Category: Funnies

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph/visual aid of the Week

Comparison of entopic phenomena with the cave art of the San, the Coso and of Upper Paleolithic Europe

After Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only.

This week: The Secret of the Yamas by that John McAfee

Before he invented anti-virus software and became a tech billionaire John McAfee was a meditation teacher. He wrote this book, considered a classic amongst aficionados.

Eventually there was the whole thing in Belize. The abyss claims another: “Arrakis has seen men like you come, and go.”

Non-duality is not necessarily peaceful. The anima works in notoriously, poetically mysterious ways.

Next issue: Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes and psychedelic philosophy

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph/visual aid of the Week

The first patent for MDMA

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: The Archaic Revival by Terrence McKenna.

Stories of space narcotics by major authors collected by druid of derring-do Michael Parry (d. 2014) , including The New Accelerator by H G Wells, Subjectivity by Norman Spinrad and What to Do Until the Analyst Comes by Frederik Pohl.

Plus a superb cover naturally.

If you like this sort of thing and haven’t read The Employees, a 2020 Booker Prize nominee by Danish author Olga Ravn, a ‘disconcertingly quotidian space opera’ (The Guardian), do so at light speed.

I can’t look at books like this without being hauntd by a sci fi short story about a co-ed college on a space station where the boys get these pets called teasels. I couldn’t find any reference to it online which was chilling in itself.

Next issue: Dr Rick ‘The Strass’ Strassman goes further than ever before… several times

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

Attribution of consciousness to living and non-living entities before and after a psychedelic belief-changing experience

After psychedelic experience

Before psychedelic experience

From: A Single Belief-Changing Psychedelic Experience Is Associated With Increased Attribution of Consciousness to Living and Non-living Entities (supplementary material) by Samdeep M Nayak and Roland R. Griffiths, John Hopkins University (2022)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only

This week: Transcendent Mind by Imants Barrus and Julia Mossbridge. Swept on for £50 when I noticed prices were going up quickly

Despite what the sort of thing I write in my day job would have you believe, government-backed public education openly invests in paranormal research (for better or worse). It even issues press releases about the positive findings. Here in the UK Northampton University is the crucible of not-so-forbidden learning, with parapsychological research taking place across several departments.

Published in 2015 by the notoriously conservative American Psychological Association Transcendent Mind contains an enthusiastic review of official investigations into consciousness, the soul, supra-physical existence and the cosmic whole.

Drs Julia Mossbridge and Imants Baruss, a former engineering scholar who quit to work as a roofer before taking up psychology, are heavy-hitters in the field. You may also enjoy Alterations of Consciousness: An Empirical Analysis for Social Scientists.

Next issue: Ancient Greece and the Mysteries of Eleusis

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

The relationship between ego-dissolution and ego-inflation for experiences occasioned by:

Classical psychedelics

Coacine

Alcohol

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts. Replaced after my first copy accompanied a close friend to his new life in NY

From the first chapter: ‘William Blake drew on Albion as a symbol of man before the Biblical fall and historian Peter Ackroyd has used the term for the title of his book charting the origins of the English imagination.

From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD.

Thus, Albion embodies the mythological imagination of these Isles, a state akin to the aboriginal Dreamtime, to which everyone should have access. This, then, is Albion’s dreaming.’

Andy Roberts is Britain’s answer to Erika Dyck; our national chronicler of the far out. Psychedelic Renaissance author AWAKN’s Dr Ben Sessa says:

“Andy is an anti-authoritarian, free-thinking individual who has happily nailed his colours to the weirdness mast without being lost in its sea of ethereal fluffiness.”

Indeed he’s unafraid of toppling sacred cows, like in this forensic inquisition into the Francis Crick LSD-DNA connection and his biography of disruptive-at-best prankster Michael Hollingshead. Grab his recent collection of essays from Psychedelic Press and see vids on the New Psychonaut YouTube depository.

Next issue: Dr Joe Tafur explains traditional and modern indigenous perspectives