highly recommend it, especially if you’re into the psychedelic scene, mushrooms, and people who are on the cutting edge of actually accomplishing  amazing things, especially with regards to the stigma-filled world of mushrooms.

***Update (03/02/10) – Read the full article here.***

Great article in the newest issue of Scientific American on the resurgence of LSD in clinical trials.  Highly recommended read as Scientific American is a very popular magazine.  Plus, it’s just good to see.

Some excerpts below:

The patients who received the drug found the experience aided them emotionally, and none experienced panic reactions or other untoward events. One patient, Udo Schulz, told the German weekly Der Spiegel that the therapy with LSD helped him overcome anxious feelings after being diagnosed with stomach cancer, and the experience with the drug aided his reentry into the workplace.

The trials follow a strict protocol—“all LSD treatment sessions will begin at 11 a.m.”—and the researchers are scrupulous about avoiding mistakes that, at times, occurred during older psychedelic trials, when investigators would leave subjects alone during a drug session. Both Gasser and a female co-therapist are present throughout the eight-hour sessions that take place in quiet, darkened rooms, with emergency medical equipment close at hand. Before receiving LSD, subjects have to undergo psychological testing and preliminary psychotherapy sessions.

Another group is also pursuing LSD research. The British-based Beckley Foundation is funding and collaborating on a 12-person pilot study at the University of California, Berkeley, that is assessing how the drug may foster creativity and what changes in neural activity go along with altered conscious experience induced by the chemical. Whether LSD will one day become the drug of choice for psychedelic psychotherapy remains in question because there may be better solutions. “We chose psilocybin over LSD because it is gentler and generally less intense,” says Charles S. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a trial to test psilocybin’s effects on anxiety in terminal cancer patients. Moreover, “it is associated with fewer panic reactions and less chance of paranoia and, most important, over the past half a century psilocybin has attracted far less negative publicity and carries far less cultural baggage than LSD.”