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Going with a different format this time around on the Blog…

Elder Interviews: Jim Fadiman, 1998 Part 1
Part 2 will be published tomorrow…There will be an dedicated page to these interviews coming up.

We are happy to host this Interview with Jim Fadiman.
A big shout out to Diane Darling for doing the original transcriptions.
All Illustrations, yers truly. Just click on them for enlarged view…

This is a great read. For those of us who weren’t there/born yet, this is first person accounts of a time of great change, that influences the world to this day. (There are more stories out there, and they should be told!) I am pleased that Jim decided to let this interview be published.

Cheers,
Gwyllm

This is my homage to the Human Be In… January 14th, 1967 Golden Gate Park…

Elders -Jim Fadiman
: This is July 18th, 1998. We’re here today with Jim Fadiman in Menlo Park. And I’m Charlie Grob, here along with Gary Bravo and Alise Agar. Jim, I’d like to thank you for agreeing to spill your guts today.

JF: So far, it’s a pleasure.

: I really do want to thank you for spending the time with us to talk about your early experiences in this field and your current views. In a sense, this is a follow-up meeting. We met with you ten years ago, Gay and myself, and we had a similar conversation. So, one thing to look at is how have things changed. But perhaps first we can start with: How did you get involved with psychedelics and the work you did with psychedelics?

JF: You know, I’d say I’m one of the inadvertent pioneers because I was an undergraduate at Harvard and I ended up in a small tutorial with a young, dynamic, and – at that time – somewhat neurotic professor named Richard Alpert. Out of my being an undergraduate and Dick being an assistant
professor, we got to be friendly.   Then I was offered a summer internship at Stanford where Ralph Metzner and Dick and I were all involved in a research project that had been ongoing for some years about children and the Thematic Apperception test for children, and cognitive skills, and, various psychological stuff.  I was very much the junior partner on the project.  As it worked out Dick Alpert and I rented a house together for the summer, so we really did become quite close. Then I went on in my senior year at Harvard. Nothing psychedelic was happening for either of us.

I went off to live in Europe. At the end of a certain amount of time in Europe Dick Alpert showed up in Paris with Timothy Leary and Madison Presnell, who was an African-American psychiatrist. They were off to go to Copenhagen to deliver the first paper on some work with low-dose psilocybin.  Basically Dick Alpert was in wonderful condition. I had known him, and he was enchanted that I was this young man bopping about Paris, as he was someone who had never really been to Europe. He said to me, “The most wonderful thing in the world has happened, and I want to share it with you.” I said, as anyone would, “Of course.” Then he reached in his breast pocket of the jacket and took out a little bottle of pills. I thought, “Pills? Drugs? What kind of weirdness is this?” I really had no idea what he was talking about. However, that evening I took some psilocybin, sitting in a cafe on the … [pause while aircraft passes overhead] Literally I took some psilocybin from this little bottle, sitting in a cafe on a main street in Paris. As I’m sitting there, I said to Dick, “I’m feeling a little awkward because the colors are so bright and sounds are so piercing.” He had not taken any material, but he said to me, “Well, that’s the way I feel just being in Paris.” So we withdrew to my hotel room where he was basically a sitter for this session. Out of that came a first realization that the universe was larger than I thought, and that my identity was smaller than I thought, and that a lot of my attachments seemed became more tenuous. There was something about human interaction that I had been missing. It was definitely what we would call a bonding experience, but it was not at all stripping away the levels of reality that came later.

However, whatever happened that week, one week later he was in Copenhagen and I had followed him, somewhat like kind of a dog that gets lost hundreds of miles from home and finds their master. I showed up in Copenhagen, and we had another evening session. The realization that night was that when human beings were close to one another, you could really ask anything of each other because you would take into account the other’s needs first. You would not ask anything that would be a true imposition even if you really needed something. There was a level of, The Three Musketeers that seemed to arise out of that. A while later I was traveling in Scotland with Arthur Kopit, the playwright, who was at that point a young genius, also just a year out of Harvard. I felt that Arthur really didn’t understand all the beautiful things I was experiencing. I was this incredibly open, loving little being at that point. So much so that a local Scottish lass who we came across ended up a while later as my fiancé. I was clearly radiating goodwill. I asked for some more material to show Arthur what life was all about, but, by the time it arrived Arthur had gone off in his life, while I was back in Paris doing other things. I ended up actually giving my brother a session, which led to his being much more open and getting engaged to someone shortly thereafter. That was all at the level of human closeness, authenticity- what the humanistic psychologists define themselves as. This was not looking at all at spiritual issues, at religious traditions, which didn’t interest me particularly then.

Due to some other things in my life such as the war in Vietnam and my draft board -I had a letter from them saying, “Would you like to join us in Viet Nam? “ I considered the alternatives open to me by law, one of which was graduate school. I’d been accepted to Stanford the year before and had said, “I’ll just put a hold on that because I would rather leave the country.” But after my draft board wrote me, graduate school looked really good. I saw it as much, much, much the lesser of two evils, but truly something that had no great value for me. I showed up at Stanford as a first-year graduate student somewhat embittered, because I was truly there as a way of dodging the draft. I really felt that the United States government would make a terrible mistake having me as a soldier. A combination of distaste for war, not wanting to kill people I didn’t know, cowardice, and a number of deep· philosophical truths which I hadn’t come across yet.

At this point, I’m starting my graduate work and feeling fairly disappointed with what psychology might be, because also, now I’d used psychedelics, and I knew there was a lot more. I didn’t know what “more” was, but I sure knew that psychology was not teaching it. In the book of university courses, hidden away in the back, were what are called “graduate specials.” Willis Harman taught one. It was called The Human Potential. In the little write-up it said, “What is the highest and best that human beings can aspire to?” It suggested various kinds of readings. I read it and I thought, “There is something about psychedelics in here. I don’t know what it is, but this man knows something of what I know. I was going around at that point dividing the world into people who knew what I knew – which wasn’t very much, but more than I’d known two weeks earlier and everyone else. I’d look at Impressionist paintings, and I’d think, “Did this person see what they were painting or are they copying other Impressionists?” And like- I knew. Whether I knew correctly or not was totally beside the point to me. Anyway, I wandered into Willis Harman’s office, which was a typical professor of electrical engineering’s office in a building that was as drab as a contemporary hospital. I said “I’d like to take your graduate special,” and he said, gently, “Well, it’s full this quarter, but I give it again. Perhaps you would be interested at a later date.” I looked at him and said, “I’ve had psilocybin three times.” He looked at me, and he got up, and he walked across his office past the engineering bookshelves and closed the door. Then we got down to business.

As it turned out, I had guessed very correctly that this course was his way of dealing with how do you teach this material in a way that doesn’t get you either discovered or fired, because I don’t believe he was tenured by then. We agreed that I would not only take the class, but I would kind of co-teach it. Because I was totally willing to be open with what was happening with me, and he was not. I felt that I had much less to lose, which was probably true. So, we gave it together, and gradually we began to go through his “What is the best and highest that human beings can aspire to?” Near the end of the class, we read the mystics and then moved on to discuss personal experiences. At some point that fall, I was also starting to work with the International Foundation for Advanced Study that had been set up in Menlo Park as a way of working with psychedelics. Myron Stolaroff funded it from his time at Ampex Corporation, Willis Harman was involved, and a number of other people. They had no psychologist on their team, so I became their psychologist, which at the time was a little ludicrous since I was about two months into my first year of graduate work, having not been a psychologist as an undergraduate. We began to work on a paper called, “The Psychedelic Experience” for the Journal of Neuropsychiatry.  It reported the results of the sessions they’d been running for people, and it contained beautiful transformative experiences, and people who had discovered love and truth and goodness in each other, and also a great many mystical experiences. I went over this paper and I carefully noted all the mystical experiences, and took scissors – cut-and-paste in the pre-computer era – and cut them. Didn’t paste them anywhere, just put them aside. Willis said, “What are you doing?” I said, “No respectable journal is going to print that kind of stuff.” Willis looked at me; I looked at him, and he said, “That’s fine.” He took all my little scraps and carefully put them in a little appendix to this paper.  I said, “What are you going to do with that?” He said, “Well, I’ll just show that to some friends.” I said, “That’s fine.” So, he sent the paper and the appendix to the journal over my unknowing dead body, and they published it.

At some point during this time – because some months went by between acceptance and publication – Willis said “Maybe you’d like to have a session with us.” Because here I was, filled with my psilocybin-Dick Alpert-Tim Leary-human closeness-low dose experience. I said, “That’d be great!” So, I showed up on October 19th, 1961 at the Foundation’s headquarters, which were two living room-like suites above a beauty shop looking out over a parking lot. I was offered the opportunity to take some LSD with Willis as a male sitter, a lovely woman professor of electrical engineering as a female sitter, and a physician, who was Charlie Savage. The physician basically did his physicianness of giving me the material and then left to resume his private practice down the hall as a psychoanalyst. I took some material and looked around and said, “Well, aren’t you taking something?” Because that had been the model I had from Dick and Tim and the session I had with my brother and so forth. Willis, I think, took a little amphetamine to kind of keep me cool. I then put on some eye shades, lay down on a couch, listened to music – this being the method that they had developed through the work of Al Hubbard and others. Basically, I had my little mind washed away, much to my surprise.

The day went on in kind of classic psychedelic high-dose entheogenic fashion. I discovered that my disinterest in spiritual things was as valid as a ten-year old’s disinterest in sex. It came out of a total unawareness of what the rest of the world was built on. I went to a place where there was the total aloneness, the got-to-walk-this-valley-by-yourself deep awareness of separation from the universe, and that there really was nothing that you could hold onto. Which fortunately is very, very close to the place next to it where there is only one thing, and you’re part of it. At that point, there was what might be called songs of jubilation throughout the heavens at that moment another jerk wakes up to the realization of not who I, Jim Fadiman, was, but who/what I was part of. What a relief!  I then moved into a space of feeling that I was-not part of everything, but everything was part of everything and I was clearly part of that. It was obvious there is no death. It’s obvious that the fundamental waveform of the universe is best described in human terms as love.

This was all incredibly obvious. For some peculiar reason, which was unclear to me at the time, but was clearly a question, is I was being given this awakening to my true self.  From that place, for the rest of the day I looked at various structures in my life, and they were all – at best – amusing. That being a graduate student, avoiding the war, seemed to be a perfectly plausible thing to do since one had to do something in this incarnation, in this body. It was unclear whether I, Jim Fadiman, as a personality had lived before. But it was also not very important, because the Jim Fadiman that was in that room on October 19th wasn’t very important. He served as the box I came in. That evening, before going home with Willis, I went up to the top of Skyline and looked out, and the feeling I had of identification with Creation was such that I kind of walked around saying things like “I’ve really done a splendid job at all this.” The “I” was clearly not me, not Jim Fadiman, but the “I” was pleased with Creation, and pleased that part of me was observing part of me. Like singing songs of praise to the Lord is an Old Testament notion. You wonder, from a down-here position, why the Lord is at all interested in that, since He wrote the songs and so forth. But when you’re in the praising mode, it feels like a very nice way of congratulating yourself for jobs well done.

I saw an 80-year-old filmmaker the other night, looking at some of his films done 30 years ago. Someone said, “What do you think of when you look at your old-films?” He said, “Some of them are pretty good.” It was that feeling. I wasn’t into being the Creator, but having been the Creator it was a very nice place. I went home to Willis’s house to kind of come down for the evening, and looked into, among other people’s, eyes his son, who was crawling at that point, Dean Harman. Dean and I looked at each other, and it was one of those, “Hey man! Hey man! It’s cool, right?” He was an old soul, too, yeah. “You’re in just a little baby body.” “Yeah, that’s what I’m doing now, but don’t worry about it.” There was at feeling that the nature of personal identity was a fascinating topic, but not a way of identifying yourself. Eventually I was dropped back into my little graduate student hovel. I emerged the next day, wondering, “What do you do when you know all this?” Given that you’ve been reincarnated as a first-year graduate student at Stanford, a world not at all hostile to any of this, but totally oblivious.

I continued a rather delicate career as a graduate student, committed to making this more available to everybody, since, at that point there was no one, I could see who would not benefit from knowing what I would say was the fundamental truth of existence. I became a kind of dual agent, which is, I was a somewhat boring graduate student by day. I took to wearing a coat and tie. I was the only graduate student that looked the least like a hippie possible, since I felt that the department then would not assume that I was anything other than what I looked like (which was a great stratagem). Then, at night, I was reading what I needed for my education, which was the Gita, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and whatever Wasson had written by then. From time to time, I’d stop reading and go out and sit in front of a small tree and watch it begin to vibrate and look like energy in the shape of a tree. That would reunite me with what I was about. There’s also a huge beautiful church at Stanford with large stained glass windows that I would also spend time in and relax until the characters and colors were also in motion, which I identified with psychedelics. There is something called visual constancies, which we all have to keep the world from looking a little odd, so when people cross a room they don’t go from small to large. What I learned from psychedelics is you could relax your constancies and actually see things as they were, without the editing function thrown in. That turned out to be very useful.

That’s an initial answer to the question, because then I remained part of this team – Willis Harman, Myron Stolaroff, Charlie Savage and others, – but at a very different level, because now I knew what on Earth we were doing. The question was how we could do what we were doing and what was our vision? One of the things I did was say, the Harvard group really needs to be brought up to speed, because they’re still at the level of human closeness. I did manage to get some meetings of the two to happen, but it turned out that the Harvard group and the Menlo Park group had somewhat different ways of looking at the political structure. Tim, as we all know, had a habit of would trying to destroy any structure he was in. The group I was working with had a habit of cooperating with the federal government at whatever level seemed necessary, including letting them know what we were doing, and really being in touch with what were beginning to be the drug police of the United States. We were totally watched and investigated endlessly in our little research unit by the federal government. One of the nicest was at one point, they said “The mescaline you’re using needs to be assessed for its purity, because we’re sure that it may have problems.”

It turned out that the mescaline used by the federal government to calibrate ours was the other half of the same batch as ours. We were in this dance with the government. When they said you can’t use mescaline, then we would work with LSD, and back and forth. We actually became not substance-dependant for the work we were doing.  The work was determining that if you could give psychedelics in a totally supportive atmosphere, a non-medical setting, with a high enough dose to matter, could you facilitate what we would now call an entheogenic experience, and would that be beneficial? This was with total federal approval for a few years except for these little dances about materials and that we were being watched. Because our mentor was Al Hubbard, and Al Hubbard was this very mysterious character who was at various times a Canadian agent, a federal agent, and had through his own transformative experiences decided that this was what he was going to do with his life was to make this all possible. He was really the guiding light and certainly the major disturber, and kind of the shit-stirrer in our little world. Whenever Hubbard would come through, any of the convenient relationships that we had with one another would be disrupted by both his presence and what he would do. Also, advanced training as it came to be called was done with Hubbard, and was not done in Menlo Park. :
In Canada?

JF: No, it was usually done in Death Valley. Death Valley, from that standpoint, was the most kind of intense outdoor setting that existed, and that it allowed a kind of opening that didn’t seem to be as easily achieved in any other place.

: What was the set and setting there? Or how did you do it? What was the structure?

JF: Set and setting for Death Valley was very different. You went out in a car from Lone Pine and at some point you stopped and you took a bunch of material and then you drove to some locations and spent time there, usually ‘eyes open/dealing with what was visible- or visible on the invisible planes there, the notion (and this is things I didn’t experience) was that there are very large entities in Death Valley, entities half a mile high, some kind of energy beings from some other way of looking at the world. You also dealt with your own life much more directly because of literally, the harshness and the enormous beauty and enormous barrenness of that area. I actually only went out there once, but that was the advanced training center which was a major way of making sure you didn’t get caught in your belief systems.

I was also involved on the other end of things with the Ken Kesey world because Dorothy, my wife to be, had been involved with Ken, and I met her through that group. I was one of the few people who was deeply involved in totally legal experimentation, high-dose religious experience, and also hanging out with – not the psychedelic pioneers but the absolute first group of psychedelic outlaws, who were total explorers and had no restrictions on what they explored or how, and really did much more dangerous and exciting things. At one point, we discovered through research and Richard Evans Schultes’ writings that certain varieties of morning glory seeds contained an analog of LSD. This, I think, is representational of the kind of cheerful naïveté that I, at least, worked with. Some of the people in the outlaw world were thinking of taking these, and I thought that they also might have terrible side effects and might be poisonous and so forth. One morning Willis and I ground up a whole bunch of morning glory seeds that we bought from our local gardening store and ate them. I realized my intention was to see whether they were bad for you.

As I look back on that, that’s a kind of personal research I wouldn’t practice anymore. We then walked from Willis’s house up into the Biological Preserve above Stanford and lay around for the day. I did find that if you eat enough cellulose that you do feel sick. The seeds did contain an analog of LSD, which absolutely took you toward the same place. During that session I had one of those visions that forever colors the way you hold certain attitudes and ideas. The vision was that I, (being in the academic world, you have academic visions), was writing on this huge blackboard a very complicated and very sophisticated analysis of reality as I understood it with the help of psychedelics. With that, God came in and looked at this and said that it was just wonderful! – and then erased it all.  I said, with more than a little bit of concern, “Why have you erased it?” He says, “That was just wonderful. I just loved that. I certainly hope you’ll do others.” I realized that what I was being told is that the chances of me – in this body, in this lifetime, with these languages and in this civilization really understanding reality was zero. But it is extraordinarily entertaining and even nourishing – it was a good thing to invent these theoretical castles in the air. The transformation for me was that I, from that point on, was not committed to my deepest core beliefs. Because I began to see that my deepest core beliefs were among the beliefs that I was changing. If I looked back a few years, there had been real shifts in the beliefs that I now felt were core. So, since I was letting go of some core beliefs every few years, I had no reason to assume that the core beliefs that I had now were going to last any longer. There was a certain relief, a kind of letting go of pretentiousness. And a willingness to argue …

{Audio Tape goes haywire here: looks okay but sounds like it’s running fast forward! Must of happened in dubbing process – SL}
Tape#2

JF: We were just kind of finishing up the destruction of belief systems. That’s been partly, I think, my career of not being too attached to any given ideological stance was really clarified in that particular session, which is different from the experience that all systems are valuable that lead toward this fundamental experience. It’s a different way of looking at it. This was more understanding that my own personal take on things was always going to be personal, subjective, limited, and inaccurate.

: Would you say some more about Al Hubbard and the way he conducted sessions?

JF: Well, one of the things that interesting about Al Hubbard was that he came out of a kind of non-sophisticated Catholic background. One of the questions that he had originally had asked the Virgin Mary to give him something, a purpose in life. Out of certain visionary experiences he had, he then discovered psychedelics, which tied in, for him, what he’d been told he might work on. But one of his concerns was always dealing with the Catholic Church and the Catholic hierarchy. So, one of the things, for instance, in the work in Menlo Park, where we had a number of Catholics and we knew we were dealing obviously with fundamental religious experience, we had a letter from someone within the Catholic hierarchy that basically said yes, they understood what this experience was about, and it was acceptable for Catholics to have this experience. Now, for Catholics and Christians in general, one of the things that this living room had was one wall with a curtain. If you drew the curtain, what you saw was a mural of the Last Supper, without any features on any of the faces, but a very traditional Last Supper rendition. This was not mentioned before a session began. So, for people with a strong Christian issue or orientation or devotion, when you were in a certain level of psychedelic work and you have this to project through, some remarkable transformations occurred.

The other item that was used was a Salvador Dali painting of the Crucifixion, because this is an incredibly drawing taking you up through energy levels. With my, I think, iconoclastic orientation beforehand the vision I experienced on that October 19th included something with Jesus, where I was rising toward that light in the universe through which all love and all energy came through, and in front of me was a crucified Christ. However, as I continued on my journey I passed it. I was somewhat confused because I had been amazed to see it. As I looked back, it was clear that it was a cutout. It was like a set piece, and literally you’d see the structure of the set construction, you know, the 2x4s crossing where your set design was constructed, perhaps because I had a background in drama. What I realized is indeed Christ was “the way”, but if you think about it, you don’t stop on the way, it’s the way to something. For people for whom that was important, that was an opening. I also knew that Buddha was a way, and so forth and so on. Personally it made the Christian experience a little more a comfortable, a little more sensible. For Al Hubbard, I don’t think that one would say that Hubbard was a Catholic any more than one would say any of the major psychedelic pioneers have-any single identification. For example, to say that Zalman is just Jewish would be really a great disservice to him, and so forth. Does that answer that?

: How long were you able to conduct this research with psychedelics at Stanford?

JF: I was able to complete my dissertation, which was “Behavior Change During Psychedelics (LSD) Therapy,” a title I that I came up with so that Stanford would not throw me out. My dissertation, if you really have no idea what I’m talking about, looks like a fairly ordinary dissertation. It took me two years to get a committee who would be willing to have their names on it, and about six or eight weeks to complete the dissertation after that, because I had most of it done. Later we were allowed by the federal government to do a totally different study on creativity, on the question of could psychedelics facilitate problem solving of a technical nature. Oscar Janiger and a lot of other people had done work with artists. However, with people like Willis and Myron, it was clear that we wanted to be able to do more scientistic science, as well as more scientific science. We were really not sure, if we could use these materials and get people to work on highly technical problems, when we knew that if you upped the dose enough, they would be much more interested in letting go of their personal identities, and letting go of time and space, and seeing God.

To put it to the test, was we got together one night – Myron and Willis and James Watt, our current physician, and I-and we took a very low dose of LSD, 25 mcg. We then played music to ourselves and waited until the walls were breathing just a little, and we were at a reasonable state of whatever the biochemistry is, and we were in flow. Then we worked on the study. Our reasoning was that if we could design a study under a low dose, then one could run the study, because we were doing exactly what we were asking people in the study to do, which was to focus down on the technical problems of research design, and not get caught up in the beauty and grandeur of the universe. Which we did. It was truly bootstrapping in the nicest form. Then we began to run this study. I was a PhD. By then and therefore had learned a certain amount of research design and blah, blah, blah. We began to run this gorgeous study where we had senior scientists from a number of companies – research scientists – and what we said to them is, “We will assist you in your most pressing technological problems, particularly if you’re stuck.” Our criteria for admission to that study were: “At least three problems that you have spent at least three months on.”

We had a range of people from hard sciences, theoretical mathematicians, architects, a number of people. We would work with four of them at a time. Because of our connections at Ampex, we had the best audio equipment available because, it turned out, good sound quality seemed to matter a lot – four sets of headphones. We basically would take them through the morning as we would for a high-dose experience, which is: relax, headphones, eyeshades, music, and don’t work on your problems. Then, we would pull them out around noon and ask them to work on their problems. They would have brought pens, pencils and, pads of paper. Someone did bring a slide rule, but decided it was not applicable after a while. They worked ’til maybe 4:00. Lunch was slipped in, but most people didn’t eat. Around 4:00, we would begin to basically get into more of a relaxation – not social, but convivial time. They would also begin to review their work and make such other notes as they needed to make. Their discussion was basically: How did it work? Out of those sessions, a number of patents emerged. One of my favorites was a lovely architect who had the task of designing a small block in Santa Cruz into a set of shopping, eating and sitting spaces.

It was a task of complicated architectural possibilities. What he said was, at the end of the four hours, he’d seen the entire structure. He’d spent the afternoon making drawings. What was most exciting to him was he hadn’t seen the concept; he’d seen the buildings! He drew in the parking spaces; he was drawing in very kind of inside-the-walls specifications: size of beams, nature of bolts. For him this was just a total pleasure, because that is not the way he’d ever been able to do a project before. He literally had seen it and walked around in it. It was designed. It existed as a kind of platonic form. That was the kind of marvelous thing we were doing.

One morning we had four people running – It was between now the nine and noon, and I’d stepped out for a while. We got a letter from the federal government. It said, almost this curtly, “ As of the receipt of this letter, your experimental drug license is terminated.” We learned much later that over 60 psychedelic research projects had been canceled on the same day. Seemed counterintuitive for the government to shut down the only regulated uses while the counter culture was rapidly expanding. The theory that I came up with was that there was a meeting in Washington that went something like this: “We are now concerned that psychedelics are widely available and that people are misusing them. There are things happening in the youth culture, and we really can’t do, as far as we can tell, a thing about the things that bothers us. But we can stop somebody somewhere, and that will make us feel better. So, what we’ve decided to do this morning is stop all research in the United States. Our reasoning {my best guess here} is that was the only thing that we controlled, so at least we can stop somebody.”

Reading the letter with our little crew, we thought about the four people in the next room who represented major scientific minds, and agreed that we had gotten this letter tomorrow. However, that effectively ended our research. We did publish those results and there are a number of rather distinguished, very happy scientists in this area. One became the vice president of Hewlett­ Packard, another has won every major scientific award that the computer offers, and so forth- from that research. So, we in a sense … It’s as if you strike oil and you get that scene of the geyser spraying dirty oil on everyone, and everyone’s smiling and hugging each other and laughing, and then someone comes along and says ” Cap your well. No more oil in the United States.”  At the peak of our finding a way into the culture, totally acceptable, and also acceptable to us, not denying people’s spiritual values, because these were problems that people wanted to work on and mattered to them.

We were asked to please not only stop, but to – as we all know – to try and deny whatever we had already learned and to maintain as high level of ignorance as we could while millions of people then experimented without knowledge, help, support, etc.

: Given that you are instructed to terminate these activities, and given that you had had profound visionary experience yourself, what did you do with your psychedelic vision at that point?

JF: I really stepped back, and at that point… I was more aware of the absurdity of this moment in the drama than feeling personally affected, because I was at a place where things didn’t personally affect me much; they just happened and I did whatever I needed to do. And so I thought, “Well, what else is available?” At that point, because of the millions of people using psychedelics, numbers of other pathways were starting to open up. What had been the other traditions – of which meditation was the most obvious, speaking now – but it was not at all obvious in 1965: fasting, vision quests, self-immolation, the use of shamanistic practices, the peyote way. In a sense, given that I couldn’t use what seemed to be the cleanest, best, easiest way to work with myself and other people, I then said, ” What else is there? Since I’m not going to, you know, begin to sell life insurance.”

Given that I was this just fresh PhD without employment. I was offered a position as a counselor at San Francisco State – because they were desperate for someone who had experience with these materials and could work with students who came in with drug related issues. Until, however, they thought about it and realized that if they hired me or anybody like me, it would imply that there was some truth or legitimacy to what was going on. Rather than have someone who knew what was going on, they decided not to. I then realized that my career was on rather shaky grounds, since my dissertation exposed me as one of ‘them,’ whoever ‘them’ were.  I had snuck through Stanford. By the time I got done, Stanford’s great terror was that they would be known as the Harvard of the West, which would mean – since Tim and Dick had been fired by that time for doing research, less controversial than the research I’d been doing.

Arabesque

: So, what did you do with the psychedelic vision, then?

JF: I tried to make use of it in my life in a very simple-minded way, which was: If I knew or had learned anything, then I had to somehow in my life exhibit it. There’s a country & western tune that says: “If you’ve got religion, show it.” An even more wonderful song by Bessie Smith, that says, “If you got it, bring it in here or else you got to leave it out there.” One of the things I did was begin to work with what became the transpersonal, and – among other things – helped create the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, which was a place in which different religious traditions could talk, not about doctrine or differences, but about experience. We could cooperate with each other in a way that hadn’t really been possible in religious circles or in psychological circles. That whole association and journal came out of a meeting at Esalen that we put together with the help of Michael Murphy, where we brought together the best Catholics we could find – the most open, the most liberal, the most scholarly – and a number of us – we weren’t outlaws because there weren’t too many laws yet, but we were clearly beyond the fringe.

We had a meeting with them for a weekend. What we came away with is to realize that the bridge between spiritual experience and psychology had to be built, and that these Catholics weren’t going to lay a stone of it. So, it was up to us. We really felt that one model that existed was the humanistic journal, association, friendship group. We began to form that on a friendship basis, and we wrote to all the editors of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and said, “We’re moving on. There is more to the human condition than we have experienced in our humanistic orientation. We don’t quite know where we’re going, but here’s among the things that we’re going to look at. Would you like to join us?” About half of them said something like “I have some vague idea of where you’re going and I’ll go with you” or and the other half said, “Absolutely not.” The major “no”s that come to mind were Victor Frankl, who said “Total nonsense.” and Rollo May, who, for various reasons, became a enemy of the spiritual, willing to work against it. Particularly, what seemed to frighten him was adding the spiritual back into psychology. Along the way as a graduate student, I had become a devotee of William James. James basically not only invented psychology, but also the psychology he invented was the full transpersonal realm from the highest and most abstract or non-form spiritual experiences to human learning and personal interactions and how the visual system works under stress and so forth. Here was this incredibly full vision of psychology that turned out to be the foundation of psychology. In sharp contrast, there was what I’d had at Stanford, and then mainstream psychology has only become more shrunken since.

: I have a historical question that I put together. We interviewed Stan, who mentioned that Maslow his whole life had resisted taking any psychedelics.
JF: Uh-huh.

: And I guess Stan had talked to him, maybe you had talked to him, and other, xx [?] talked to him, and so on. And according to Stan, at the end of Maslow’s life, he had a heart attack.

JF: Right.

: After he had a heart attack he came either to Ram Dass or to Tim – we’re not sure who – and said “I’m ready sure I don’t have a lot of time left.” He then had a psychedelic experience and apparently personally made the leap between humanistic and the transpersonal. According to Stan, it was at that point that-. I think, and this is what I want to get clear and check out with you – I guess you and Stan and maybe Maslow began to really create what is now, put the seeds of the transpersonal xx [?] group together. So, I’d like to get a little bit of the historical from your sense.

JF: Let me give a different history. Tony Sutich is the unsung hero of both humanistic and transpersonal psychology. One man created two of the four psychologies. Tony Sutich did this while being almost totally physically paralyzed. Tony lived on a slant bed and had the use of muscles in one arm enough to turn the phone on and off with a little pull chain, and about half of his facial muscles. That’s about all he had. The internal organs worked well enough so he could live. Lying there he became friends with a lot of people. He also made a living as a psychotherapist. But lying there he created humanistic psychology and he created the Association for Humanistic Psychology as a covert way of getting more funding for the journal, because you could charge people twice for the same journal. It was Tony who began to realize that we needed to move on, that the highest and best were beyond what the humanists were talking about. It was around that time that I appeared with my little psychedelic fresh-scrubbed face.  Maslow was certainly on the fence in those years. But Maslow, as he got older, began to have what he called “plateau experiences.” which were that he would get very high off of something in Nature or in human beings, and he’d stay there for a while. He really had no framework.

At one point he was redoing The Psychology of Being. We were on our way to a Spring Grove conference, which was early consciousness researchers hiding out in the Midwest where no one would suspect us, and talking truly openly about everything. Abe and I were on a flight together, and he showed me the introduction. It had a footnote, which basically said the I Ching and astrology and Eastern thought in general was bunk and hokum and should not be looked upon by grownups.  I said, “Abe, I don’t think you want to put that in. Even if you don’t know, it’s not going to serve you.” And he took it out. But that’s where he was coming from; he is truly someone who had come through the Western mind. Originally, he was an animal researcher. So, he’s made more of an intellectual and growth leap than any of us ever had to do. Someone in Freud’s circle talks about standing on the shoulder of giants.  I think Freud’s retort was “And the giant still is a giant,” something like that. We could go beyond where Abe could go comfortably. Yes, it was near the end of his life that Abe became comfortable with all that. But it was a hard road for him.
To Be Continued….

On Sale Now! The Hasheesh Eater

Here we go with the second part!
Gwyllm
_______________

Elder Interviews: Jim Fadiman, 1998 Part 2

Second Half Continued:
He died of a heart attack, running around his swimming pool in California, doing his exercises to prevent a heart attack.

: But do you know that he had a psychedelic experience?
JF: That’s correct, as Stan has told you.

: But you also found a certain level of hostility from some of the entrenched powers of the humanistic movement. Where was that resistance corning from? Because, in other respects, they were rather progressive for their time. Why was the psychedelic issue, the transpersonal movement, so antithetical to where their belief systems were?

JF: Since I made an interior move from their position to mine, I really have a good feeling for it, which is: If you have been brought up in a world where there is only this world, in a sense you’ve been brought up intellectually provincial. The only experiences you’ve had with religion have been with people who also have never had any spiritual experience. If, you’ve been brought up where there’s formal religion. You then have people who are speaking in all the metaphors of religion – because that’s the best language we have – but all it brings up for you is your own rather impoverished spiritual background. You then project onto them or to me that if I’m speaking about being a divine agent of God, that I’m clearly a paranoid schizophrenic about to knife you. Because paranoid schizophrenics talk about being the divine agents or angels of God. You get people who are truly dealing with the fear that their entire worldview is little. When you’re in a position of power and your entire worldview is little, it’s not unrealistic for you to say that the people who are attacking it must be wrong.

Psychology has a wonderful way of turning disagreement into derangement, into disability, into pathology. When I said I wore a coat and tie at Stanford that was a very conscious and deliberate effort to make sure that people did not even ask me what I knew. A very nice way of saying it is: Fear in the scientific world is usually called skepticism. The people who I ran into – and run into today- truly are saying, as Werner Erhard might say, “From my observation and experience, everything you’re talking about does not exist.” If you read ancient history and you get, Herodotus’s view of certain ancient peoples who lived in places he’d never been, maybe carried their heads under their arms – I believe that was one of the groups that he writes about. If I’ve had no experience with that it’s unlikely, it’s unlikely that if you’ve never seen a giraffe or an elephant, that either exists. If you’ve had a little bit of biology, it’s highly unlikely that a duckbilled platypus exists. If someone comes to you and says “I would like you to meet my friend the elephant who will carry us in his trunk into the jungle.” Correctly, you would say “I’d rather you go away, and I certainly don’t want to hire you in my school. I certainly don’t want to publish your articles.”

: Would you say that this is also reflective of why the culture at large became so hostile to psychedelics, and why, after the initial enthusiasm, there was a wave of repression which included shutting down your Stanford program?

JF: Well, the way I’ve looked at it is that psychedelics were a wave growing in magnitude, and Vietnam was this stone wall. When psychedelics met Vietnam, the country split apart, the old guard who had created and maintained a Vietnam and were into war and so forth were correctly, terribly threatened. Because the psychedelic people were saying “We are not really interested in any of your institutions, and we’re willing to do what’s necessary to tear them down. We’re willing to eliminate your university, not to add some courses. We’re willing to eliminate your military, not improve training. We’re willing to turn your churches into parks, because true religious experience does not work well in stone halls. Each of those institutions said, “I don’t know what you guys are up to, but I’m so deeply threatened, to the extent that I can stop you, I will. Basically, you saw got an amazing unity of the major institutions against the psychedelic wave. What the major institutions said was, “We control all the guns. We control all the universities. We control all the roads. We control medicine. And, by God, we are at war with these people who are not content to let us live our lives, but are determined through the most dangerous and most vulnerable part of us, our children, to take away the love and respect and support of our institutions and ourselves.” From their point of view, it’s hard to know what else they could have done.

: … also, you’re a great storyteller.

JF: I once looked at my speaking patterns; they are closest to pre-stroke Ram Dass. I was listening to him a couple of times and I got “Whoo!”

: You’ve just got the tempo …

JF: Tempo, well, the use of timing, use of humor, only for serious points. For instance, I never tell jokes, and I can. I don’t do anything for humor, but I use humor continuously as a way of breaking frameworks.

JF: It can be, but it’s the way I see the world. I mean, I really do see the world in its dramatic potential.

.: Recently I looked through a listing of all the articles in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology over the years. In the first six or seven years are a great number of articles addressing the psychedelic issue. Then for about the next 12, 13, 14 years there’s not one article on psychedelics. What happened with the evolution of the transpersonal movement, and why did psychedelics fall out until relatively recently, when they re-entered?

JF: Let’s make the question just a little larger: Where did psychedelics really deeply influence parts of the culture? If you go down a list of the major people in transpersonal psychology, or spiritual psychologies in general, what you will find is: Almost everyone was deeply affected by their own psychedelic experience. Let me give you a parallel world, which is if you go to a conference of the great computer hackers and breakthrough computer people of the first wave of computer companies, all of them were deeply affected by psychedelics. You will not find any mention of psychedelics in the history of computers, because it didn’t serve them to mention it, except to one another. At some point there’ll be a great outing of those people. Many of them have been asked and they have said, no, they would rather not come out at this point. What you got were people who were working with consciousness in the transpersonal. We’re also creating and trying to define what this branch of psychology was. What we found is: As we expanded, there were more and more people who were deeply concerned with one or another aspects of a spiritual tradition and how that affected consciousness. In a sense, psychedelics were less and less important to filling in the puzzle.

While the major figures all were affected by psychedelics, maybe continued to use them, maybe not, what was transpersonal became far larger. The way I like to talk about it is: People say, “Well, what is transpersonal psychology versus conventional psychology?” I reply, “Conventional psychology is at least 150 years old, and transpersonal psychology is 5,000 years old. What we learned is there are a lot of people who had actually explored things for hundreds of years that we were just discovering. We tended to begin to look to the Buddhists and the Tibetans and the Hindus – not for exploring our own personal experience, but for seeing how the worldview was discoverable through these much longer and sophisticated lenses. I mean, one of the things, as my blackboard incident says, is my understanding of things was not very large. I understand the fundamental truth of the universe, but if you ask me to describe that, I will fall into one metaphorical system or another, because I don’t have any choice. Transpersonal began to realize that we were able to publish articles of incredible depth and sophistication by drawing on thousands of years of other people’s work, rather than our early issues where we were drawing on our own personal experience which was initially naive and certainly kind of wobbly.

If you look at Castaneda’s work, you know, the first book of Castaneda says “I am a jerky graduate student, and I fell into a bunch of people, some of whom were illiterate, but all of them knew about a thousand times as much as I ever will, and, at the end of my book, I will throw in a little anthropological nonsense to prove that I am still a graduate student.” Gradually you lose any possibility that Castaneda knows anything of relevance, and that he is working from a worldview unknown to the rest of us, of the Native Mexican-American tradition. As we learn, he begins to understand that he was given psychedelics a lot because he had such a thick head and had so many conceptual boundaries that the question is: What can we do to get him to understand anything at all? I think Charlie Tart says that there are some of us who need to be hit across the head with a 2×4 to get our attention. We basically moved from our own self-congratulatory explorations to a much wider version of the world. I’ve given lectures and written books on certain religious traditions. Can I find psychedelics in those traditions? Of course. Do I need to mention it? Not particularly. Also, of course, as psychedelics had worse and worse press, and became less associated with fundamental religious experience, and more and more connected to whatever the federal government’s dishonest take of the day was, it was just less useful. Now you meet people in the transpersonal world – particularly people from other countries – who have come to transpersonal entirely without psychedelic experience, through various spiritual traditions.

: I guess now in the last six or seven years you’re starting to once again see articles on psychedelics in the transpersonal literature, there are xx [?] on psychedelics at the transpersonal conferences. What are the implications of this latest turn?

JF: The trend in the culture is to gently begin to admit, that while the federal government has stopped research, and the journal stopped accepting articles, and the funding organizations dried up, that young people are still taking psychedelics. Young people, predominantly better educated, and they are beginning to kind of admit to each other that the decades of misinformation hasn’t really held as well as the makers of disinformation would like. Just as it is generally known among approximately 12 to 20 million people that marijuana is not bad for you. Ginsberg said many years ago, “Imagine, given the success of marijuana and other psychedelic drugs, given the entirely hostile and wrong information about marijuana – imagine if we were allowed to advertise like tobacco.” What you’re seeing is another generation, of which some of you are members, that say, “I honestly had to look at my own experience versus the walls of misinformation, and my own experience seemed to be more valid. It’s now not so terrible to talk about psychedelics, because if you say in any public forum, “The government is both misinformed and misinforming,” no one is upset. Hitler had a theory that the Big Lie would work. And it does, unless you have personal experience.

Twenty years of Grateful Dead concerts have left a kind of road on which the culture of people who’ve had personal experience travel. The reason that marijuana is now available for medical use, whether the State of California likes it or not, is because too many physicians were saying it was a good idea. In spite of all of the rules that said that you are not allowed to tell the truth if you are a physician. You’re not allowed to tell the truth if you’re a psychologist. I did a series of films on psychedelics many years ago for KQED. And what we learned is – this was in the mid-Sixties, ’67 or so – that young people already knew that if someone was introduced as a government official or a physician that they were about to be lied to. That was the starting place in ’67. That core understanding – that you cannot trust your government to tell you about your own inner experience – has been maintained. We’re now seeing a kind of another wave of people who are in positions of authority and knowledge and responsibility who are being asked – particularly again by their children, now the third generation: “What’s the truth?”

: Were you also saying that, back then at least, you could not trust your physician to tell you the truth about your health?

JF: Right. This was at a period when if you had cancer your physician wouldn’t tell you.

: Well, what about today? Looking at this, we had the origins of the transpersonal movement, which were heavily grounded in the psychedelic experience.

JF: Right.

: A long maturing period where the great world traditions were embraced, incorporated. Now, there’s a sense that psychedelics are opening up again, a bit perhaps in a less dramatic way, a bit more subtle. Looking at the role of physician, let’s say, who seem to have monopoly over administering drugs, can you envision a phenomena, a transpersonal psychiatry which would more directly address psychedelic drug administration?

JF: Well, I think there are two contexts for psychedelic. One is psychedelic, and the other is entheogenic. Entheogenic is that one’s religion must be a private act, and that government suppression of private, internal events is fundamentally against humanity. President Clinton, on his first trip to China, said there are certain fundamental human freedoms. One of them has been, in the United States. the freedom of religion. That’s the entheogenic path. That’s the path that I am committed to, because I now realize that the government did not stop my research with that letter ending the research in the next room on creativity. It basically said, “You may not practice your religion, or we will physically imprison you.” That’s a rather striking departure from what the United States has historically done.

The other use, what my dissertation, for example, reports, which is the use of psychedelics to help people live better lives by having less neurosis, less psychosis, less fixations, less perversions, whatever. It’s a very different question. Maybe that should be in the hands of the people who historically in a culture administer interventions, which have been called ‘medical.’ Now I’m personally a lot more radical than that, because I recall in the United States around 1830, the laws were: Anyone could practice any kind of healing or medicine they wish. If you hurt people, you could be sued. If you didn’t hurt people, then you wouldn’t be sued. That’s where I’m coming from, which is the freedom to help people. We’ve lost that to many professions. I am not a licensed psychologist, which means that I cannot legally help people and charge them. With that said, I’m also a minister, and I can help people if I wish. I have that freedom to be helpful. If I were a psychologist I would have an enormous set of restrictions on how I could help them. If I were a physician, I would have a different set of restrictions on how I could help them. I’ve opted for the religious way, which gives me the maximum freedom to be of maximum use.

: Looking in your crystal ball, projecting ahead into the future, do you prognosticate a role for psychedelics, for entheogens? At least in these models?

JF: Until we get to the bottom of this current era of enormous moral repression, things will not change much. This is a real Inquisition era that we’ve moved into, where the goal of enormous number of people in this country is to prevent other peoples having the right to choose: the right to have children or not to have children, the right to have medicine or not to have medicine, the right to have religion or not to have religion. We’re reached reaching a pretty ugly place in terms of the decline of personal freedom. Hopefully, we’ll bottom out, and the next wave will not only allow psychedelics in the medical model, and entheogens in the spiritual model, but will really begin to set up structures that make sense. Just as there are now some religions coming out of Brazil which have found not only, very sensible structures for entheogen use, but are remarkably middle class – non socially disruptive, non tear-down-the-foundations-of­ society – groups. The problem that we had in the ’60s: It’s not that our vision of what the world could be was incorrect. It was, that by tearing down the buildings we happened to be standing in, we made it doubly difficult. It’s like Yugoslavia really has pushed itself back to about the 14th century by everybody shooting at everybody. Yes, they had some disagreements, but everyone lost enormously because everyone went too far. In a sense, that was the problem with the ’60s. That isn’t happening on this next round. The nice thing about the desire in the medical profession to alleviate human suffering is: that everyone at some point gets that they could be helped. The entheogenic route is a little more difficult, but will probably occur as country after country stops buying into the United States’ demands to have a drug policy that meets our morally conservative paranoia. The camel’s nose under the tent is really medical marijuana. Once you admit that a substance that your government says is unmitigated evil for all people at all times, no matter what, and we should not learn anything about it, should we be wrong has been wildly wrong, thing start to change. At some point, grownup nations start saying, “Golly, this really doesn’t sound like the way grownups behave. Even if the largest bully on the planet keeps saying, ‘You gotta do it our way,’ our own citizens really deserve better.” At this moment in England, the House of Lords is looking into if medical marijuana a good idea. Same time, the drug czar of England has recently busted his own son. Okay? We are dealing with a little bit of nuttiness here, at a very high level. But we’re not dealing with nuttiness in the House of Lords, because the House of Lords really doesn’t have a great stake in medical marijuana, for or against. We in this country have bought into such a set of lies that it’s very hard for a politician to say, “Huhh! All my colleagues and I have been lying to you for 30 years. All the people who I trusted for information when I was just a hustling attorney trying to get a job in Congress, lied to me and I continue to pay them.” Hard. It’s very hard to find grownup politicians who will say, “I was wrong.” We have Havel, Mandela, – a few great beings. But most politicians feel afraid to say, “I was wrong.” However, I think the future is basically bright-in cycles. In some ways, I’d like it to get to the worst as soon as possible, so we could get done with it.

: Jim what would you say to young people about psychedelics?

JF: I would basically give them my ’60s lecture on set and setting, which is: If you’re going to use psychedelics, do it with someone you love, and hopefully someone who’s been there before you, and be aware that you may find out that the world is even better than you ever thought. Sometimes people do ask me that. I recently was talking with a recent Stanford MBA, who was really asking that question. I saw that MBA about three months later, and she said, “The world is really wonderful!” She said, “And yeah, to think I was afraid.” I said, “Well, when you’re afraid, that’s not the right time.” Really, what I say is – If it feels correct then you’re going to go ahead, and by all means try and understand what the truth of these things are, which is that they are very powerful, and that you can indeed make a lot of mistakes. I can tell you about all of our mistakes, because, you need to make your own mistakes, while you’re on your own path.

: How would you say that the psychedelic experience in your own life has affected your personal views, about aging and death?

JF: Those are really two separate questions. Let’s take death, because that’s easy. My psychedelic experience is very clear that for Jim Fadiman death is certainly going to end a lot of interesting anecdotal material. As Jim Fadiman, I certainly think that’s terrible. But as I- this other I – big deal! -I deeply have the realization that my personality is like my shirt. When my shirt really gets ragged enough, I’ll take it off. There are other shirts. “In my house, there are many shirts,” to ruin a perfectly good quote from Edgar Cayce. Death is something that I don’t particularly look forward to it, even if, it’s as someone said, it will cure whatever ails you. Eventually all your troubles, whatever your conditions are, you don’t have to worry. So that’s fine.

As for aging, I haven’t found much going for it yet. That’s why I’m one of the psychedelic “pioneers’” and I’m very happy to be joining psychedelic “elders,” who are certainly considerably older than I am.

: I think one way of our looking at ‘elders’ was: What information would they want to pass on to younger people.

JF: I understand. The word ‘elder’ from a shamanistic position is the right word. Ram Dass used to use a different term – which I think is really more what pioneer is about- which is “explorer.” What he said is “Now and then you’d go back to the Explorers Club and they’d say: ‘Where you been?”‘ I feel more like someone who’s part of National Geographic than the Akashic Records. What I say to young people is basically to understand that the government has misinformed you very, very badly, and that it would be an awful lot better if you knew what the truth was before you worked with psychedelics.

That is probably because the level of misinformation is so great, people are using psychedelics a little too young. What I learned from my own research is that psychedelics took your life experience and composted it, so that something new could grow. If you really didn’t have too much experience it didn’t seem to be much effect. You didn’t seem to gain enough. I look at psychedelics always as learning tools. Even in the middle of a psychedelic experience I would begin to think, “I wonder what I’m going to do with this?” I’d like it to be over so I can start to get to the digestion and assimilation and new brain cell production. The act of the psychedelic experience itself wasn’t what was of major interest.

: Amongst indigenous peoples it’s not the young people going off on their own to take plants, psychedelics. Rather, it’s the elders facilitating a ritual of initiation to really, who’s desire it’s not for them to have a great personal experience but to fully incorporate them as functional adults within the society, within the community.

JF: Unless you know something about the nature of life and death, you’re not a grown up. Once you know something about the nature of life and death, then you don’t have much choice but to be a grownup. That’s the model that makes sense to me. So back to aging … As I got grew up fairly quickly during the ’60s, in terms of the deep things I know, I have filled in a lifetime of the shallow things: the making a living, and writing books, and having a family, and so forth. All of which, I’m very happy with. I’m not at all distressed about my life. But you do those whenever they come up. What I notice is that when I was much younger, old people were the age I am now. At my age, I still find old people are somewhat older. I don’t have much of a grasp on aging. I don’t do it much. I notice friends get into it but doesn’t attract me. When friends say, “Do you want to get cardiovascular improvement?” or “Would you like to go to the Galapagos?” I’d still rather go to the Galapagos.

Chelation doesn’t look like something I’m going to get excited by. Also, I’m a social being and what I’ve found is that one of the things about aging is that you become invisible to certain age groups. I don’t really find being invisible feels good, in terms of my neurotic needs and my desire to be liked and to do speaking and tell stories, it just doesn’t work for me. When someone says, “I’d like to learn something from you,” I’d prefer that we don’t have an age barrier. A problem, at least in this culture, is that aging raises those little barriers.

: Have you used psychedelics in more recent years? And if so have you found anything new?

JF: I had a long period in which I didn’t use them. Partly again, problems of set and setting. Making things illegal really doesn’t improve them. Most of my work was legal and legitimate. When I took psychedelics near the end of that period, it was still basically an acceptable thing; the thought police had not arrived.

There was a long period when I didn’t take them, but in the last year or so, I had a major psychedelic experience. My major concern, from that place of psychedelic clarity, could I say if had I lived my life within the framework of this larger vision. It was like a precursor of the Last Judgment, where they get those scales out and they weigh all those dirty things you did and all that groovy stuff you did, and you just watch the scale. I was relieved to find out that my life’s all right. Now, at higher levels, it couldn’t matter less what my life was, had I been a mass murderer and given bubonic plague to millions of children – at a high enough level, that’s just the way the universe was working.

The level I was looking at was a very conventional, which is: Did I make use of what I’d learned in the way I treated human beings, the way I treated myself, the way I loved, the way I expanded. I was taking a kind of long evaluation session. I could very comfortably, certainly wanted to go back to a more what I would call directly spiritual, where we bypass all that. Didn’t happen. What I got out of it was a reaffirmation that my personality doesn’t hold my interest. It’s a good tool; I like it. It’s a tool for the kinds of things I do in the world. But so is my Honda.

: What does hold your interest?

JF: I’ve been freed from reading psychology, which is just an enormous gift of personal liberation. I returned to literature, where all the great psychological thinking was. From there, I’ve moved into writing fiction. What I’ve finding is that, as someone said, “If it’s fiction, it better be true.” I can say more clearly what interests me and explore it more deeply using the structure, the superstructure, the scaffolding of fiction more than anything else. I’m also looking at: Where am I totally deficient due to my education? The visual arts. I had a sixth-grade teacher who managed — with enormous perseverance over my sixth-grade year -to kill any possibility of drawing or painting or any kind of making imagery. In the last couple of years, I’ve taken drawing classes, basically to get over that. What I’ve found is: There is a kind of meditative clarity, putting my personality aside, when I am trying to draw. After several years, I’m still not very good, but the feeling of pleasure in the doing keeps increasing. Without keeping learning, I feel I would have become boring to myself and I certainly couldn’t have maintained a decent marriage.

I have a pretty good idea of who I was as a Harvard undergraduate. As someone once said of me, “Does he ever have a serious thought?” I was a silly, smart, clever, sarcastic, childish, arrogant yecchh! I mean, I’m amused by who I was, but I certainly wouldn’t have him for dinner. My world was very, very tiny. It was based on having a very large vocabulary, a moderately large IQ, and so little soul, that if you measured it in teaspoons you probably wouldn’t have tasted it. I wasn’t bas but I wasn’t much. I am very clear that psychedelics were the fundamental resource upon which I have drawn to become a human being. Does that. .. ? [laughs]

: That’s a great answer, in fact, yeah. Who do you think should take psychedelics? Say, if it was in your power to design policy?

JF: Right, if it were in my power to design policy I would probably design something the way adult literacy is designed. For people to be given this experience in a good enough setting, those who are interested in helping other people would be empowered to do so. Certainly, there is no historical precedent for them to be people trained in either mental health or physical health as the primary criteria. It is very useful to have such people available, because sometimes there are problems, because these are very powerful and important materials. I would certainly feel very strongly that to return entheogens to a guide relationship, which has been true in every culture that I have studied, and during the years when I studied all cultures for their kind of entheogenic relevance, that’s what I found. The idea that people should go off and trip with people their own age, who don’t know any more than they do, be they 50 or 20 or 12, has never worked very well, and it didn’t work real well in our culture. If I were the religion czar, the spiritual experience czar, and decreed that people would be allowed to have freedom of religion in the United States of America, I would start by saying that freedom of religion of an entheogenic sort will be done similarly to the way one flies a private plane, which is: You don’t go up alone, you go up with someone who knows more than you do, and they steer the plane till you know how.

: What advice would you have for those of us who are interested in working within the system to make psychedelics available for healing? And similarly, what advice would you have for those like Bob Jesse who want to work within the system to make psychedelics available for religious experience?

JF: For those of you in the healing arts my advice is: Never trust anyone in the media to give you a fair shake. Even if you have given them psychedelics and their entire life is devoted to serving it.

: I’ve been through that one.

JF: That’s the first bit of advice. The second is – I don’t have any advice for you, I feel a combination of admiration and sorrow at the large rock you’re pushing up a very steep hill. When you get it up to the top each time, somebody pushes it down. In some sense you are a holding action; you are preventing the wisdom from being lost totally.

It’s like the Irish monks in the.9th and 10th centuries: You’re holding the knowledge until it can be used again but, honestly, the work that you’re allowed to do is damn little. If you were allowed to do research, I would be much happier for you, but to run studies to see if if it’s going to help cancer patients is as if you’re finding out if masturbating will get you off. It’s known.  I just admire you, really, for being willing to do this work that I clearly have dropped out of, because I was unwilling to push the rock Then again, you came up and that was the only door that was still open. The one’s I’d used were all closed. I watched them close a number of them in my face.

Therefore, I took some alternative routes to keeping the vision alive, if not the way of getting there. That’s the psychiatric side. On the spiritual side, I encourage that people continue to let the Divine Wind blow through them, however that can be done. If it’s satsang; if it’s meditation, whatever. I find that the national park system is a set of absolute cathedrals designed for people to let go of their small self.  I’m very supportive of the national park system. Give me Bryce Canyon, Death Valley, Zion, Yellowstone. The one thing that the government has not figured out is how much sedition is created by people falling in love with Nature.

: Anything we haven’t talked about, generally, or anything we have left out?

JF: Are we down to that one?

·: We’re getting there. We’re getting close.

JF: I don’t get to send a message to Zalman. He is one of the few people that would make the world want to be Jewish. Most theologians, of whatever persuasion, make you really are glad you’re not that. But Zalman really does the best I’ve ever seen at overcoming everyone’s concerns about the rigidity within the Jewish tradition. From a personal standpoint –this is a terrible time, where I don’t have any personal freedom, I live in this globalization country where “let’s make the poor, poor enough so that there’ll finally be a revolution, and the rich, rich enough so they can escape to some other country,” you know, choice, personal freedom, personal freedom of speech. There’s so little freedom speech anymore; it’s called political correctness. Unless you’re a right-wing fascist bigot, you can’t say what you want. Since I’m not-. I think I’m not – and I can’t say what I want in most public venues or I get attacked. We’re back to sexual repression as well.

As someone said, “I liked the Sixties.” My brother Jeff said it well. “For a few years a small percentage of the population was actually sexually satisfied.” That was a wonderful part of the Sixties, that people were free to love each other. I find this a very terrible time: From a slightly larger perspective, however, this is one of those “act two” eras, where act one was the Sixties and act two is now when everything gets terrible. When you work in fiction, you know that act three is where either you have a kind of joyful exuberance of discovery and reunification and the evils get undone, or you have a tragedy. Either one is art. Now that I can see more about what you do with fiction, either can have the same message, which is: No matter how great the darkness, there are still places of light.

One of the things I’m seeing in the 12th century is it was full of light. The 13th century was “pfft!’ – the darkness totally wins. The Catholic Church is at its unjust worst. It got so bad that we had the Reformation, that people said “God! This just can’t be the only game in town!” The Catholic Church said, ”Well, it actually is. We have eliminated all the other paths.”  The Catholic Church makes Microsoft look like, Ben & Jerry’s! Now, again, this is for people who are interested in being bold and brave and, as Ram Dass says, “Standing up. This is a wonderful time to be a hero, because the forces of darkness are everywhere. You know, in a time of universal peace, all this warrior stuff is inappropriate. I’m having a wonderful time at the moment. I’m aware that there is so much to be done. I mean, I used to give a talk on, “Don’t worry if people are not into your cause; there’s more than enough causes for them to participate in. As long as everyone is doing something, that’s very encouraging. Goethe says, “If every one in the world would sweep their front porch, the world would be clean.”

: From the long view, are you optimistic?

JF: On the long view I would say that there is no record of human history moving much. Socrates is still about as good as we get. We’ve now had a few thousand years, and there have been no improved models. I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic. If you’ve been in enough theater, what you realize is, the play will go on. You’re either going to play your part as well as you can, or you’re going to be a big drag. I’m personally optimistic, because my life is really quite wonderful, and the people that I try and affect, I want their lives to be wonderful. If I could affect millions of people, I’d prefer that. But the people who tend to affect millions of people tend not to be able to make their lives much better. Okay? Therefore, the more optimists there are the better it is. One of the things about correct use of entheogens is that you can tap into a core of optimism that no amount of “this world” can defeat. Because this world is not the only game in town; it’s not the best game in town, but as they say, when you’re a gambler and the only slot machines are crooked, you’re still going to play.

: I guess if Socrates is as good as it gets, then can we return to Eleusis?

JF: Socrates had the advantage that his government allowed him religious freedom. until he didn’t. He was able to use such psychedelic materials, with guides, as were available. Certainly Buddha had the same opportunities. So, that’s the nice thing. If you look through history through an entheogenic lens, what you realize is: The truth is always available. People are going to discover it one way or another in every generation. Therefore, in this generation a lot of us had a chance to discover it, not in a formalized institutionalized setting where we all have the same words. The other side of it is-and this is the very positive side – there has never been a time in the history of humanity when all the spiritual traditions were as close as your nearest bookstore. No one ever has had that!

: Or your computer screen.

JF: Or your computer screen even wider. That means you don’t have to live near a bookstore, which is also a new thing. So that’s really different. You know, in the 12th century there were just a couple of paths, you could find: the Kabbalah, the Arthurian legends, chivalry and a few mystical traditions. But those were only if you were one of the very, very, very tiny few in Europe with a lot of education and could do a lot of traveling. We’ve never had access to all the spiritual traditions. In spite of the government’s blah blah blah, there’s still easy access to entheogens. This could be… What do they say? ”This could be the start of something swell.”

· : Looking at history from entheogenic eyes, are you of the opinion that all the religions have an entheogenic core that may be long repressed but this would have been the original inspiration for what ensued?

JF: At the center of every spiritual tradition that is worth the name there is, somebody who had a break through into understanding what reality was. They were at that time in some kind of cultural matrix, so when they came back into being their bodies and their own cultural matrix and their own personality. They’d ponder, “How am I going to share this with anybody?” They did it in some way, and then eventually, they had ·a lot of people who hung out around them. Eventually some of the people hanging out around them said, ‘”I’ll do the shit work. I’ll arrange the meeting, I’ll bring in the food, I’ll handle things.” And the handlers gradually, as they always do, got control of the situation.

The original founders passed away, and then the handlers started to make it easier for themselves, because it’s easier to bring in the food if it’s every Sunday. It’s easier if everyone has ‘a certain place to sit. And so the bureaucrats always end up eating up spiritual food of the founder. Without a continual infusion of spiritual food you end up with what we call a religion. If you look at the religious right in Judaism, where you kill your prime minister; in the Arab world where you kill lots of other people; in the Christian world where you want to kill almost everybody -the religious right seems to be absolutely the same in every tradition, which is the farthest away from individual experience of universal love and compassion.

The religious urge cannot be repressed any more than the sexual urge – the need to be part of your whole self. But the expression of it always, inevitably – and I say that, without even any ill will anymore, gets “solidified.” That’s the nicer term; it gets ossified. Right? The bones start to be inflexible. Inflexible bones lead to inflexibility and that’s fine. My concern, for instance, with humanistic and transpersonal, is that it’s still run by people like me. I want to know who’s going to get rid of me, who’s going to throw us out. I’m looking towards – in a sense – the next psychedelic generation to say “What a bunch of tired old farts you are with this journal and this association and this old-fashioned transpersonal psychology when God is all around you!” I want then to say, “Carry him out!” I’ll say, ” Yes. Carry me out of the palace. You win! Let them tear down the walls and get back to basics.”

: So, maybe that’s your advice as an elder?

JF: Right. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t shoot me. But please take my job!

– : Okay. Thank you, Jim.

JF: You so very welcome.

: That’s excellent.
[End of interview]

Thank You For Visiting!  More Soon!

Gwyllm

So…

We went to see our old friend Nels Cline with his band Nels Cline 4 at the Mississippi Studio, in Portland in the north east part of town last April (yes just posting this…me bad!) Nels and his band mates performed a stellar set, transcendental to be exact.  “Pacific Pines” and “River Mouth (Parts 1 & 2) were the highlights for Mary & I.

We have known Nels since 1978/79 when he had just started working at Rhino Records on Westwood Blvd. 4 blocks from where we lived with Michael Conner, poet and lyricist and a member of the band “Grey Pavilion” where Nels guested on tracks and such.

His talents are many, you may know his works with Wilco, but for us it is his solo works, though we do love Wilco!

Henry Miller’s Best Friend…

Mary and I met Emil at the Henry Miller Museum in Big Sur. We had driven up from L.A. after moving to the States in late 1986. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, and a honeymoon as well (having married 8 years earlier). We were staying at the Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn… Eating Mushrooms, exploring.

We went to the museum. Emil was there, and he was taken with the beauty, and foreign accent of my wife. He took her hand and proceeded to kiss it up to the elbow, the old smoothy. We still have a poster he signed. We talked with him for about 2 hours about Henry, and art, Anais Nin. What a wonderful person.

Great Memory!

G

https://henrymiller.org/2017/12/22/why-did-emil-convert-his-house-into-a-memorial-for-henry-because-i-missed-him/

Emil’s Obituary

“Isis” – Gwyllm 2019

Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers hath moved me to succour thee. I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven! the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be diposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the Aethiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the Aegyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call me Queene Isis. Behold I am come to take pitty of thy fortune and tribulation, behold I am present to favour and ayd thee, leave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away all thy sorrow, for behold the healthfull day which is ordained by my providence, therefore be ready to attend to my commandment. This day which shall come after this night, is dedicated to my service, by an eternal religion, my Priests and Ministers doe accustome after the tempests of the Sea, be ceased, to offer in my name a new ship as a first fruit of my Navigation.”
― Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass
______________________
So, a bit of format change in this edition. One should not get stuck in a rut, so I am changing things a bit.  For instance, trying to be a wee bit current by using video on occasion! (heaven help us all!) I will be putting together a video blog once in awhile, and doing some podcast with radio content, and perhaps a talk or two. New horizons, it is time to get out there a bit more, and be a bit less reclusive.

I have always liked stepping off into the metaphorical abyss, and this suites me nicely.
We have some great poetry this go around from Whit Griffin, some nice music (featured on the “Serpent’s Lair” Radio Show) and to cap the radio announcements 27 seconds of yers truly speaking.

Here is to a new year, new projects, and to all of us coming together to help change the world.

Pax,
Gwyllm
_____________________
On The Menu:
Radio EarthRites Updates/Thanks To Our Supporters!
The Links
Whit Griffin – “From The Universal Lyre”
Steve Roach – Bryon Metcalf “The Lair”
_____________________
Radio EarthRites Updates:

New Weekly Series, Poets & Philosophers… Featuring poets, philosophy, various iterations of spoken word, chants, spells, mystery unfolding…

Music… as always.  New shows weekly. “The Serpent’s Lair” explores a more atmospheric approach to mainly acoustic sides, with a bit of sparkle thrown in with some electronics.  Lots of Steve Roach, a rarity from Popol Vuh, along with Patti Smith, Dead Horse One, and various nouveau rock acts from New York, UK, Sweden, Russia…

__________________________
The Links:
The Digital Prudes…
Learning From The Little Ice Age
Planet Of The Apes?
The Universal Song…
__________________________
Poesy: Whit Griffin

From The Universal Lyre

Yarrow, carpenter’s weed, old
man’s pepper. Sun
opener. Meadow
fire.

Colorful broom. Herb of the Spirits.

Wild olive, devil’s wood. Lilac,
the blue pipe tree. The bluish
flame which envelopes fraxinella.

Bees to blue flowers. Blue
Deer provides peyote. As blue
is the best color for the interior
of a tea cup.

Severed penises hang from her
goatskin apron. Her liver exults in mirth.

Nemain killed a hundred warriors with her voice.

Enyo,
goddess of war. The snake
goddess who lives in our backbones.

A tiny blaze of fire at the base of the spine.

A trumpet made from a femur.

Coca spoons from jaguar
bones. The visionary
divination from burning blood.

The coat of many colors is reserved
for those who know oneiromancy. Only those

who had achieved the fourth degree
of wisdom were permitted to be teachers
of occult philosophy.

Teaism is the smile
of philosophy. Play is the chemistry of yes.

They bathe their hands and heads
in the juice of elder berries when
they are being initiated into the mysteries.

The messiah returned,
and she is Tiamat.

As Puck to the Pooka, the
little Phrygian-capped mushroom.

The sacred cannibalism
that produces ecstasy and bestows knowledge.

To fashion stars out of dog
dung, that is the Great Work.

Thou art the eyeball of Vritra.

Floating stories, floating
figures. Feel with the eyes.

Khadomas of wisdom, with
red and green eyes.

The rewilding.

The relationship between
datura and palo verde.

The persea bears fruit in Egypt
but only flowers at Rhodes. As

the persea ripens its fruit at
the season of etesian winds.

The angel that spoke to
Descartes.
Angels are heavenly whores. Saint

Paul thought demons

were attracted to women’s
hair.

You will be embraced by your angel /

demon

at the moment of your death.

Inca coca oracles. The
wonderful child with oracular
birds. A pebble

numbered 3663. Mithras and Abraxas
are gods of numerology. Wrap a naked boy in linen

from head to toe, then clap
your hands.

For an only child I request immortality.

For the earth-lion have I

obtained the boon. The negativity

placed on the serpent

arose from the dominance of
Marduk.

Evil arose with the bifurcation of the collective mind.

Evil arose from the weakness of scientific
mythology.

From solid to spoked wheels. The correspondence

theory of truth. The secret name of
Rome. Correggio’s silver-

plated crescent moon. Shinjed rides

a fearless buffalo. The clarity
of mind
erases fear. Fear

guards the vineyard.
Fear is the barrier between the ego

and the full understanding

of reality. The giving up of
the sandals

to the giving up of the will.
_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________
Rashīd ad-Dīn Sinān – رشيد الدين سنان
‘Nothing is Forbidden, Everything is Permitted’
not
‘Nothing is Real, Everything is Permitted’
it is a subtle difference, but so much is based upon subtlety.” – Terezakis.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

First, I want to wish you all a Happy New Year!

May this year shine for you and yours. Kindness and care will see us through.

Love is the answer to all questions… (I believe)

Thanks To All Of You Who Have Helped Keep Radio EarthRites Going! More music, more art, more poetry and mythology soon!

Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

Gods of Divine Inebriation – Gwyllm

A Stream Flowing

Now I saw a stream flowing;
Now neither bank nor bridge was seen.
Now I saw a bush in bloom;
Now neither rose nor thorn was seen.
– Lalla

Dear Friends,

So it has been a very long time since I published anything on my blog and for that you have my sincere apologies.

Lots has been going on with my beloved’s health and with me helping to organize Portland Psychedelic Society’s Conference that was held on October 26th. (A big thank you to the presenters, especially Jim Fadiman)

Hopefully I will be posting more as time goes along. I find myself not wanting to be at the computer very much except to do art and writing.

I am burning out on social media even though  making a good part of my living by selling art on Facebook and other places. With that said I have been banned from Facebook for publishing art.  The AI or the people scanning pictures can’t tell the difference between a painting and a photograph and heaven help you if you post anything that looks like a nipple,

Of course if you’re a nazi/racist or you publish snuff pictures you get a free pass, so yeah I’m kind of done with that whole situation. I think social media has actually helped the decline of conversation and socializing. People get stuck in front of  screens for hours upon hours and I am among them so I know this happens.

I had no idea the internet would end up being in so many ways a psychic sewer and a commercial tool for faceless corporations …as well as a tool for social control via the media and governmental agencies. Who knew it would become a go to for lies and oppression?  It certainly didn’t seem that way back when.

Yet with all of that I still have hope that good people everywhere will use it to communicate for the common good and for enlightenment of our fellow humans. Everything can change, if we work at it.

Enough of all this we have some catching up to do with some poetry, music and an article from the Invisible College # 9 that I published that I wanted to share on the eve of the publication of the Invisible College #10.

The article “Imaginal Arcadia” is my take on an imagined golden age or one that occurred. As I am here instead of back then I would probably fall on the side of imaginal at this point, and that is okay. If it indeed was a golden age, well that works as well.

More coming soon,  I hope you enjoy this entry!
Gwyllm

___________________

The Links:
Commercial Break!
Lennie: Happens To The Heart
Poesy: Sufia Kumal
Poesy: Fadwa Tuqan
Imaginal Arcadia
Lennie: Steer Your Way
___________________
The Links:
Transgender Battles
Monkey Mind!
Psychedelics, Again
Solidarity is not dead: how workers can force progressive change
___________________
Commercial Break:

The 2020 Calendar(s)!
2020 Wall Calendar!
2020 Desk Calendar!

The Hasheesh Eater & Other Writings
Find it all here, the book in its’ various iterations, prints & Folio Editions

The Invisible College #9th Ediition
Get Your Copy Here!

Gwyllm Art, Just The Art…

___________________
Lennie: Happens To The Heart…
Absolutely love this. Pure Lennie. We miss ya!

___________________
Poesy: Sufia Kamal

That Love Of Yours

I’ve taken possession of that love of yours
that fills the earth’s vessel till it overflows,
filling my eyes, filling my heart,
and filling my two hands.
How unbearable is this joy, that this love is so intense.
With the touch like arrows of its golden rays
the inner bud blooms, as quickly as grass.
Illumined in my heart, it brings jewel-inlaid riches;
that’s why I’m wealthy, my joy will not perish.
With images ever new, this world has gratified me,
given as it is to praise, to perfumed blossoms dripping honey.
The diurnal light of sun, at every watch of the night,
merging hour by hour with your love’s every letter, will set.
Ever-new messages I hear;
my heart is overcome – so in love I compose my answering letter.
Warmed from the Sindhu’s expanse of river,
these clouds upon clouds of gentle moist air
ever bring these love letters, then carry them afar.
The eager heart grows devoted as an unmarried girl,
so it longs to compose scores upon scores
of ever-new messages of love and amours.
The heart fills with joy, grows voluble,
so I’ve gathered hence,
from the mortal earth, from the horizon’s expanse:
impassioned, illumined, that love of yours.

[Translated by Carolyne Wright with Ayesha Kabir]
_________________
Poesy: Fadwa Tuqan

Hamza

Hamza was just an ordinary man
like others in my hometown
who work only with their hands for bread.
When I met him the other day,
this land was wearing a cloak of mourning
in windless silence. And I felt defeated.
But Hamza-the-ordinary said:
‘My sister, our land has a throbbing heart,
it doesn’t cease to beat, and it endures
the unendurable. It keeps the secrets
of hills and wombs. This land sprouting
with spikes and palms is also the land
that gives birth to a freedom-fighter.
This land, my sister, is a woman.’

Days rolled by. I saw Hamza nowhere.
Yet I felt the belly of the land
was heaving in pain.
Hamza — sixty-five — weighs
heavy like a rock on his own back.
‘Burn, burn his house,’
a command screamed,
‘and tie his son in a cell.’
The military ruler of our town later explained:
it was necessary for law and order,
that is, for love and peace!
Armed soldiers gherraoed his house:
the serpent’s coil came full circle.
The bang at the door was but an order —
‘evacuate, damn it!’
And generous as they were with time, they could say:
‘in an hour, yes!’

Hamza opened the window.
Face to face with the sun blazing outside,
he cried: ‘in this house my children
and I will live and die
for Palestine.’
Hamza’s voice echoed clean
across the bleeding silence of the town.
An hour later, impeccably,
the house came crumbling down,
the rooms were blown to pieces in the sky,
and the bricks and the stones all burst forth,
burying dreams and memories of a lifetime
of labor, tears, and some happy moments.
Yesterday I saw Hamza
walking down a street in our town —
Hamza the ordinary man as he always was:
always secure in his determination.
_________________
This is the article….

Before Greece was “Greece” it was, something else.

Arcadia (the domain of Pan)

(Pan, being the embodiment of nature, often described as the god of shepherds, having roots deep, deep in the per-neolithic dream-time, containing all nature in his being, the Lord of the animals, the animus of the world…)

Arcadia, with her roots in the times before deliberate cultivation, before the plow ripped our mothers’ flesh, rises up in visions, art, poesy again and again hearkening to the age when it was golden, verdant, a tumbling world of plant, animal, spirits, and gods… before the times of subservience, neolithic priest-craft, kings and corporations.

Arcadia, the wild hunt, Centaurs chased by nymphs as Hamadryades observe from cool glens and sacred groves… echoed later by the Dionysian frenzies of the Bacchante. Classical scholars look backwards to a past surpassing their present, to an age not forgotten, but hidden, dormant, sleeping.

Pre-Religion, before priest-craft before alphabets stealing essence of the ancient tales, un-tonguing bards striking vision down to dusty tablets, then rotting pages over the ages.

Rivers churning with fish, herded by naiads through channel and rapid, swimming languorously in pools of emerald purity. Children playing in streams, the sunlight slanting down through the canopy, letting fish slip through their hands, laughing.

Before the Πελασγοί, Pelasgoí, before the Mycenaeans and Doric hordes streaming southward into the mother country with their jealous Olympians ousting an older world; an older order of Goddesses & Gods, who had walked upon the earth, titans, dragons, the Great Mother all encompassing.

Bear Clans, Wolf Clans, Deer Clans, Lion, Leopard Clans, the Horse Clans/Centaurs running on ridges high above the vale, ages before the Pythian mysteries were seized by Golden Apollo, long before Persephone’s descent. A chaos of green, a riot of divine madness, endless, ancient.

There was Colloquy and Chaos, nature unbound untrammeled, un-subservient to plows & plunder, a world still wrapped in wonder. Arcadia…

Rites before religion, it rises chthonic again and again in the collective memory, through literature, art and inebriation. The world as it was, the world as it should be, the world in its original context, dreaming and full of life, infinite. Every child is born in Arcadia, and then dissuaded from their inheritance, to wander as orphans until the journey home.

Stars wheeling in the skies above forest and meadow, dolmens newly risen cave dwelling tree beautiful in the twilight. We ran with the packs, the herds, the tribes, chasing the moon, her maidens her shadows..

A moment suspended in aspic: Aurochs graze in meadows of poppy and anemone that sway in drowsy summer sun, stirred by afternoon zephyrs before the harvest of acorn and berry, so long ago. Epimelides wander past wild apple and herds of sheep.

Mortals commingling with Goddesses and Gods, celebrating through divine inebriation, and the rites of love and season.

The sun scuttles across the sky followed by the moon. Time spirals in the ever present now. Seasons come and go, now is all their is. Acadia still sleeps beneath the surface of our every thought, rising out of plants in human guise, humans transforming into animals, animals into plants, mineral, water stone. Unclad, beneath the sun and moon.

So, I have let my imagination flow backwards to ancient before ancient times, and savoured the imaginal in the ravines and valleys of my mind…

I was brought up on the classics. The first two books that I remember were illustrated versions of The Iliad, and The Odyssey. Of course these are tales of the Mycenaeans and Pelasgian peoples,who were cohabiting Greece at that time. The Olympians were just making their appearance, subverting the Elder Goddesses & Gods of the Pelasgians and older tribes by seizing shrines and places of spiritual and ritual importance. You know the stories that have informed the West for the last three thousand years at least.

Little did the Mycenaeans and Pelasgians know what was to befall them with the (supposed) incursions of the Ionian & Doric waves… Although the archaeological evidence could be deemed, “scant”, something indeed occur in the years/century after the fall of Ilium/Troy. Cities abandoned, palaces burned, a return to smaller communities, a loss of script, etc bringing in a dark age of at least 300 – 500 years. There are no records, only tales passed down through the years dimly.

The fading light that was Arcadia outside of the heartland was certainly quenched in the more… “civilized” cities, Thebes, Corinth (most ancient!), Athens, and mother Knossos. Did Arcadia still continue? Perhaps in the hinter lands, the mountain and hill country where the plow and serf were not yet introduced by the emerging lords of the land, whether the old ways and old Goddesses & Gods were still held in high esteem, where the Centaur tribes still rambled. It has been said that Pan would still manifest/visit the sacred groves and flocks up to the time that another dour faith appeared, with one jealous god, a god who forgot his origins as a mouse daemon amongst the grain, one who forgot he was but one of many.

Why is Arcadia, or the idea/ideal of it important? If you have spent time in wilderness, made love in a sun drenched meadow, or in moonlight, swum naked in a stream, lake or ocean it would not even be needed to ask.

I do not hold with Marija Gimbutas that all was copacetic before the “Kurgans” appeared (still being debated btw) but I will say that even up into the times of the Pelasgians & Mycenaeans melding of cultures, the Great Goddess perhaps known as Eurynome (Εὐρυνόμη) or by some older name held sway over cultures in Greece and the Balkans for thousands of years. There was inter-tribal conflict buy not necessarily like what came after with the Sea Peoples and the fall of the mother civilization.

It is a dim memory now, but Arcadia is also a dream of possible futures. Perhaps we will finally shed the barbarism that the later neolithic brought into being with its hierarchies and concepts of division from nature. I sit outside, and on one hand listen to the frantic sounds of mechanized transport, but yet the wind still blows the branches, the birds sing, and at night the frogs join together in choruses that echo into the darkness. The river flows near, and we are surrounded by the green and tumbling world still. It is here, just under the surface, ad we have just to awake to the world as it was and to what it really is.

Civilizations fall, this we know. This one will as well, even though it spans the entire globe. We can hope and work for a better one to follow, emerging out.

We tend to dream futures. You see it in literature. Arcadia as a concept came back into the western mind with the advent of a poem in 1504 written by Iacopo Sannazaro “Lament of Androgeo” (Arcadia). This poem influenced Milton, Shakespeare, Philip Sydney and others. It’s publication is cited as the beginning of the Renaissance, and for good reasons. You can feel the longing for Arcadia in the stories and poems since. Glimpses of that age appear in art, literature, in secret societies that welled up trying to overturn the direction of civilization in those times and since.

This reawakening was not an accident by any means. Nothing happens without deeper resonance. Dreams & realities will lie dormant until the time of awakening is right. We are now in such an awakening, we have a road map that leads us to where we are destined.

Arcadia is both past and future.

Gwyllm Llwydd – 2018

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Lennie: Steer Your Way

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With ravished ears The monarch hears, Assumes the god, Affects to nod, And seems to shake the spheres. – John Dryden

Jicarilla – Gwyllm Llwydd

Whoa, 2 post in 3 days, returning to some normalcy, at least for a while.
So, there are some offers on this post for art, calendars and publications. Check ’em out. The publications are a bit time sensitive, especially with the holidaze, but will let you know the delivery date. Great offers on Blotter, and Prints. Stay Tuned.

There are 2 interviews with yers truly on this, one with Tom Hatsis from this past May in Ashland. The other is more recent, from Reality Sandwich! by Ronnie Pontiac. Long, but fun.

Some great music, an article that was featured in Invisible College #9, “Arcadia” and some beautiful poetry from Persia…

Anyway, I hope December is treating you well. Got my lights up 2 weeks early, heavens will wonders never cease?

A blessing on you and yours, and thanks to all who have supported my work over the past year!

Gwyllm
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On The Menu:
Time Of The Season Holiday Offerings!
The Links:
Tom Hatsis Interviewing Yers Truly
First Light – Marconi Union
Divine Inebriation
The Secret Rose Garden
Lars Leonhard – Lucid Dreams

Time Of The Season Holiday Offerings!

Calendars!

The Handy Desk Calendar:
Desk Calendar

The Wall Calendar:
Wall Calendar

Holiday Sale of The Hasheesh Eater!
Five dollars off the purchasing price, inclusive of shipping
30.00 for an unsigned copy (shipped from printers)
36.00 for a personalized signed copy. Limited to Six Books on hand
This offer is good for US sales only, sorry.
Order Soon Though To Arrive Before The Holiday!

Check It Out Here!

Prints, Blotter Art On Sale.  Keep the wolves away from an artist’s door!
All kinds of stuff for yer stockin’!

Holiday Sale!

We are very excited about the 9th Edition, “Arcadia” in which we explore different cultural expressions from the past, present and future. Coming in at 148 pages, our largest edition yet,  filled with great art, poetry, articles!  For the first time we are following a theme, “Arcadia”. So excited about this one.  Almost 75 pages of art alone!

Get it here!

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The Links:
Gwyllm Llwydd Interviewed In Reality Sandwich!
The End of Illusion
To Fight Climate Change We Must Empower Women!
Yes, the Octopus Is Smart as Heck. But Why?
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Tom Hatsis Interviewing Yers Truly At Exploring Psychedelics  in Ashland, this past May….
I have spent lots of hours with Tom and his lovely friend Eden.  Wonderful, good people.  Life, she is good.

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First Light – Marconi Union

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An article I wrote…
From The 9th Issue Of The Invisible College Review:
Divine Inebriation

What else is Wisdom? What of man’s endeavour
Or God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;
And shall not Loveliness be loved for ever?”
– Euripides,The Bacchae

Prologue:

Latin: maeander Greek maiandros…
This is a meander down ancient pathways. To perhaps cleave through the detritus of accumulated ages with the labrys of inner remembrance and recall down ivy laden trails into groves and grottoes of light and darkness, where our deep memories stir with the wild of the green and fecund world.

From Mt. Nysa, to Boeotia, across the wine coloured Mediterranean to Ægypt then onto Sumeria. Triumphant from India to Thrace vineyards sprung up where he strode with his maenads, leopards and wolves. The Centaurs decamped from Arcadia and followed his call from the Hellespont to the Atlas mountains… Twice born Dionysus, in whose blood and body we celebrated immortality and the dead,
a model for later incarnations… Lift up this krater of dark wine to our lips so that we might find imaginal realizations.

“Young man,
two are the forces most precious to mankind.
The first is Demeter, the Goddess.
She is the Earth — or any name you wish to call her —
and she sustains humanity with solid food.
Next came Dionysus, the son of the virgin,
bringing the counterpart to bread: wine
and the blessings of life’s flowing juices.
His blood, the blood of the grape,
lightens the burden of our mortal misery.
Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour out
to offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed.”
– Euripides,The Bacchae

There were perhaps two great Gods who spanned the time of the Olympians but whose origins are far more ancient, Demeter & Dionysus. Of Demeter we will leave for another time our concern is with Dionysus.

Dionysus, Bromius, Bacchus, Eleutherios, Iacchus (may come from the Ιακχος (Iakchos), a hymn sung in honor of Dionysus.) All names/epithets for perhaps the greatest incarnation of divinity in the ancient world.

Although Thebes is said to have been city of origin, and his mother the mortal Semele and his father Zeus, there is perhaps a much older story that predates the Olympian gloss.

It is said that Dionysus is the younger of these two deities and this is of course based on the idea/assumption that grains were domesticated before grapes, but some see this as the outcome of the lack of imagination. If one goes out in the Autumn into the forest you’ll often find birds & mammals inebriated on late fruit & berries that have given themselves over to fermentation, a conspiracy between plant and free floating yeast & friendly molds. I have seen birds fall out of trees, drunk and raving from berries, a grand cacophony continues until all is consumed. Grain ferments as well of course, as an example there was a grain shipment that derailed up in British Columbia several years ago which spilled several tonnes of grain on the side of the tracks. Come the Autumn & trains had to proceed with great caution in the are of the derailment due to drunken bears laying about on the tracks, stumbling around etc.

It doesn’t take a grand leap to think that pre-neolithic peoples observed and partook of the gifts of the season. It would be foolish to consider that the roots of Dionysus doesn’t emerge in the paleolithic. This is of course imaginal thinking but if we extrapolate and veer off the familiar path then all kinds of possibilities open up around the archetype. There are enough connections between Dionysus and the green world, that the horned god found on cave walls throughout Europe & elsewhere is the progenitor of Dionysus, or Dionysus in an earlier form/incarnation. After all, when Dionysus was born he is mentioned to be “horned” surely a clue, a link lies here to earlier times.
We share the inebriated state across a wide biome of life. Flora provides it, fauna consumes it. The pursuit of this state may indeed be universal.

“He is life’s liberating force.
He is release of limbs and communion through dance.
He is laughter, and music in flutes.
He is repose from all cares — he is sleep!
When his blood bursts from the grape
and flows across tables laid in his honor
to fuse with our blood,
he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows
of ivy-cool sleep.”
– Euripides,The Bacchae

There are many elements of inebriation. It breaks down inhibitions and brings down hierarchies of thought and societal structures.. One should not wonder at the current state of affairs with drug laws & prisons for users. Humans like their counterparts in other species are programmed for altered states, the quest for transcendence.

“Receive the god into your kingdom
pour libations, cover your head with ivy, join the dance!”
– Euripides, The Bacchae

Dionysus is closely associated with the grape and ivy in most classic volumes. Some mistake him for the sovereign of wine alone. He brings more than that. Greek wines, in classic times were not just alcohol, but an admixture of many different plant teachers. Mind you, that alcohol if used correctly can deliver a transcendental state, now pretty much forgotten due to its ubiquitous nature in modern society. Anything sacred can be reduced over time to banal commodity… but if one has the proper set and setting… The Greeks mixed wine with such substances as Papaver somniferum (Opium Poppies), Hyoscyamus niger (Henbane), Mandragora (Mandrake), and Cannabis in its various iterations was indeed a heady drink. Wine was usually mixed with water, diluted due to the added constituents. The dilution of wine to water was usually 1 to 4 parts. This gives you an idea of the strength of it. There may of been other plants (Ivy has been cited) and even perhaps fungi (Ya never know!) It is a guessing game at this time until new evidence is turned up.

One could consider that Dionysus is the persona of the divinity in nature, the wild, the untamed, unfurrowed, unfenced, forces of chaos & riot. The reassertion of our inner nature, boundless, untrammeled without the constraints of societal hierarchies, pristine, pure and dangerous. This state is both joyous, and full of grief. Everything in full measure.

Back though to this… Demeter & Dionysus as Goddess & God are exalted and constrained by nature, a trait which they share with us. The seasons are the their holy path, which seems to culminate in harvest and riot. The round of the year hold them close to us, the joy of flowering spring, a drowsy indolent summer, the abrupt changes and beauty of autumn, and the grief and sadness of winter. The fields of grain cut down, the vine left to rot on the midden. These are divinities that are born, live and die yearly. This is a part of their immortal mystery, tied to the ancient cycles of life and death.

“Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.”
– Euripides,The Bacchae

That we might live again, in all immortality, we eat this flesh, we drink this wine…

“He is the god of epiphanies—sudden spiritual manifestations—and of transformation, and there is more shape-shifting associated with Dionysus than with any other Greek god except for his father, Zeus, whose metamorphoses were usually prompted by his pursuit of women.
– Euripides,The Bacchae
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The Secret Rose Garden (and More)
The Poetry of Sa’d Ud Din Mahmud Shabistari

Tavern Haunters

The tavern is the abode of lovers,
The place where the bird of the soul nests,
The rest-house that has no existence
In a world that has no form.
The tavern-haunter is desolate in a lonely desert,
Where he sees the world as a mirage.
The desert is limitless and endless,
For no man has seen its beginning or ending.
Though you feverishly wander for a hundred years
You will be always alone.
For the dwellers there are headless and footless,
Neither the faithful nor infidels,
They have renounced both good and evil,
And have cast away name and fame,
From drinking the cup of selflessness;
Without lips or mouth,
And are beyond traditions, visions, and states,
Beyond dreaming of secret rooms, of lights and miracles.
They are lying drunken through the smell of the wine-dregs,
And have given as ransom
Pilgrim’s staff and cruse,
Dentifrice and rosary.
Sometimes rising to the world of bliss,
With necks exalted as racers,
Or with blackened faces turned to the wall,
Sometimes with reddened faces tied to the stake.
Now in the mystic dance of joy in the Beloved,
Losing head and foot like the revolving heavens.
In every strain which they hear from the minstrel
Comes to them rapture from the unseen world.
For within the mere words and sounds
Of the mystic song
Lies a precious mystery.
From drinking one cup of the pure wine,
From sweeping the dust of dung-hills from their souls,
From grasping the skirts of drunkards,
They have become Sūfīs.
—-
One Light

What are “I” and “You”?
Just lattices
In the niches of a lamp
Through which the One Light radiates.

“I” and “You” are the veil
Between heaven and earth;
Lift this veil and you will see
How all sects and religions are one.

Lift this veil and you will ask —
When “I” and “You” do not exist
What is mosque?
What is synagogue?
What is fire temple?
—-
A Drop of Seawater

Behold how this drop of seawater
has taken so many forms and names;
it has existed as mist, cloud, rain, dew, and mud,
then plant, animal, and Perfect man;
and yet it was a drop of water
from which these things appeared.
Even so this universe of reason, soul, heavens, and bodies,
was but a drop of water in its beginning and ending.

…When a wave strikes it, the world vanishes;
and when the appointed time comes to heaven and stars,
their being is lost in not being.
—-
The Marriage of the Soul

Descending to the earth, that strange intoxicating beauty of the unseen world
lurks in the elements of nature.

And the soul of man,
who has attained the rightful balance,
becoming aware of this hidden joy,
straightaway is enamored and bewitched.

And from this mystic marriage are born
the poets’ songs, inner knowledge,
the language of the heart, virtuous living,
and the fair child Beauty.

And the Great Soul gives to man as dowry
the hidden glory of the world.
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Lars Leonhard – Lucid Dreams

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