20130628

Blades of Canada 4: He Who Shits Out Magic May Shine











Be drawn to what’s wrong and believe everyone
Go ahead touch your nose & off you go up and run

And now comes yet another
The next dose of real freedom
I guess the wait is over
You sat here long enough
Your personal triumph is coming up

Piss away again throwing caution to the wind
Telling lies to friends

Be strong in your aim map your course and set sail
But know well life is quick and very slick
Slick as snails

Robert Pollard

20130619

Blades of Canada 3: Remembrance of Things Past, Present, and Future




Lucky for me I had the day off from work on June 3, 2013.  It was a Monday, the sun was out, and Boards of Canada was scheduled to stream their new album live that afternoon.  For most fans this would be the first opportunity to hear the album in it's entirety, for free, a week before it's initial release.  Good guys those Boards of Canada.

What intrigued me most about the event was this:  the album would be streamed only once, starting at exactly 3:00pm EST, meaning that anywhere from 100 to 10,000 to 100,000(?) people would all be connected to the internet and forming their first impressions of the album simultaneously.  If someone asks "When did you first hear "Tomorrow's Harvest"" the most common answer will certainly be "6/3/2013 at 3:00pm EST".

This is quite a psychic event in my opinion, and the engineering behind it was not arbitrary.  I believe it provides some insight into the title of the album.

It's a simple metaphor:  the Soil is the collective mind gathered at one specific time and in one specific place (internet/noƶsphere).   The Seed is the music contained on "Tomorrow's Harvest".  After the broadcast, or Planting (implanting?), a period of Germination begins.  The next day this process begins to yield substantial critical/emotional feedback:  the Harvest .  The opening track is called Gemini, a not so subtle nod to the importance of timing involved here.

Realizing that I was lucky enough to take part in this epic experiment/operation/ritual, I set out from my home and traveled by train up to the north side of Chicago.  My plan was to walk south along the lakefront while I listened to the new album.  I figured heads across the world would be taking in the scenery of thousands of different environments (psychic components of the Soil), and I wanted the landscape of Chicago's lakefront to be part of the equation.

I have made this specific walk (from the campus of Loyola University Chicago in Rogers Park to Navy Pier) three or four times before in my life.  It's about 6 miles in a straight line, but on foot, more like 8, and usually takes me about four to five hours, depending on how often I stop.  I timed the start of my walk so that the live stream would start about a quarter of the way through my journey.

As I said, it was a beautiful sunny Monday.  I had no responsibilities and nowhere to be except present in the moment.  Lucky me.



The music of Boards of Casteneda is unique, and as the live stream began, it suddenly became absurd to me.  I tried to imagine just exactly what other people could have chosen to do as they listened to the boardcast.  Dance?  Fuck?  Meditate?  Gamble?  Drugs?  Videogames?  Fish?   A million questions regarding the nature of music assaulted me, and I began to wonder about my own choices, and why I had made a trip so far from home just to listen to an album.  As I spiraled inward, meditating upon these questions, the music ceased to be music, and the sound became an environment.  I was in, and I was in deep.  So deep that when I stopped my thoughts and looked around, I had no idea where I was.  I wasn't simply disoriented, I was completely and utterly lost.

The jolt of adrenaline from this realization pierced my entire being and I suddenly flashed on a long forgotten memory.

When I was 5 years old, I was at a family party in the city, an area I was not familiar with.  My sister and I went with a group of kids from the party to a nearby park, a rather massive city park.  It was exciting because the other kids were older than us, and we were going without our parents.  My only instructions:  "Stay with your sister."

Everything was moving so fast.  We crossed a busy street and made our way to the playground.  It seemed like there were a million people at the park.  People were playing soccer, riding bikes, having picnics, and all I know is that one minute I was with the group and the next I was all alone.  I had no idea how I had gotten separated, I had no idea where I was, and I had no idea how to get home.  Every step forward was a step in the wrong direction and I literally became frozen with fear.

"Where the fuck am I?  When the fuck am I?  Who the fuck am I?

What did I do to deserve this?"



  I had no hope of answering these questions when I was 5 years old.  At five years old I couldn't process the emotions or the enormity the situation.  All I could do then was cry.  Hysterically. 
   


Realizing this same situation as an adult hit me like a hammer.  It was a completely pure emotion, and it immediately connected me with my 5 year old self, as if I was in one place (LOST) but at two different times (child, adult).   There wasn't a thought in my head that could offer comfort or clue.  The horror was incredibly real.

As this drama deepened, the music of Boards of Canada continued to stream.  It took what seemed like an eternity to realize that I still had headphones on.  I was somehow oblivious to the fact that the tones and rhythms of the album had become an inseparable soundtrack to my situation.  Oh, did I mention I had smoked marijuana at the start of the live stream?  

I finally recognized one step I could take to alter the situation was to remove myself from the environment the album was creating.  I summoned all of my power in that moment (fear of that magnitude can be crippling) and magically removed the headphones from my ears, thereby lifting a powerful veil from my reality.  I was still lost, but I could feel my feet on the ground, and I could walk.  I turned around 360˚ and scanned my environment, finally recognized the Willis Tower and moved South.   As I slowly moved forward, I began to orient myself and in a few minutes I knew where I was again.  The whole event lasted no more than 15 minutes.

It took me the rest of the next week to process what had occurred.  

I knew I wouldn't have the opportunity to listen to the album again until the official release, but for some reason, I knew exactly how I would listen to it.  There was no doubt in my mind, having experimented extensively with film/album sync, that the way to listen to "Tomorrow's Harvest" was also the way to watch "Tomorrow's Harvest". 

At about 2:00 am on June 11 I downloaded the album from iTunes and cued up the DVD of the Final Cut of Blade Runner.  I smoked up, but this time I did not experience any fear or horror.  I was simply in awe at how grand the whole thing was.  Everything.  

As the movie finished around 4:00am, I had to ask myself if I had ever really seen Blade Runner before.  I've watched that movie five or six times before in my life but I'm not sure I ever really saw it.

As far as "Tomorrow's Harvest",  I had actually only listened to the first fifteen minutes prior to this viewing, so this was the first time I actually listened to the album in full.  I can't imagine listening to it any other way, at least for awhile.  




Start the album "Tomorrow's Harvest" by Boards of Canada at 00:00:09 of the Final Cut of Blade Runner.  This is specific; make sure that when the album is at 00:05, the DVD is at 00:00:14.  Start over if this is not in sync.  The film should play without sound or subtitles.  Listen to "Tomorrow's Harvest" on headphones (put the album on repeat).  You'll know for sure if you are locked in when the clenched fist of Roy Batty appears.  

Also, if you haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep before, I recommend reading it before you watch this.  It's a quick read and, in my opinion, it is essential to appreciate the full scope of this.

I really hope you take the time to experience this one, it's worth the dollars and cents.  If you do, please let me know what you think.  

Update 9/28/2020:  spin Tomorrow’s Harvest at 00:03:14 of the original Blade Runner.  

20130526

20130514

Blades of Canada: To The Moon Alice





The breaking of the power of time short circuits karma, shortcircuits the dreadful power of world itself exerted over the individual unless by some salvific event it is cancelled.  For the Gnostics, this was Christ's true role.  Something must occur that triggers off the final meta-abstracting; Plato spoke of something encountered that reminds us of our forgotten former life.  I call it a "disinhibiting stimulus."  Maybe it's a large black slab, as in 2001. (I seem to be joking but I am not.  My meta-abstracting in February 1974 did not randomly happen; it was induced)

                                                        PKD, 2/14/81 in a letter to Patricia Warrick


The OHED (Oxford Hebrew English Dictionary) gives the letter Qoph a transliteration value of 'Q' or 'K' and a final transliteration value as a 'ck'. 


The Moon is the Path of Qoph that is between Netzach (victory) with Malkuth (Kingdom) and is the Path of Transition where the Soul begins the process of incorporating the body. It's planetary sign is Pisces.  At first, the Path of Qoph is a process of the Soul's organization of the physical body it will "inhabit" 

For the student who wishes to reclaim their Universal Inheritance, the journey of awakening from the "Sleep' of incorporation is begun by traveling "upward" along the Path of Qoph, into the Dark recesses of the Unconscious, and its illusions of fear and destruction brought on by the survival mind's fear of Death.  In other words we must slay the demons of our own animal death/fear of pain-illusions to remember the multidimensional Daemon consciousness that we are. This awakening process is a conquest of phantoms reflected from the material world, i.e. "Creations of the Created" and so it is a Path out of darkness into the reflected light of the Sun.


In Episode Six of the Sixth Season of Mad Men, Roger Sterling and Don Draper are at the airport waiting to fly to Detroit to meet with Chevrolet.  They hope to pitch a successful campaign to win the account of an as yet unnamed "top secret" automobile project.  Unbeknownst to them, and to the delight of advertising rivals loudly "coughing" down the way, the SCDP agency has lost another big account, this time it is Vick's, makers of cough drops. A qoph suppressant.

The "top secret" automobile project is the Chevy Vega.  Vega is the brightest star in the Lyra constellation (sometimes referred to as "The Falling Eagle").  The spectrum of Vega was first photographed in 1872 by Henry Draper--wait, who? 

Henry Draper was the son of John William Draper, who began the art of astrophotography in 1840 when he produced an image of the Moon using the daguerrotype process.  It seems as though fate has already chosen Don Draper, but as the moment of truth approaches, the path to Vega looks quite grim for the agency of SCDP.

The Chevy Vega account is all the more essential for the survival of SCDP with the loss of Vick's (cough).  The competition is strong, and Don has little confidence that he can bring the big fish (Pisces) home.   In a desperate, last minute scramble Don merges his agency with CGC.  Not only is CGC home to Peggy Olson, one of Don's most successful proteges, it also is home to Ted Chaough, he of the make-believe surname.  What's in a name anyways?


Ted Chaough = Death Cough

"The Moon is the Path of Qoph that is between Netzach with Malkuth and is the Path of Transition where the Soul begins the process of incorporating the body."

What will Draper's Soul find when it incorporates into the Body?  The lungs and liver of a man twice his age.  But this Death Cough is not as dire as it might seem on/under the surface.

The merger with CGC is a successful one and their new supergroup has won not just the Chevy Vega account, but all of Chevrolet. 

As we enter Epsiode 7, entitled A Man With A Plan, we have to wonder, who is the Man and what is his Plan?

The newly merged agency, whether they like it or not, is going to the Moon via the Path of Qoph taking both Vega, the "Falling Eagle", and Don Draper, the once rising, now falling Star of the advertising world.

Another falling eagle/falling star, is the United States of America, which also is on the path to the Moon, based on the directives of John F. Kennedy.  Qoph means "back of the head".  Ouch.

Both John F. Kennedy and Don Draper have a profound love of women, and for Don, his current fascination is Sylvia Rosen.  




Don spends the episode attempting to control Sylvia solely for his own desire and satisfaction, much like he has attempted to control all of his desires and mute all of his pain through the use of alcohol.    Don's body is rejecting his Soul.  His attempt to imprison his body ("You exist for my pleasure")  fails:  Sylvia Rosen/Liver says no.  He then attempts to dismantle his newly merged peer with whiskey, but Ted, although a bit embarrassed, survives.  Near the end of the episode, Don enters a small airplane, (evoking the late John Kennedy Jr.) with Ted as his pilot.  As they travel through the dark stormy airspace, Don is completely filled with fear.  

"The journey of awakening from the "Sleep' of incorporation is begun by traveling "upward" along the Path of Qoph, into the dark recesses of the unconscious, and its illusions of fear and destruction brought on by the survival mind's fear of Death"


But his pilot Ted Chaough has done this before, he has been down this path, and he expertly guides them out of the darkness, above the clouds, and into the light of the sun.

"This awakening process is a conquest of phantoms reflected from the material world, i.e. "Creations of the Created" and so it is a path out of darkness into the reflected light of the Sun.  The Moon is representative of such a journey, as it has both a dark side and reflected side. When facing the darkest fears of your own mind, and of the race, a student undergoes some frightening and devastating  emotional and mental trials that involve real dangers to the physical and mental health of the individual who sense of self is not strong."


As the Episode comes to a close, and all is seemingly fine Robert "Bobby" Kennedy is assassinated.  By a busboy. 

Don has a son, named Robert, whom he calls "Bobby".  Another Robert works at SCDP, who every one calls Bob.  Bob Benson, the smiling, affable, regular guy working in accounts.

There was a Robert who played a character named "Benson" in a TV show about a butler who goes from working in the Tate house to working in the mansion of a widowed Governor.  It was also has the distinction of being the first TV show to reference the Internet in a 1985 episode that showed characters accessing ARPANET.  What are you talking about Willis?


ARPANET 

The earliest ideas of the Internet were discussed in 1963, with the first working model, ARPANET,  born on October 29, 1969, a few months after the first successful trip to the Moon.  

“Cabbalists believe that the Tzaddi on this Path (of qoph) can find and unearth the buried Divine Spark and reunite it with the Source."


The first message communicated via ARPANET was very short because the system crashed after only two letters were sent.  The message that was intended was "login", but only "lo" were delivered.  This message could be misinterpreted as a few things.  As a one and a zero (10) or an I and an O (IO).    



  Io, a moon of Jupiter, is very close to the same size as our Moon.

"The work of the Path of Qoph ends with the dissolution of energy back to its source, which is Netzach (victory). Successful understanding of this path, is to understand the relationship of our personality-consciousness to the physical power-tool built for each incarnation and facilitates an awake Soul, who walks in the light rather than a Soul who sleeps in the dark and doesn't operate the Power-Tool it was given to help continue the Great Work. The Moon Card is a reminder that most people/souls, during the cyclic phase of withdrawal of consciousness from the physical Power-Tool, continue to act on information and phantasmagorical  fantasies related to survival subconscious body existence. If not released, the sleeping soul-consciousness becomes a phantom of its own fantasies and are known as Ghosts."



Earlier in this season Don is shown relaxing on the beach with a little light reading, Dante's Divine Comedy, or as it as it is in Italian Divina Commedia.  Dante's work is a journey from the darkest recesses of hell, Inferno, into the mucky muck of Purgatory, and finally into the light of Paradise.  There are 100 cantos that comprise the epic poem.  This echoes the journey on the path of qoph in design, as well as number:  in Hebrew gematria, qoph has a numerical value of 100.


Don’s own private Inferno is certainly his awful childhood; his mother died in childbirth, and according to Don, his father beat him on a regular basis.  When Don was ten he saw his father kicked in the head by a horse and die.  He ran away from his surviving family and found him self in the Korean War, where he finally found an opportunity to escape his past and change the complexion of his life. 

Don's enters Purgatory with an assumed identity, where he comes to live with the widow of the real Draper, a woman named Anna who is as much a mother to Don as he ever had, and by this association, grandmother to his children.  She is familiar with the Tarot and gives Don a reading in Episode 12, The Mountain King, of Season 2.


"In the position of the Present the card is the Sun reversed, with the 8 of cups as the challenging card.  In my tarot readings, I would read these cards together:  the Sun, reversed, would represent Don in the position he’s in at that moment in time, and the crossing card, the 8 of Cups, as the thing that is getting in his way.  I would say that Don’s been favored with luck, and good fortune, and success, but none of that’s important to him —  he’s dissatisfied and tired of dealing with all the  emotion surrounding him.  The Eight of Cups has always seemed to me to have the perfect illustration: the figure in the center walking toward the moon away from all those cups."



"To the Moon Alice, to the Moon"





Don Draper is of course not Don Draper, he is correctly Dick Whitman, but where one ends and the other begins is impossible to tell.  I remember another Dick who famously struggled with dual identities. 

Philip K Dick documented this split in two different novels, one reflecting Inferno, the other Purgatory.  In A Scanner Darkly, we have our character lost in the Inferno, literally draped in an identity cloaking device.  In VALIS we have our main character, who, by the divine grace of anamnesis, remembers where he is, but is cleaved into two distinct people, Philip and Horselover Fat.  The synthesis of these two never arrives.       

Dick Whitman is clearly a man cloaked in false identity, and Don Draper can be considered a horse lover, considering what happened to the father who beat him.  These identities remain and struggle for a conscious release of Soul into Paradise.  This release can not be found in the execution of one identity for the other, it can only happen through synthesis, through a merger of the two.  Don/Dick obviously understands this, at least unconsciously.  We've seen him do this a few times already.  What desperately needs to occur for Don/Dick to actualize this consciously.  But what will it take to trigger this realization?  

The Planetary sign of qoph is Pisces, the fish.  Don used to be a big fish in a small pond, but now he is realizing that the Age of Aquarius is ocean wide.  Dick Whitman is realizing that Don Draper has an expiration  date, and Don Draper is realizing that underneath it all he is scared and all alone.  Both are drowning.

I have been hoping that the trigger for Don's synthesis will be achieved through the power of a proper psychedelic experience.  This is a strong possibility considering the experimentation of the 60's, as well as the positive experiences of Draper's partner Roger Sterling with LSD.  And Don has yet to turn down a new and exciting experience.  

This opportunity at synthesis was given to another character from Matthew Weiner's other successful show, The Sopranos.  

Tony Soprano is a character who also struggled with dual identities, even referenced in the title of Episode 53,  "The Two Tony's" (Don imprisons Sylvia in Room 503).

In the second part of Season 6,  Episode 18 entitled "Kennedy and Heidi"(written by David Chase and Matthew Weiner), Tony Soprano takes mescaline, and is thrust into the cosmos, which for him starts in the belly of the beast, a hotel room in Las Vegas.  Vega again.

After violently purging into the toilet, Tony leans back against a towel.





 XVIII The Moon






X Wheel of Fortune


"24"


The Empire Never Ended


"He's dead!"


"I get it?"                                                                                                     "I get it!"


Tony failed to synthesize the experience, just like the rest of the people in his family.  He couldn't get out.  Carmela tried to divorce herself from The Family, but she returned.  A.J. got a job making minimum wage, and proposed to his girlfriend, but winds up back in the The Family when he accepts a job as a producer in a porn studio.  Meadow strives to become a lawyer, even working in a law center in the inner city, but she is eventually pulled back into The Family as well.

I hope when Don/Dick gets his chance he has built better wings.

  


20130402

The Grow Beast Sheet Cheat Part 5: A Formula For Thunder




Common descriptions of the process of meditation: transforming the stormy arisings of thoughts, emotions, and feelings and recognizing them to be impermanent phenomena; like passing clouds in the skywatch your mind and let the clouds pass bythe sun is always shining behind the clouds let the clouds pass and you will once again find the sun; though thoughts will arise, they are merely clouds passing by the mountain. 



Another extremely poor formula for thunder.


What do I mean when I say thunder?  Thunder is simply the SOUND of lightning.
 If our goal is enlightenment, if what we want is an enlightning experience, how are we supposed to generate lightning without clouds?  How do we breakthrough without the thunder?   



"When a tribal man hears thunder, he says, 'What did he say that time?', as automatically as we say 'Gesundheit.'"

Marshall McLuhan

This makes sense, actually.  It’s just a matter of understanding the difference between a one hundred letter word and one hundred letters.

"I can meditate; I see those damn clouds and have no problem letting em' drift; sometimes I see lightning, but the storm is so far off in the distance that I can't hear the thunder.  To tell the truth, I can't tell the difference between thunder and my own fart."

Is it even possible to design a formula for thunder?  To generate a direct lightening strike?  



20130401

The Grow Beast Sheet Cheat Part 4: Mind, Your Own Business





One morning sometime in late 1963, months before that night at the Delmonico Hotel, Paul McCartney awoke from a dream in which he had composed a particularly good tune.  He jumped out of bed and began to play the melody on piano so as not to forget what he had dreamt.  Initially, he was unsure if the tune was unconsciously plagiarized from a song heard in his childhood, or borrowed from a tune overheard on the radio or in a club.  After the assurances from many others that the melody was indeed original, McCartney began to search for the appropriate lyric to bring the finishing touch.  For months, the work in progress was known as "Scrambled Eggs" due to the comical substitute lyrics used to fill the void.  

The song was finally finished when Paul had a breakthrough with the lyrics during a trip to Portugal in May, 1965.

"I remember mulling over the tune 'Yesterday', and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea ... da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that's good. All my troubles seemed so far away. It's easy to rhyme those a's: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there's a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and 'b' again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it."

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

"Yesterday" was voted the best song of the 20th Century in a poll by BBC Radio 2 in 1999, and voted the #1 pop song of all time by both MTV and Rolling Stone in 2000.  It has been covered by over 3,000 different artists, and according to BMI, was performed over 7 million times in the 20th century alone.


"thinking for the first time, really thinking" 

Paul McCartney, August 1964


I was alone, I took a ride
I didn't know what I would find there
Another road where maybe I
Could see another kind of mind there

Ooo, then I suddenly see you
Ooo, did I tell you I need you?
Every single day of my life


Got To Get You Into My Life was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot. I'd been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting... I didn't have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.

So Got To Get You Into My Life is really a song about that, it's not to a person, it's actually about pot. It's saying, I'm going to do this. This is not a bad idea. So it's actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

I'm such a fool.  I thought "Got To Get You Into My Life" was about a girl.  Even Lennon got it wrong; he thought McCartney was singing about LSD.


Paul's again. I think that was one of his best songs, too, because the lyrics are good and I didn't write them. You see? When I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort, here's an example. It actually describes the experience taking acid. I think that's what he's talking about. I couldn't swear to it, but I think that it was a result of that.
John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff


Something extraordinary had happened to McCartney between between that dream in 1963 and the breakthrough of lyrics in 1965.  We could say that it was his exposure to marijuana; his "ode to pot" is pretty compelling evidence, but I think it would be too simple to attribute all of that to just marijuana.  There were many variables at play.  Consider that John, George, and Ringo had all smoked the same pot that night, but it was McCartney who seemingly had the most profound awakening.  And while John and George fell under the spell of LSD in early 1965, convincing Ringo to join them in August of 1965, it was McCartney who abstained until March of 1967.   McCartney must have been exceedingly confident in his abilities in that interim, convinced that his creativity was not in need of the "experience" that his bandmates were so incredibly enamored by.   Why did it take McCartney so long?  I think McCartney fell back on the attitude he had expressed when the band played all night shows in Germany, when amphetamines were the fuel that drove them on:


The speed thing first came from the gangsters. Looking back, they were probably thirty years old but they seemed fifty... They would send a little tray of schnapps up to the band and say, 'You must do this: Bang bang, ya! Proost!' Down in one go. The little ritual. So you'd do that, because these were the owners. They made a bit of fun of us but we played along and let them because we weren't great heroes, we needed their protection and this was life or death country. There were gas guns and murderers amongst us, so you weren't messing around here. They made fun of us because our name, the Beatles, sounded very like the German 'Peedles' which means 'little willies'. 'Oh, zee Peedles! Ha ha ha!' They loved that. It appealed directly to the German sense of humour, that did. So we'd let it be a joke, and we'd drink the schnapps and they'd occasionally send up pills, prellies, Prel­udin, and say, 'Take one of these.'
I knew that was dodgy. I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we'd be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, 'What are you on, man? What are you on?' I said, 'Nothin'! 'S great, though, isn't it!' Because I'd just get buoyed up by their conversation. They'd be on the prellies and I would have decided I didn't really need one, I was so wired anyway.  Or I'd maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five during the course of an evening and get totally wired. I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got just on the conversation. So you'd find me up just as late as all of them, but without the aid of the prellies. This was good because it meant I didn't have to get into sleeping tablets. I tried all of that but I didn't like sleeping tablets, it was too heavy a sleep. I'd wake up at night and reach for a glass of water and knock it over.  So I suppose I was a little bit more sensible than some of the other guys in rock 'n' roll at that time.  Something to do with my Liverpool upbringing made me exercise caution.


Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles


The time between August 1964 and March of 1967 is considered the Beatles most creative period during which Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, the singles which would make up Magical Mystery Tour, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were all written.  And according to some, it was McCartney who was the unspoken leader of the group.

Then came that fateful night in March 1967.  The Beatles were in the studio recording Sgt. Pepper's when Lennon inadvertently took LSD.  Feeling the effects of the drug coming upon him, John left the studio.  Paul followed and offered to take John home.


I thought, maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It's been coming for a long time. It's often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John's on it already, so I'll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot.
Me and John, we'd known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other's eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that's what we did, round about that time, that's what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You're looking into each other's eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn't, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.

There's something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, 'How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?' And the answer is, you don't. After that you've got to get trepanned or you've got to meditate for the rest of your life. You've got to make a decision which way you're going to go.

I would walk out into the garden - 'Oh no, I've got to go back in.' It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But 'I've got to do it, for my well-being.' In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while.

I'd just had enough after about four or five hours.  John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way.  John said, 'Go to bed? You won't sleep!' 'I know that, I've still got to go to bed.' I thought, now that's enough fun and partying, now ... It's like with drink. That's enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off. But of course you don't just sleep off an acid trip so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. 'Yeah, I think so.' I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles


I imagine that prior to that first trip McCartney was driven quite mad by John, George and Ringo, as well as countless others, ranting and raving about the awesome power of the LSD experience.  I am sure he had read all about the pros and cons in countless news articles and magazines.  So unlike pot, which everyone in the group tried at the same time without much defined expectation in the same room,  Paul's set and setting with LSD was markedly different.  He had many predetermined expectations; he was also on an island within the group.  And I think that the above variables had an big effect on his experience.  I don't think that his experience with LSD defined him or furthered his creative potential as much as marijuana had.  I don't think that he shared the same passion for it as Ringo, George, and especially John.  

About one year after Paul had joined the rest of the band in experimenting with LSD, the group publicly rejected drugs and flew to Rishkesh, India to study at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation training camp.  Meditation won out over trepanation.  But that too was short lived.  And shortly after that, the Beatles were no more.


                  Ooo, then I suddenly see you


                                 Ooo, did I tell you I need you?      


                    Every single day of my life

Every single day?  I'm not sure that this is a good formula for epiphany, and certainly not the kind that McCartney experienced in the Delmonico Hotel.  Just how much is too much?  John Lennon admitted to taking LSD every day for a long period of time.  How much impact could it possibly have any more?  Like the alcoholic or the junky, the daily habit is an addiction, not a celebration.  It is a medication not an intoxication.  It is also a very unenlightened magic.  A poor formula for Thunder.

The Fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonn
bronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnska
wntoohoohoordenenthurnuk)

20130330

The Grow Beast Sheet Cheat Part 3: Smoking In The Mens Room



Awesome secrets.  This is what we want, awesome secrets.  The trouble with awesome secrets is that when they come our way, we usually have no idea what to do with them.  More likely, we don't even recognize them.

"I remember asking Mal, our road manager, for what seemed like years and years, 'Have you got a pencil?' But of course everyone was so stoned they couldn't produce a pencil, let alone a combination of pencil and paper.

I'd been going through this thing of levels, during the evening. And at each level I'd meet all these people again. 'Hahaha! It's you!' And then I'd metamorphose on to another level. Anyway, Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, 'There are seven levels!' Actually it wasn't bad. Not bad for an amateur. And we pissed ourselves laughing. I mean, 'What the fuck's that? What the fuck are the seven levels?' But looking back, it's actually a pretty succinct comment; it ties in with a lot of major religions but I didn't know that then."

Paul McCartney

New York City, August 28, 1964, somewhere in the Delmonico Hotel, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney were all gathered together in one room.  Dylan apparently wanted some "cheap wine", and when Mal Evans was sent out to get some, Dylan suggested a toke.  Brian Epstein, Beatles manager, explained, to Dylan's great surprise, that the Fab Four didn't get high.  

Dylan looked disbelievingly from face to face. 

"But what about your song?" he asked, "The one about getting high?"
The Beatles were stupefied. "Which song?" John managed to ask.
Dylan said, "You know..." and then he sang, "and when I touch you I get high, I get high..."

John flushed with embarrassment. "Those aren't the words," he admitted. "The words are, 'I can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hide...'"

The Love You Make
Peter Brown

Naturally, Dylan busted out the stash, joints were rolled, and, as John Lennon said, "It was party time."


Mens

Pronunciation
IPA: /meĖns/
Etymology
From Proto-Indo-European *mn̥ti-, oblique stem of *mĆ©ntis (“thought”). Cognates include Ancient Greek Ī±į½Ļ„ĻŒĪ¼Ī±Ļ„ĪæĻ‚ (autĆ³matos), Sanskrit ą¤®ą¤¤ि (matĆ­), and Old English Ä”emynd (English mind).
Noun
mēns (genitive mentis); f, third declension
mind


The concept of set and setting applies to all boundary dissolving experiences.  It is especially important when considering the first time one is introduced to boundary dissolving substances.  

Categorizing the set and setting of the Beatles suite that August night at the Delmonico is difficult, recreating it is impossible, and I doubt that any one smoking marijuana for the first time will ever experience the particular dynamics that were at play.  Five of the most famous artists in the world, one the most famous folk-singer, the other four the most famous rock and roll band, all together in one room, sharing a completely life changing moment, one that marked the beginning of a cultural shift that is best categorized as a revolution.   

The Beatles spent the next few hours in hilarity, looked upon with amusement by Dylan. Brian Epstein kept saying, "I'm so high I'm on the ceiling. I'm up on the ceiling."

Paul McCartney, meanwhile, was struck by the profundity of the occasion, telling anyone who would listen that he was "thinking for the first time, really thinking." 


Can the average person ever hope to recreate the kind of set and setting at play in the Delmonico that night?  Can ANY person ever approach that kind of set and setting for their first boundary dissolving experience with marijuana?




Coincidentia oppositorum is a Latin phrase meaning coincidence of opposites. It is a neoplatonic term attributed to 15th century German polymath Nicholas of Cusa in his essay, De Docta Ignorantia (1440). Mircea Eliade, a 20th century historian of religion, used the term extensively in his essays about myth and ritual, describing the coincidentia oppositorum as "the mythical pattern". Psychiatrist Carl Jung, philosopher and Islamic Studies professor Henry Corbin as well as Jewish philosophers Gershom Scholem and Abraham Joshua Heschel also used the term. In alchemy, coincidentia oppositorum is a synonym for coniunctio. For example, Michael Maier stresses that the union of opposites is the aim of the alchemical work. Or, according to Paracelsus' pupil, Gerhard Dorn, the highest grade of the alchemical coniunctio consisted in the union of the total man with the unus mundus.
The term is also used in describing a revelation of the oneness of things previously believed to be different. Such insight into the unity of things is a kind of transcendence, and is found in various mystical traditions. The idea occurs in the traditions of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, in German mysticism, Taoism, Zen and Sufism, among others.

So, let's face it, you and I will never experience getting high in the Delmonico Hotel with Bob Dylan and the Beatles.  We'd be lucky to get high with Taylor Swift and Mumford and Sons at the Holiday Inn, but even they would agree that they would be mighty lame replacements.  We could try to get famous ourselves, we could try to play the role of Dylan, or Lennon and company.  We could.  Or we could go another way.  The way the Beatles went in search of themselves.  And with a little bit of cheating, I propose that we can sneak our mind into the set and setting of the Delmonico if we really want to.

The guru says that we should approach our meditation from a position of clarity, that we should be of a clear mind and clear body.  The guru imposes strict guidelines for diet and activity, and sobriety: no meat, no alcohol, no caffeine, no nicotine, no drugs.  All of these are impediments to enlightenment.  




“Strictly speaking, you cannot as yet speak of knowledge because you do not know where knowledge begins.  Knowledge begins with the teaching of the Yellow Submarine. You know the expressions 'macrocosm' and 'microcosm.' This means 'large submarine ' and 'small submarine’ , or 'large globe' and 'small globe.' The universe is regarded as a 'large submarine' and man as a 'small submarine’ analogous to the large one. This establishes, as it were, the idea of the unity and the similarity of the World and Man.

The teaching of the two submarines is known from the Cabala and other more ancient systems. But this teaching is incomplete on its own.

"As above, so below," is an expression which refers to seven submarines, and, well, it’s this part of the talk that gets me in trouble…

It is essential to know that the full teaching on submarines speaks not of two, but of seven submarines, all included within one another to represent a complete photograph of the universe. 


The first is the Protocosmos—the Yellow Submarine 

The second is the Ayocosmos, the holy cosmos, or the Megalocosmos

The third is the Metros—the Large Cosmos

The fourth is the Deuteronomos—the Lost Cosmos

The fifth is the Mesocosmos—the Middle Earth

The sixth is the Triton—the Lost Cosmic

The seventh level is the Microcosmos—the Atom, the Nugget, or the Meme

As I have previously explained what is called Atom is the smallest amount of any substance in which the substance retains all its properties, physical, chemical, psychical, and cosmic. From this point of view there can, for instance, be an 'atom of chicken.'

The conditions of the action of laws on each plane are determined by the two adjoining submarines, the one above and the one below. 

Three submarines next to one another are capable of giving a complete picture of the manifestation of the laws of the universe

One submarine cannot give a complete picture. Thus in order to know one submarine, it is necessary to know the two adjoining submarines, the one above and the one below the first, that is, one larger and one smaller. Taken together, these two submarines determine the one that lies between them. 


In order to understand the meaning of the division of media and the relation of different media to each other, it is necessary to understand what the relation of zero to infinity means. If we understand what this means, the principle of the division of the universe into different media, the necessity of such a division, and the impossibility of drawing for ourselves a more or less lucid picture of the world without this division will immediately become clear to us.

This separation of media helps us to map the collective unconscious in the world; and it solves many problems, especially those connected with space and time.  And above all, this idea serves to establish the principle of media relativity. The latter is especially important for it is quite impossible to have an exact conception of the world without having established this principle.

This type of relativity enables us to put the study of higher relativity on a firm basis. At first glance there is much that seems paradoxical in the systems of media. In reality, however, this apparent paradox is simply relativity.

The idea of the possibility of broadening man's consciousness and increasing his capacities for knowledge stands in direct relation to McLuhan’s teachings on media. In his ordinary state man is conscious of himself in only one media, and looks at all others from the point of view of a singularity.

The broadening of his consciousness and the intensifying of his psychic functions lead him into a sphere of activity where the lives of multiple  medias happen simultaneously.  

This broadening of consciousness does not proceed in one direction only, that is, it continues going above, at the same time it goes below.

This last idea will, perhaps, explain to you some expressions you may have met with in occult literature; for instance, the saying that:

 “The way up is at the same time the way down”

 As a rule this expression is quite wrongly interpreted.  In reality this means that if a man begins to feel the life of the novel, or if his consciousness passes to the level of the world of literature, he begins at the same time to feel the life of memes.  In this way the broadening of consciousness proceeds simultaneously in two directions, towards the greater and towards the lesser.  These changes great and small require comprehension for them to bear fruit. 


The transference of the laws of one media into another media constitutes what we call a miracle. There can be no other kind of miracle. A miracle is not a breaking of laws, nor is it a phenomenon outside laws.  It is a phenomenon which takes place according to the laws of another media. These laws are incomprehensible and unknown to us, and are therefore miraculous.


It is very useful to examine the phenomena of one media as though we are looking at them from the point of view of the laws of another media.  All the phenomena of the life of a given media, examined from another media, assume a completely different aspect and have a completely different meaning. Many new phenomena appear and many other phenomena disappear. This in general completely changes the picture of the world and of things.”

g-jo