On The Music Box: Earthrites Radio!
(D M Tree)
Last Excerpts: Psychedelic Prayers
Timothy Leary
Gate Of The Soft Mystery
Valley of life
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Beginnings in the lowest place
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Gate of the Dark Woman
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Seed of all living
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Constantly enduring
Gate of the Soft Mystery
Enter
Gently…
III.12 The Lesson Of Seed
The soft overcomes the hard
The small overcomes the large
The gentle survives the strong
The invisible survives the visible
Fish should be left in deep water
Fire and iron kept under ground
Seed should be left free
To grow in the rhythm of life
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Well Thursday has arrived. It has been a busy week, and just seems to get busier. The weather is holding, and Wednesday we worked on the yard, removing Wisteria from the side of the house (it was pulling the down spout out), moved the Cactus’s off the porch and into the backyard as well as the Caapi and various other friends.
Dog pen got moved, much to the bemusement of dog. Sophie tends to smile and do the dog laugh alot. I think we constantly amuse her with our busy ways. She would be happy just to chew on the post man. (her nemesis!)
My sister Suzanne stopped by for an hour or so. Later on my nephew Andrew came by from his first day of work on his new job. He was literally beaming, nice to see…
Mary and I watched one of the old “Carry On” films from the UK, “Carry On Dick”. The film is about Dick Turpin the infamous Highwayman of 18th century fame. A nice giggle seeing it again.
Moving forward with projects that take fruition soon, so stay tuned.
Our featured Artist today is Roberto Venosa. He studied with such luminaries as Ernst Fuchs, Mati Klarwein, and Salvador Dali. His art touches me in the deep places. If I may, a quote from Saint Timothy (Leary): “Robert Venosa creates mythical mindscapes that fascinate and illuminate. His tableaux are windows into timeless vistas of the inner realities.” Tim says it in a nut-shell.
We are very happy to have his art grace Turfing again. Thank you Roberto!
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
The Links:
The Article: Liberty & LSD by John Perry Barlow
The Poetry: A.E. Russell
The Artist: Roberto Venosa…!
(Tres Flores)
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The Links:
ATT acts out as the Slimey Corporation that they are…
Thomas Giovanetti: Victim of DRM
Everest Expedition Uncovers Exotic Species
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by John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation)
(Ayahuasca Dream)
OVER THE LAST 25 years, I’ve watched a lot of Deadheads, Buddhists, and other freethinkers do acid. I’ve taken it myself. I still do occasionally, in a ritual sort of way. On the basis of their experience and my own, I know that the public terror of LSD is based more on media propagated superstition than familiarity with its effects on the real world.
I know this, and, like most others who know it, I have kept quiet about it.
Shorty after the Bill of Rights was drafted, the English philosopher john Stuart Mill said, “Liberty resides in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious. ” The Buddha was wise to point out that people must be free to work out for themselves what is true from actual experience and express it without censure.
I will go further and say that liberty resides in its exercise. It is preserved in the actual spouting of those odious views. It is maintained, and always has been, by brave and lonely cranks.
Lately it seems that our necessary cranks have been falling silent, struck dumb by a general assault on liberty in John Perry Barlow is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has also been a cattle rancher in Wyoming, America. This is no right-wingplot from the top. Like most totalitarian impulses, it has arisen among the people themselves. Terrified of virtual bogeymen we know only from the evening news, we have asked the government for shorter chains and smaller cages. And, market-driven as ever, it has been obliging us.
This is what is now taking place in our conduct of the War on Some Drugs. In this futile jihad, Americans have largely suspended habeas corpus, have allowed the government to permanently confiscate our goods without indictment or trial, have flat-out discarded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and are voluntarily crippling the First, at least insofar as any expression might relate to drugs.
In my gloomier moments, I wonder if the elimination of freedom in America is not what the War on Some Drugs was actually designed to accomplish.
Certainly we haven’t engaged this campaign because the psychoactive substances we are so determined to eliminate are inherently more dangerous than those we keep in plentiful and legal supply. Indeed, the most dangerous, antisocial, and addictive drugs I’ve ever taken-the ones I’m afraid to touch in any quantity today-are legal.
Alcohol, nicotine, and prescription sedatives do more American damage every day than LSD has done since it was derived in 1942. Each year, alcohol kills hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of them violently. Alcohol is a factor in most murders and suicides in America. It is a rare case of domestic violence or abuse where alcohol plays no role.
Yet I don’t hear people calling for its prohibition, nor would I support such an effort. I know it won’t work.
(Oothoon’s Palace)
It’s not working for LSD either; and it’s even less likely to. Lysergic acid diethylamide-25 is active in doses so small you can’t see them. It’s colorless, odorless, and it doesn’t show up in drug tests. And you have to be pretty high on acid before anyone’s going to notice you being anything but extremely alert.
Does this mean that I think LSD is safe or that I am recommending its use? Hardly. I consider l.SD to be a serious medicine, strong enough to make some people see God or the dharma. That’s serious medicine. There are two points that need making: First, by diminishing the hazards inherent in our cultural drugs of choice and demonizing psychedelics, we head our children straight down the most dangerous path their youthful adventurism can , take. Second, LSD is dangerous but not in the ways generally portrayed. By dressing it up in a Halloween costume of fictitious dangers, we encourage our kids to think we were also lying about its real ones. And LSD is dangerous.
It is dangerous because it promotes the idea that reality is something to be manipulated rather than accepted. This notion can seriously cripple one’s coping abilities, although I would still argue that both alcohol and advertising do that more persuasively than LSD. And of course, if you’re lightly sprung, it can leave you nuts.
But LSD is not illegal because it endangers your sanity. LSD is illegal because it endangers Control. Worse, it makes authority seem funny. But laugh at authority in America and you will know risk. LSD is illegal primarily because it threatens the dominant American culture, the culture of Control.
This is not a sound use of law. Just laws arise to support the ethics of a whole society and not as a means for one of its cultural factions to impose power on another.
There are probably 25 million Americans who have taken LSD, and who would, if hard pressed in private, also tell you that it profoundly changed their lives, and not necessarily for the worse.
I will readily grant that some of these are hopeless crystal worshipers or psychedelic derelicts creeping around Oregon woods. But far more of them are successful members of society, CEOs, politicians, Buddhist meditation teachers, ministers, and community leaders.
This is true. Whether we want it to be or not.
But the fact that so few among these millions dare utter this truth is, in a supposedly free country, a symptom of collective mental illness.
I neither expect nor ask any young person to regard me as a role model. There are easier routes through this world than the one I’ve taken. But I do like to think of myself as someone who defends his convictions. And I hope to raise my three daughters to be brave enough to own their beliefs, no matter how unorthodox, and to own them in public, no matter how risky. I dream of a day when anyone’s daughters will feel free to do that.
The most I can do toward a world in which their liberty is assured is to exercise mine in this one.
(Sanctum Caelestis)
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Poetry: A.E. (George William) Russell
Babylon
THE BLUE dusk ran between the streets: my love was winged within my mind,
It left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind.
To-day was past and dead for me, for from to-day my feet had run
Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.
On temple top and palace roof the burnished gold flung back the rays
Of a red sunset that was dead and lost beyond a million days.
The tower of heaven turns darker blue, a starry sparkle now begins;
The mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and the sins
Come back to me. I walk beneath the shadowy multitude of towers;
Within the gloom the fountain jets its pallid mist in lily flowers.
The waters lull me and the scent of many gardens, and I hear
Familiar voices, and the voice I love is whispering in my ear.
Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid:
The wave of phantom time withdraws; and that young Babylonian maid,
One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide,
Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side.
Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.
—
(Florestreno)
By the Margin of the Great Deep
WHEN the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies,
All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam
With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes;
I am one with the twilights dream.
When the trees and skies and fields are one in dusky mood,
Every heart of man is rapt within the mothers breast:
Full of peace and sleep and dreams in the vasty quietude,
I am one with their hearts at rest.
From our immemorial joys of hearth and home and love
Strayed away along the margin of the unknown tide,
All its reach of soundless calm can thrill me far above
Word or touch from the lips beside.
Aye, and deep and deep and deeper let me drink and draw
From the olden fountain more than light or peace or dream,
Such primeval being as oerfills the heart with awe,
Growing one with its silent stream.
—
Echoes
THE MIGHT that shaped itself through storm and stress
In chaos, here is lulled in breathing sweet;
Under the long brown ridge in gentleness
Its fierce old pulses beat.
Quiet and sad we go at eve; the fire
That woke exultant in an earlier day
Is dead; the memories of old desire
Only in shadows play.
We liken love to this and that; our thought
The echo of a deeper being seems:
We kiss, because God once for beauty sought
Within a world of dreams.
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(Crystal Bay)
