Tristram Burden's Blog
Posted by Tristram Burden
The drugs debate in the UK has been heating up this past week with a lot of exposure given to the links between Cannabis usage and an increase in the likely-hood of the onset of schizophrenia in developing minds.
As mentioned previously on these pages, the links between mental health risks and psychoactive drugs are indisputable, but should this have any impact upon their legality? If we're to say that any substance or behaviour which leads to mental illness or a risk thereof is to be banned, where does that leave the onset of mental illness when not drug related? What do we ban then, and who do we blame?
It's been pointed out that the prohibition of cannabis is one of the reasons for the stronger varieties like skunk being more widely available. Also, a huge percentage of cannabis is sourced from the British isles, giving further access to strengths which previously were out of reach for anyone who couldn't afford repeated trips to Amsterdam, possibly a consequence of regular smokers getting bum deals for too much cash.
While the mental health risks of very strong varieties of cannabis are right to be brought into the public domain for debate, it still seems that the media is doing its time old trick, and focusing upon the few extreme cases to the detriment of the positive experiences and benefits. While these benefits certainly include pain relief for chronic sufferers, and relief from the symptoms of debilitating diseases like ME, they extend further into the quality of our consciousness. And the quality of consciousness, while being far from a hot topic on the airwaves, naturally has a direct link to our quality of lives. If we could measure the quality of the average consciousness, I guarantee deep disappointment. While many of us are swamped by television, advertising and the combined noises of a myriad of strange machines, day-in-day out, others are in perpetual fear for their lives and sleep to the sounds of bombs dropping and their kin being shot. While part of the quality of consciousness depends upon a pleasant environment, more important is the need for adaptation, empathy, perspective and willed transcendence.
This crucial area of our daily lives, consciousness, still remains a mystery to the popular sciences, and if it can't be explained by the High Priests of Learning, best not discuss it or the limits of their knowledge becomes plain and the public lose trust in their voices. However, as a possessor of consciousness, each human already possesses everything they need to understand it: their own minds.
Experimenting with different states of consciousness is more possible than ever in contemporary culture, although some authorities still inhibit the distribution and possession of substances which can enable some thorough explorations. While dreaming, meditating, magickal ritual, or a simple walk in the wilderness can inhibit the 'running mind', that mind which twists and turns from one thing to another in a cacophony of anxieties and meaningless thought, the human species should not be blocked by any method it chooses to explore consciousness because of a simple technicality like law. One's individual conscience, and one's individual morality outreach the narrow black/white boundaries of Legal/Illegal. Full liberation is enough of a responsibility in itself without listening to the gnarled, grey face of social authority.
Posted by Tristram Burden
There is no basis for policies on drugs to be founded upon perceptions of users as violent, abusive and potentially harmful to themselves or others, a Royal Society of the Arts study has recently concluded. Public perception, and the social policies which inform it, have long been confronted with the almost universal idea that drugs make people dangerous, or the simplistic view that drugs are taken by dangerous people, who when on drugs will cause more harm than good, to themselves or others.
While careful observation might afford the same results, this study which occurred over a two year period, draws attention to our strange hypocritical position on drugs. And very succinctly pointed out that if we where to put legal and illegal drugs side by side, alcohol, our most beloved drug, would rank with some of the most harmful and illegal ones. While the study seemed limited exclusively to the social effects of drugs, it provokes an illuminating illustration about the distance between public perception about drugs and their social role, and the hidden world of personal accountability and responsibility that exists in opposition to it. A secret world where people use drugs responsibly, where there are no dark dens, no hooded people crowding around a shimmering pipe and tin-foil, random acts of cruelty occurring all about them in the shadows as gun shots ring out in the distance.
There has always been a culture entirely divorced from the criminal image that drug usage has attached to it, a culture far more alive, vivid and, perhaps, socially and culturally intrinsic, which except in the underground press, and the minds of the few more possessed of common sense, has been pure anathema to this strange hidden hand which manages to distort public views about these things, most active since the late fifties and early sixties, growing louder in voice and resulting in the historically abnormal clamp down on any mind-altering substance which was not alcohol. Let's be clearer about this, when I say distort the public view, that is not to say some system of mind control, but rather an uncalculating and instinctual lie posing as 'public perception' which is invariably the opinion of the policy makers, journalists and researchers who have the ways and the means to produce a 'public' which in essence, was never there, with opinion and perceptions which are entirely their own, and bears little relation to the millions of minds they purport to represent.
Saturday's Independent ran a story about Patricia Tabrami, the hash-cake Delia Smith, comparing her brushes with the law to Emmeline Pankhurst, rightly contextualizing the legalisation of cannabis as a civil rights movement. Who has the right to determine what a person does with their consciousness? How can you regulate consciousness, and what people do with it? Anyone so switched on as to reply “Don't you watch TV, man?” can take that as a rhetorical question. The other answer of course lies with the regulation of drugs. A recent spike in this ongoing push towards a change in social policy towards cannabis in particular, but illegal drugs in general, was the integral issue that bad mental-health and psychoactive drugs don't mix, which is something I know a good few people have managed to find out for themselves, myself included. It remains important however, that individuals get the responsibility they deserve over their own minds. And it remains equally important for the government to acknowledge all its policies which serve to undermine quality of consciousness and life: consistent support of television, despite the far-reaching studies of its ill-effects, and perhaps more controversially and far from being solved, the perpetual junk, signs and symbols and sounds, any mind is bombarded with in an urban environment, without consent, in the form of advertising – corporations actually messing around with peoples desires and integral socio-biological drives. How does that get past anyone?
But at least some definite policies are being formulated about drugs in the places where the hidden hands gather, and public opinion seems to be ending its long, meandering fumble in the dark, and getting proper definition. There is no longer a Drugs are Bad, Drugs are Good divide, but a more complex reasoning which could be likened to people acknowledging that not all Islamics are militant extremists, and that not all governments mean well by their people. If we keep going like this, one day we'll realise that greed and hatred perpetuate human suffering, and that unconditional love and regular, healthy orgasms far exceed the importance of perpetuating the economy. One day...
Read about the study...http://www.rsadrugscommission.org/
Read the results...http://www.rsadrugscommission.org.uk/pdf/RSA_yougov_survey_results.pdf
iCooking with the Cannabis Granny by Ian Herbert, The Independent, Saturday 10th March, 2007.
Posted by Tristram Burden
Robert Anton Wilson was the secret agent of synchronicity.
It was his works I discovered when I began receiving weird vibes about Sirius, and his books I was guided towards soon after executing a gung-ho magickal operation to receive illumination about Truth. Uncle Bob blew my mind with a fierce wind of cross-cultural meta-narratives about mysticism and occultism. He made the broad connections between maps and phenomena which most brains only garner the vaguest hint towards, let alone full synthesis and processing into erudite, witty, funny and perpetually enlightening prose. I haven't met one person who wasn't changed in some way by reading Robert Anton Wilson's work – which could be a testament to a sheltered life, or a bona-fide indicator of just how important this man was: in bridging the gap between the 1960's counter-culture and the future of occultism; in filtering out the dogma and the bullshit that occultism often carried along with it, breaking down a wall that precipitated a flood of fresh occult thought that wasn't weighed down by the pseudo-religious and sometimes impenetrable jargon that hung over mid-20th century occultism from the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
That he'd fallen ill late last year initiated a wave of concern all over the planet. He was pronounced dead 4:50am, 11th January 2007. He wrote about his experience of polio as a child, and his consistent sufferance of post-polio syndrome, with his trademark mixture of comic tragedy. That it should claim his life, despite his heroic advocacy of life-extension and virtual immortality, is a kick in the face to all optimism everywhere. But the anecdotal evidence that he maintained his humour throughout his final days on this earth, is further testament to just how switched on he was.
From his very early writings about drugs (republished as Sex, Drugs and Magick (New Falcon Press, in its sixth printing in 2000) Uncle Bob was an iconoclast. Picking away at the faults of the state and its systems and always championing the overlooked virtues of common sense. But it was the Illuminatus Trilogy, written with Robert Shea in 1975, that cemented him as a voice and mind to be taken seriously (or not, depending on your side of the fence), and his subsequent chronicles of the synchronicites and madness that led him to write that book, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, that secured his position as man deep in touch with his own genius.
In this book, Uncle Bob defied magickal convention by dropping LSD and listening to a tape-recording of The Bornless Ritual, thereby achieving Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. He blew the lid (for this reader at least) on the connections with extra-terrestrial intelligences and magick, and wrote with reference to the eight-circuit model of consciousness with more clarity and better explanation than its creator, Timothy Leary, ever did in his lifetime. Any self-proclaimed magician who actually practiced magick, would have recognised the initiatory journey Uncle Bob was chronicling in that book. And sympathised, perhaps even found a voice of reason where there was only a burgeoning concern of affliction with schizophrenia: I'm sure I couldn't have been the only person to read Cosmic Trigger and say “You too? Thank ****. I thought I was going nuts...”
With Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology, arguably along with Cosmic Trigger his best and most rewarding books, he delved deeper into the exploration of human consciousness, and de-mystified mysticism into a post-modern practice of socio-cultural and neurological transcendence. Something that previously hadn't been done with such empathy, and an insight into just how stupid and prone to over-complication a human mind can be.
As I write this at 2230 I'm also reminded of Uncle Bob's fearless introduction of the 23 meme into popular consciousness. While the 23 Current has taken on a life all of its own, Bob's Most Marvelous Magi Trick may have been to let that one loose to plague a thousand minds, probably more. He almost single-handedly popularised Discordianism and edged it into the important magickal movement it is today. Without Uncle Bob, would there be Chaos Magick, or a wave of modern shaman's delivering human consciousness back from the brink of a potential over-scienced and under-psy-enced dark age?
At 2300 hours I'm reminded that while it's impossible to say too much about how great the man will be missed, it's easy to overstate it when a simple “Good Bye Uncle, Bob, we'll miss you!” would probably do.
As much as you'd probably hate to come back as anything, it would be a good idea. There's no business like show-business, and you've showed us so much. But a little more never hurt.
RIP Robert Anton Wilson 1932-2007
Posted by Tristram Burden
Recent developments have been made in a strain of research that seemed to shut down almost half a century ago. LSD (Lysergic Acid Diathylamide) has appeared in the news again after continuing research into its curative effects upon alcoholics. A chemical discovered accidentally by Albert Hoffman in 1938, LSD has baffled researchers and underwent a variety of labels before given the numinous and exotic title 'psychedelic'. It's effects upon consciousness proved popular with the 1960's counter-culture, and maintained popularity during the rave culture of the late 80's and early 90's, though usually as little more than a byword for a recreational substance, and rarely available in its purest form.
While LSD is recorded as responsible for an astounding amount of positive psychological effects, cataloged in a number of suppressed or ignored studies, asides from within the personal experiences of either experienced or novice users, it remains a chemical looked upon with great suspicion. While worth bearing in mind the possible traumatic experiences had by some users, such experiences are very often down to carelessness and a lack of accurate education about the full impact of a hit of LSD, not necessarily the fault of the user, but rather an oversight in the culturalisation and socialisation of western youth. LSD itself is not a 'bad drug', but its devastating psychological impact is something that requires due preparation and responsible care, if not guidance by experienced users and trusted responsible acquaintances. Failing that, a strong sense of self at the very least.
The study that has appeared in the news recently, a continuation of British psychologist Humphrey Osmond, belongs to that body of research giving further credence to the immense usefulness of LSD-25. While giving access to states of consciousness usually out of reach on a day-to-day basis, the particular nature of those levels of consciousness is the key to LSD's potential uses. Classed at one stage as a 'psychomimetic', something that mimics psychoses, we must remember that 'psychoses' is a term fit in the eyes of some psychologists to describe the trance of a shaman or the world-view of a ritual magician. Ergo, LSD has the potential to act as a gateway to states of consciousness that might similarly be relative to the religious experience, or the peak-experience as termed by Maslow. These are experiences of immense clarity, which have a lasting impression upon the experiencer, and enable new perspectives, ideas and understandings to enter into the experiential data-bank of the user. The current term used to describe LSD and it's brother's and sisters, is 'psychedelic', a term which translates as 'mind-manifesting', indicative of the effect of the drug to bring the mind into state of absolute nakedness, 'manifest' because one may walk about in it, open up closed doors and build new ones. As much as this is a reason to experience the drug, it is also the same reason to be cautious with it. Some doors remain closed in our minds for a reason, and it is probably the forceful opening of tight-shut secrets which can lead an LSD trip into a confrontation with primal terror and unwanted aspects of ourselves.
As an experience with LSD is tantamount to opening the mind to its widest possible circumference, it is also true that any experience had on LSD will be deep set within the psyche thereafter, like planting a seed deep into the ground. One should perhaps be careful then that what you're planting in there you'd like to grow, otherwise you may have a few poison thorns draped about you for the rest of your days. It is within these mind-manifesting contexts that LSD seems to be arriving back into fold of science, as previously one of its bastard children, perhaps now, as it should always have been, it returns as its golden child, ready and waiting to be taken back into progressive cultural discourse as an enhancer of cultural and social functionality, rather than another bunch of letters unfairly relative to social dis-function.
Posted by Tristram Burden
Robert Anton Wilson has been a pioneer of Magick, Occultism, Para-Science, Truth, Non-Being, Common Sense and Good Drugs but most of all Humour (where too many others have been too serious). He has suffered from post-polio syndrome for most of his life, having contracted polio as a child and, during depression era America, suffering from a fate that most modern vaccinations help us to avoid.
It's been reported of late that Uncle Bob, as he is affectionately known to many impacted by his work, is in declining health, and that despite his success, popularity and immense effect upon counter-culture everywhere, is struggling with his family to meet health-care costs. A donation link has been set up upon his website at http://www.rawilson.com/main.shtml
So far, in just three days, $68,000 has been raised, a testimant to how deeply treasured this cultural icon is. His publisher is currently offering 7% from all online sales towards this fund also, whether of his own books or not: http://www.newfalcon.com/
This is a good opportunity for anyone unfamiliar with his work to get acquainted - with three decades of writing which spans consiparacy theories, New Age and Occult practices, NLP, philosophy, quantum physics and the significance of some of the most important but unnoted minds operating in the 20th Century, his books serve not only as an education, but often a total re-education, of what's up and what's down, of what's black and what's really white.
For more information during the possible last days of a man deep in touch with his own genius, visit the links above, and below:
http://www.lashtal.com/nuke/Article799.phtml
http://en-no-gyoja.livejournal.com/83421.html
Much love to you Bob, may you spent the rest of your days in better health and comfort.
