Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein
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Caer Llywdd’s Late August Activities….
Click On The Images For Larger Pics…..
So you have to start somewhere…. this is a bit of an update and all. Here is a picture of the Absinthe fountain that Mary got me this last Winter Solstice, with the 50 centime coasters as well… this is a very sweet fountain, and has greatly added to the Absinthe Ceremony at Caer Llwydd….
There has been a bit of Absinthe imbibing as of late around here, leading to late starts, fuzzy thinking and general hilarity…
Both my friends Ryan and Terry have been by over the last couple of weeks for the celebrations….
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The weekend before this one, I went with Gordon K to see STS-9. A wonderful show, great crowd and excellent location (McMenamins Edgefield) Nothing like an outdoor concert that fades brilliantly into the gloaming and then the darkness…
Gordon just moved to Portland from Eugene, with his lovely wife Heather and his son Zane. It is great seeing the community enlarge, and grow in such a nice way…
The show flowed nicely, with good sound, and a churning crowd of dancers… Incenses of various flavours wafted through the crowd as they danced and it was a beautiful evening in the Peoples Republic of Portland!
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Rowan with his close friend Austyn Dancing….
We celebrated Rowan’s 18th this last weekend at the Redwing Cafe on Sunday evening… It was an overdue celebration, as Julie and Mike’s wedding occurred the night of Rowan’s birthday… so we waited a couple of weeks, and had a nice time together.
Mary prepared some great food, and I did a punch that everyone seemed to like (non-alcoholic) Rowan chose to have friends his own age, and members of our older community. It was a great evening filled with food, laughter, games, dancing and various other pleasantries…
Rowan said it was his best party ever… It had been planned to be a dance party, but for some reason the Cafe’s sound system wouldn’t play the mix disc that I had produced. We will be playing the whole 4 hour mix on Radio Free EarthRites soon!
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Carly, our nephews’ Ethan friend/Girlfriend of several years has arrived in Portland from her recent forays in Japan. Whilst there, she was riding a bicycle near Mt. Fuji where she got hit by a hit and run car-driver….
She is well, and settling in to Portland to do her last year of Architectural Studies for the U of O. I understand that she just got an apartment after some frantic searching this past week.
We had her and Ethan over this past Wednesday. It was a very pleasant evening!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Caer Llywdd’s Late August Activities….
Forty Two Years Ago Today….
The Links…
Ustad Ail Akbar Khan
Chapter 21: Open Ending
The Poetry of Attar
Above & Beyond presents OceanLab – Miracle [album edit]
Art: Rick Griffin
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Forty Two Years Ago Today….
Gwyllm as a young psychonaut….
Today marks the 42nd year from my first Psychedelic – Entheogenic Experience… I took a dose of LSD in Berkeley California, about 6:00pm, wandered down to The Jabberwocky Cafe with friends from the commune I was staying in, and as some say, the rest is history. I will not go over it all again, and you can read about it from the links at the bottom of this piece.
So, this is a time that I use to reflect on my life, and the changes wrought by Albert’s wondrous molecule; how this intervention of divine proportions weighing less than a hundred angels dancing on a pin transformed my consciousness to a point where the world as I knew it fell away forever.
Every act, moment, and thought had been altered by that moment in time… it is a bit like the prisoner emerging from confinement, to find an endless horizon of possibilities opening on a view of eternity unfolding. (over the top but you might catch my drift)
The world was indeed changed forever, and I moved into a territory uncharted in our times. It was never easy, and there were times when I wish the blinders had not been torn from my eyes. When I preferred to go asleep, I fell into patterns of self-annihilation. When I resumed/continued the quest, life expanded, and inner change moved my life forward in new and novel ways. Many moved into these uncharted waters of consciousness, and their efforts and lives have brought much value to the world.
Over the years I have revisited that space in various ways, but those first times leave an indelible mark. All that came before, and all that proceeded after….
Read The Story Here:
The Story Finally Told 39 years ago…
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The Links…
Mohegans’ ancient burial ground reclaimed and blessed
Religion and its mortifying history of self-inflicted pain
Theocratic Sect Prays for Real Armageddon
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Ustad Ail Akbar Khan
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Chapter 21: Open Ending
-Terence McKenna
A Lost Chapter of True Hallucinations….
My own ideas concerning the mechanics by which the oversoul creates the UFO encounters might take the following form. Dimethyltriptamine when smoked, snuffed, or injected induces a brief and extremely intense psychedelic experience whose overwhelming sense of contact with the Other is unparalleled. For the last decade or so this extraordinary property of DMT has made it seem to many who sought a chemical basis for schizophrenia as the long sought schizotoxin. Studies have proved inconclusive however. DMT concentration has not been proven to differ significantly in schizophrenic and normal controls. Studies have established the presence of DMT in the human body, however the origin and significance of the DMT is unknown. Although it may reflect endogenous synthesis, it could also result from diet, bacterial byproducts, human laboratory error, or other sources. Bearing in mind the bizarre power of the DMT experience, its presence and unknown role in human metabolism, add one more fact: the strange aura of suggestibility that can precede the onset of the intense hallucination phase of the DMT experience. This period of suggestibility may last 15 seconds to a minute, and is a time during which the assumptions which the experient projects concerning the unusual shift of sensory input acquires enormous power. A few moments later the power of the now numinous assumption overwhelmes the consciousness of the observer with a scenario while totally bizarre and outrageous nevertheless is somehow a complete psychological fulfillment of the expectations formed in the few minutes of transition that preceded the visionary engulfment.
What I am proposing is that something like this happens during a UFO close encounter and the cause may very well be something which must be partially sought in the human organism. Imagine a person wandering alone in unfamiliar country: suddenly there’s a hackle-raising sense of weirdness, then a feeling of numbness in the limbs, followed by a clearing of vision and a loud crackling sound. At this point the sense of strangeness within and without the body would trigger a fear reaction in most people. The fear reaction causes a rapid and automatic search for a culturally-validated explaination of what is going on, and an explaination will always be found. It may range from, ‘I am being bewitched by a demon,’ to ‘Surely it is a visitation of the Holy Mother,’ to ‘My God! It must be a UFO!’ In each case the abandonment of the ego to a culturally prescribed explaination of the experience of the Other causes the experience to exfoliate, exploit and elaborate all the themes that the culture’s current myth of the Other entails. It is known that DMT binds preferentially to certain tissue when introduced into the human body. Is it not possible that we human beings are occasionally susceptible to a kind of visionary seizure? When for reasons of stress or diet these factors combine with psychodynamic factors to initiate a sudden dumping of accumulated DMT? Pheremones may play a part in this experience and isolation may be its trigger. Whatever its cause, our conditioning as individuals causes the experience to plunge us into a numinous scenario that reflects the deepest concerns and yearnings of the current culture toward the Other. In our own time this has given rise to the hope of friendly visiting extraterrestrials. As late as 1917 the miracle at Fatima was interpreted worldwide as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Today it would surely be hailed as an extraterrestrial contact. If my suggestion regarding DMT were found to be correct, it would provide insight into the way in which the cultural feedback thermostat explaination of UFOs put forth by Vallee and others actually works. Those people who experience the DMT seizure and are plunged into the current myth of the Other actually return as apostles of that myth, able to clarify and refine it, and by those means to exert the tuning and control of historical development that may be the purpose of the agency behind the UFOs.
Stress, generalized as an impending sense of historical crisis, may be the factor that induces the UFO/close-contact experience. As the historical crisis deepens the number of contacts will increase until the atemporal portion of the mass psyche has effected enough individuals that there is actually a turning away from the stress-causing course of action. How well is the Superego able to play the role of God? Can it come in saucerian splendor to save the world from the flames at the end of time? Or can it only beckon and warn with visions and dire prophesy? These are questions that we might answer if we diligently explore the states of mind that DMT and psilocybin make available. Perhaps the UFO encounters involve nothing more than an autonomous and negative psychic complex able to emerge during the situation of unusual energy dynamics induced in the psyche by psilocybin. However, a different explainatory approach merges psyche and world by involving a continuum whose modalities bisect each other with equal ease. This is the approach which grants the phenomenological existence of the constructs seen in the Stropharia trance and in UFO encounters. Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call imagination, or the unconscious, may merge imperceptibly into autonomously existing worlds we would call ‘hyperdimensional’, indicating the paradox of their simultaneous invisibility and their here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a presence which belies the term hallucination.
Ahead of us lies the future, where we can expect the ingression of the alternative dimension to intensify. It is therefore important for us to have a sense of the powers in that Other world and their shifting agencies. In a traditional society, our exploration of these matters would be firmly imbedded in the extant shamanic mythos concerning these forces. Techniques tried and true would be available to fortify our psychic constitution. Since we are members of a profane society whose relation to the unconscious is one of estrangement, we have no such consolation. No dispelling ritual or words of proven self-empowerment. By reason and intuition we must attempt to conquer the fears that attend journeys into the unknown. But reason and intuition need data with which to construct maps of reality. If we outdistance the inflow of fact we move beyond the safety zone of the conjuring rod of intuition and reason. For these reasons we move slowly and steadily. We are human factors in a multi-variable equation where the shift of unseen parameters can trigger large perturbations and resonances of unexpected types. Knowing this, and knowing how little we do know, we should be excused for this defense of caution when taking to ourselves the visions which the Stropharia brings.
Carl Jung’s ‘Mysterium Coniunctionis’ reminds us of the reality of the situation that insues once the psyche is hooked into making the transference to the alchemical or saucerian goal. Jung, citing Gerhart Dorn, stresses that the materialization of the stone is only a prologue to the experience of the perfected self in a state of illumination. Jung wrote, ‘Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists, or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience.’ Of what does this relationship consist? My own hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that an explicitly spatial dimension – of a co-dimension inclusive of our continuum – allows a hologram of other realized forms of organization, far distant, to become visible at certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field. These levels have been damped by selection in favor of mo
re directly relevant lines of information relating to animal survival. Evolution does not reinforce selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at a distance since such an ability has no selective advantage, unless the information it conveys falls upon the receptors of an organism already sophisicated enough in its use of symbols to abstract concepts for later application in different contexts.
Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of events at a distance only begin to acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has already achieved sufficient sophistication to be called conscious and mind-possessing. The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at medical engineering which amplifies, for inspection by consciousness, the quantum resonance of the other parts of the spatial continuum holographically at hand. This experience is the vision which the UFOs and psilocybin impart: visions of strange planets, life forms, perspectives and societies, machines, ruins, landscapes. The hierophanies all unfold in a ‘nunc-stans’ that has all spacestanding in itlike a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens by human beings and the rise in endogenously produced hallucinogens as one advances through the primate phylogeny could both be due to a slow focusing on the phenomenon of imagination. Imagination being the deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually existing in the present at hand.
The conclusion such an idea makes necessary is that it is upon the ideological content of specific visions that empirical attention should center. What are the working details of the worlds whose presence impinges on ours so strongly? What of the beings sometimes confronted often furtively sensed, who seem to have some existence in a world of their own revealed by the psilocybin and in UFO contact? There may exist a vast communication network in the topological nature of things. A network that becomes a fact only for those species or individuals who will but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision. It will by them be found to be persistent in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives in a climate of such ideas. To validate the idea of the worth of the visions of worlds at a distance one must emerge with some idea spawned by the visionary Other but with a utility in the here and now. The wave quantification of the I Ching is the only idea of this sort that I personally have glimpsed in completeness. It took years to elaborate and its relation to the here and now is still elusive. Fragmentary themes abound: symbiosis, saucer-lens vehicles whose possessors navigate the higher topological oceans in our heads. All this could be transference and fantasy. In the classical sense of the word the experimenter with hallucinogens pursues gnosis: privileged knowledge concerning nature and vouchsafed by her in ecstacy.
The history of consciousness is the halting exploration of the once irrational images and processes met in dreams and trance. Such images become concepts and discoveries as information flows through the multiple-continuum of being seeking equilibrium, yet paradoxically carrying everywhere images of ways the flow towards entropy was locally reversed by this being or that society or phenomenon. We are immersed in a holographic ocean of places and ideas. We can understand this to whatever depth we are able. The ocean of images and the intricacy of their connections is infinite. It is perhaps why great genius preceeds by apparent leaps. Because the revolutionary idea which inspires the genius comes upon one complete, entire by itself, from the ocean of mind. History is the story of the search for the intuitive leap that will reveal the very mechanism of that other dimension. The need for such a leap by humanity will grow as we exhaust complexity in all realms save the microphysical and the psychological. My own method has been immersion in the images and self- examination of the phenomenon of tryptamine hallucinogenesis. This means taking the Stropharia psilocybe and pondering just what this all may mean. With confidence that as more people come to share this experience time will deepen our understanding, if not answer all questions. For psilocybin argues that hallucinogens are windows into higher dimensions. That even as a cone can yield circle, ellipse or parabola to an act of two-dimensional sectioning and yet remain intrinsically a cone, so reality is something that changes according to the angle of regarding. It argues that human beings are many forms over vast scales of time, that all life is unified at some level, and all intelligence in the universe are but facets of the mystery called humanness. In probing the Other we shall always come back with images of ourselves. In probing ourselves we shall return with images of the Other. In the phenomenon of being itself no less than in the phenomenon of the UFO encounters we are merely privileged observers of a relationship between what is naively called the world and the transpersonal portion of the human psyche. How this relationship came to be, and what its limitations are, we cannot know until we gain access to the transpersonal and atemporal part of the psyche. Of what this consists we do not know and no hypothesis can be ruled out. My hunch is that if we could really comprehend death then we could understand the UFO. But that neither can be understood unless they are looked at in light of the question, what is humanness? I believe that the transpersonal component of the human psyche is not distinct from matter and that therefore it can literally do anything. It is not subject to the will of any individual. It has a will and an understanding that is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any one of the individuals who compose it as cells compose a body. It has a plan, glimpsed by individuals only as vision or religious hierophany. Nevertheless, the plan is unfolding. There will be many more UFO sightings, many more close contacts. Our belief systems are undergoing accelerated evolution via increased input from the other. Somewhere ahead of us there is a critical barrier where we will at last have enough data to obtain an integrating insight into the riddle of humanity’s relation to the UFO. I believe that as this happens the childhood of our species will pass away and when this is done we will be free to use the staggering understanding that humankind and the UFO are one. 
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The Poetry of Attar
Invocation
We are busy with the luxury of things.
Their number and multiple faces bring
To us confusion we call knowledge. Say:
God created the world, pinned night to day,
Made mountains to weigh it down, seas
To wash its face, living creatures with pleas
(The ancestors of prayers) seeking a place
In this mystery that floats in endless space.
God set the earth on the back of a bull,
The bull on a fish dancing on a spool
Of silver light so fine it is like air;
That in turn rests on nothing there
But nothing that nothing can share.
All things are but masks at God’s beck and call,
They are symbols that instruct us that God is all.
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The Triumph of the Soul
Joy! Joy! I triumph! Now no more I know
Myself as simply me. I burn with love
Unto myself, and bury me in love.
The centre is within me and its wonder
Lies as a circle everywhere about me.
Joy! Joy! No mortal thought can fathom me.
I am the merchant and the pearl at once.
Lo, Time and Space lie crouching at my feet.
Joy! Joy! When I would reveal in a rapture.
I plunge into myself and all things know.
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Looking for your own face
Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral.
You can never see your own face,
only a reflection, not the face itself.
So you sigh in front of mirrors
and cloud the surface.
It’s better to keep your breath cold.
Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean.
One slight movement, the mirror-image goes.
Don’t be dead or asleep or awake.
Don’t be anything.
What you most want,
what you travel around wishing to find,
lose yourself as lovers lose themselves,
and you’ll be that.
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Mystic Silence
From each, Love demands a mystic silence.
What do all seek so earnestly? Tis Love.
Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts,
In Love no longer “Thou” and “I” exist,
For self has passed away in the Beloved.
Now will I draw aside the veil from Love,
And in the temple of mine inmost soul
Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love.
He who would know the secret of both worlds
Will find that the secret of them both is Love.
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Attar, Farid al-Din Muhammad ibn Ibrahim (1145?-1221?), Persian poet, a strong believer in the principles of Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism. He was born in present-day Khorasan Province, Iran. Attar’s most celebrated work is The Conference of the Birds, a poem consisting of 4600 couplets. The poem uses allegory to illustrate the Sufi doctrine of union between the human and the divine. His other important writings include Divan and Tazakor-ol-Oliah ( Biographies of the Saints), a prose work about the early Sufis.
Farid Od-din Attar Neyshaburi was one of the greatest Muslim mystical poets and thinkers of the 12th century. He has written at least 45,000 couplets and many brilliant prose works.
Attar travelled extensively, visiting Egypt, Syria, Arabia, India and Central Asia and finally settled in his native town Neishabour, northeastern Iran, where he spent many years collecting the verses and sayings of famous Muslim mystics.
As said before the greatest of his works is his well-known Manteq-u-ttair (the conference of the birds), which is an allegorical poem describing the quest of the birds. his other works include Elahinameh (divine book).
From the point of view of ideas, literary themes and style, Attar’s influence was strongly felt not in Persian literature but in other Islamic literatures.
His grand book of Tazakor-ol-Oliah is in prose and his most famous works in verse include: Asrarnameh, Elahinameh, Mosibatnameh, Manteq-u’ttair, Bulbulnameh, Heydarnameh, Mokhtarnameh and Khosrownameh.
Manteq-u-ttair or the Conference of Birds, sung in iambic hexameter, is an elegantly versified book. Following Solomon’s tradition the poet puts tongue in the mouths of the birds and enables them to warble his theme and fly high and high towards Mount Ghaf in search of the invincible Simorgh or Phoenix which he ascribes to the Almighty God, and by this metaphor Attar brings his episode to a surprising climax. Led by the unwavering hoopoe or Hod Hod, thirty birds out of many thousands manage to cross the seven fatal valleys in the Path and arrive at the majestic court of the Prince of Universe on the verge of annihilation.
What they see in amazement there is an enormous phantom mirror of a thousand molten planets which reflects their own shapes and purified selfs. Here they dissolve in the mirror and join the eternity.
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Above & Beyond presents OceanLab – Miracle [album edit]
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