Luminous Numinous

What is the relationship between shamanism and the numinous? What role do tryptamine-containing plant sacraments play in shamanism and how do these psychedelic substances help us to access our own inner divinity and to connect with the numinous Ground of All Being?  Was psychedelic shamanism the original way that our species connected to Gaia, to Spirit, to the vital force of the Earth and of the Cosmos? If so, is psychedelic shamanism an important pre-modern piece of the post-post modern Integral puzzle?  

I decided to sit down with the late, great Terence McKenna. I pored of his books and constructed this posthumous Q & A. All of the “answers” to my questions are direct quotes taken from Terence’s books. References are included. Let us all be thankful that Terence was here with us today–in word and in Spirt.

LN: Does pre-modern shamanism really have any relevance in our post/modern world?

TM: The numinous motifs of shamanism can have relevance to modern humans…through understanding the fascinating and alien figure of the shaman, we can draw somewhat nearer to that numinous, archetypal living mystery that dwells within each of us. (IL, p.18)

LN: Shamanism seems a lot like mysticism in that the goal of each is to connect to the numinous within. How can the figure of the shaman help us to do this?

TM: The shaman is able to act as an intermediary between the society and the supernatural, or to put it in Jungian terms, he is an intermediary to the collective unconscious. Through the office of the shaman, the society at large is brought into close and frequent encounter with the numinous archetypal symbols of the collective unconscious. These symbols retain their numinosity, immediacy, and reality through their constant reaffirmation in shamanic ritual. (IL, 1975, p.12)

LN: The shaman is an artist insomuch as he’s a storyteller, he’s a healer insofar as he’s a psychotherapist, and he’s a priest because he brings people into contact with Spirit. Sounds like quite a bit to juggle. Who can become a shaman…what are the job qualifications?

TM: The shaman must indeed be possessed of of a superior flexibility and constitution, for not only must he attend to the needs of his patients in this world but he must also satisfy his spirits in the other. He is the technician of the numinous par excellence, and his vocation is a demanding one, consisting as it does of maintaining a constant equilibrium between ordinary reality and the supernatural realm. (IL, p.26)

LN: Getting back to the relevance of shamanism in the modern world, we have doctors and psychotherapists to heal us. Are there really ailments that a pre-modern shaman can address more effectively  than a modern psychiatrist? I mean, with all that we know about the physical mechanism of the brain, you’d think that we would be the happiest people in history, no?

TM: There appears to be occurring in modern life a progressive alienation from the numinous archetypal contents of the collective unconscious, which has engendered a gradually encroaching sense of collective despair and anxiety. (IL, p.16)

LN:  How exactly has this “progressive alienation from the numinous…” contributed to wide-scale fear and sadness in the human population?

TM: The alienation of modern humans from the numinous ground of their beings has engendered the existentialist ethic and the pre-occupation with the immediate historical situation.  Humans are regarded as leading a wholly profane existence within a wholly profane time, that is, within history; the reality of the sacred is denied or reduced to the level of psychology. In non-Western cultures, in “primitive” cultures particularly, humans are not conscious of living in historical time, but regard themselves as inhabiting a numinous sacral time. (IL, p. 17)

LN: So, specifically because he is a “primitive” or pre-modern figure, the shaman can bring our modern minds back into contact with ancient wisdom. It’s as though we have, in our ascent into modern and post-modern ideologies, thrown the pre-modern baby out with the bath water, right? So… while there are many important and valuable aspects of modernity, the fall into history and linear time–the “existential ethic” (the Orange vmeme?) has imprisoned us to an extent and shamans and shamanism can help us to make contact with “the kingdom of heaven,” with “dreamtime,” with eternity, which is not a really long period of time, but is actually a temporal dimension set apart from time entirely? Again, shamanism sounds a lot like mysticism in its philosophical premises. Terence, a lot has been said about the relationship between shamanism, psychedelics, and schizophrenia. Obviously you and your brother have a great deal of experience with the first two of these…What are your thoughts about the possible parallels?

TM: In each of these situations, experimental tryptamine psychosis and shamanic trance, what is involved are alterations and inhibitions of normal amine levels in the brain. The shaman manipulates this bizarre region for culturally valid reasons and with techniques of proven efficacy. The schizophrenic is an unwilling victim, a traveler through what, to him is a terrifying landscape.

LM: You say “the shaman manipulates this bizarre region for culturally valid reasons and with techniques of proven efficacy.”  It sounds like, in a sense, shamanism is a science. I wonder: is that how you and Dennis see yourselves…as shamanic scientists investigating shamanism and psychosis from the inside?

TM: Using analytical premises and…operational constructs, we [my brother and I] sought to carry ourselves, as modern humans, into the same numinous landscape [inhabited by shamans and schizophrenics] and to offer a report of interest to empirical investigators. (IL, p. 107)

LN: So you were rational about your sojourns into non-rational realms! I wonder how much of that was you attempting to culturally validate your proven, efficacious techniques…integrating pre-modern sacraments with modern rationalism. That brings up an interesting point. There is a lot of talk about being “integral” or “holistic” these days and there is a strong developmental-evolutionary current running through contemporary consciousness studies communities. Are we, in fact, evolving spiritually as a species….and if we are, what is the next step? How do we become “Integral” or “cosmo-centric”?

TM: The next step toward a planetary holism is the partial merging of the technologically transformed human world with the archaic matrix of the vegetable intelligence that is the Overmind of this planet. I hesitate to call this dawning awareness “religious,” yet that is surely what it is (AR, p. 136).

LN: So an important aspect of consciousness evolution will be integrating the positive aspects of the modern, industrial, technological world with certain truths of the primitive world–panpsychism, panvitalism, a connection to Gaia–via pre-modern or ancient techniques and methods. What, specifically would this involve?

TM: It will involve a full exploration of the dimensions revealed by plant hallucinogens, especially those structurally related to neurotransmitters already present in the brain. Careful exploration of the plant hallucinogens will probe the most archaic and sensitive level of the drama of the emergence of consciousness: the plant-human quasi-symbiotic relationship that characterized archaic society and religion and through which the numinous mystery was originally experienced (AR, p. 136).

LN: That’s interesting; you think that tryptamine alkaloids found in plant hallucinogens provided the initial impetus for the religious impulse…and you think they were responsible for the advent of human consciousness as such. That would mean that psychedelics are literally “second nature” to humans as a species. So, in part, what you are suggesting is that  perhaps what’s wrong with the modern world is not so much the existence or presence of technological advancements like nuclear energy…or television….or industrial agriculture,  which are often much maligned by retro-romantics, but the absence or lack of inclusion of ancient psychedelic plant “technologies,” which were used by aboriginal peoples circumglobally to connect to the numinous Overmind of Mother Nature?

TM: The abandonment of the original catalyst for the emergence of self-reflection and language, the  Stropharia cubensis psilocybin-containing mushroom, has been a process with…stages. Each stage represents a further dilution of awareness of the power and the numinous meaning resident in the mystery. (FOG, p. 121)

LN: I see.  When people stopped using ayahuasca, morning glories, moldy rye, mushrooms, and other tryptamine-rich plants as sacraments they lost their contact to the numinous, to the Divine Ground, to what you call the Overmind? It’s as though the development of the rational separate ego, marvelous and necessary as that evolutionary advancement is, has cut us off from non-rational, non-egoic, experiences of union. Well what exactly happens during a mystical or psychedelic or shamanic experience that corrects this?

TM: The Overmind breaks through the oppressive screen thrown around it and comes to meet the individual. It is like an interview with an angel or a demon. It is laden with intense psychological resonances for the person experiencing it; it is a profoundly numinous experience (AR, p. 65).

LN: But how can psychedelic experiences help people to make contact or re-connect with what is holy, sacred, or divine?  Wouldn’t it be much safer and more real to experience the divine through more traditional methods–through liturgies and rituals and sacraments that do not contain drugs? Aren’t psychedelic experiences just bizarre, subjective, hallucinatory, delusional states induced by intoxication?

TM: Certainly these states are strange–they are not mere phantasms drifting before our closed eyes, but complete immersions in higher topological manifolds and experiences potentially incomprehensible or frightening. Individuals may take power to themselves by boldly, even recklessly, exploring these dimensions. But even though these places are the heart and soul of shamanism, they are too numinous and energy-laden to be accessible through a tradition. Instead they must be personally discovered in the depths of the psychedelically intoxicated soul. (AR, p.136)

LN: Thank you, Terence, for  helping us to get a better  handle on the relationship between tryptamines, shamanism, and the numinous. May you frolic freely in “The Devil’s Paradise.”

(In references, “IL” is The Invisible Landscape; “FOG” is Food of the Gods; and  ”AR ” is The Archaic Revival.)

Yogi Bhajan, Yogi Bhajan, everywhere I turn it’s Yogi Bhajan. I’m kicking it with my best friend Alyne Rose–who studied to be a teacher of Kundalini Yoga– and who’s she yammering on and on about? Yogi Bhajan. I’m following up on one of my favorite books of the last few years—Rational Mysticism by John Horgan. I’m on the author’s webpage reading chapters that were left out of the book. And who does he say is the most enlightened person he’s ever met? It’s not Huston Smith or Stan Grof. It sure as hell isn’t Ken Wilber. It’s not even the late, great Terrence McKenna. Nope. Who is the one person that this Columbia educated journalist and former science writer for Time, Newsweek, Scientific American and the New York Times says might have been a fully realized human? You guessed it: Yogi Freakin’ Bhajan!

That’s not all. Oh no, there’s more. So, I’m researching Eugene, Oregon. I’m thinking about moving up there. I’ve applied to a doctoral program at the U of O. I’m reading up on Eugene, learning about the local flavor and culture. It seems that Eugene’s a hotbed for gurus and cult leaders. There was Ken Kesey with his acid tests and band of Merry Pranksters. Then you’ve got “anarcho-primitivist,” John Zirzan editor of Green Anarchy magazine. He lives in Eugene. But you want to guess what guru made the biggest splash in Eugene and still has a huge following there? Well I’ll be damned if it’s not that son of a gun, Yogi Bhajan.

Look, let me be clear. I have no problem with what Yogi Bhajan preaches or teaches. I have no problem with Sikhs (except for the guy  in the Fast Stop Market in Val Verde….and the guy who owns the Subway in Madera Ranchos; they’re assholes). I’m sure Kundalini Yoga is all that it’s cracked up to be and more. And I take no issue with Yogi Bhajan’s personal character in general or with his deeds and actions. I’m sure, on the whole, he was a a solid guy who did a lot of people a lot of good. No, my beef is with his name, “Yogi Bhajan.”  I think it’s manipulative. I think it’s a lingual gimmick to get Americans to trust in him and to buy into what he’s saying. By calling himself Yogi Bhajan, this character was tapping into the heart of what is sacred in America: baseball and cartoons. With this carefully chosen moniker, this Yogi Bhajan cat was neurolinguistically programming us to think that he was talented, witty, and loveable like the great Yogi Berra, arguably the best—and certainly the most quotable–catcher in this history of major league baseball. At the same time, the Yogi Bhajan pseudonym also triggers semantic centers in the brain that force us to consider him as being “smarter than the average” member of his species just like the great Yogi Bear, arguably the smartest Ursidae ever to steal a pick-a-nic basket in Jellystone National Park.

Look, you and I may know that the Yankees are a bunch of cheaters. We know all about the Kansas City pipeline that sent all of the best Athletics players to the Big Apple in ludicrously lopsided trades. We know how this put the Yankees on top financially. We know that, since there is no salary cap in baseball, that the rich, cheating Yankees have, in turn, been able to use their unfairly earned economic advantage to lure all the best players to New York (and force them to stay in New York. See: CC Sebathia) and thus, the Yankees stay on top forever. Sure, we might know this, but the average American loves the damn Yankees. They’re America’s team. Hell Americans are even referred to as Yankees. The Yankees stand for everything America stands for. They stand for capitalism and Wall Street. With those sharp pinstripes stretching vertically upward like Manhattan skyscrapers, the Yankees stand for industry and growth. Like America, they stand not for the dark horse, but for the frontrunner; not for the long shot, but for the sure thing. America stands for conquest and winning at all costs. America will napalm a village full of children if that’s what it takes to win, and the Yankees, too, would drop an atom bomb on Fenway Park, Citi Field, or Dodger Stadium if they thought they could get away with it. The Yankees, with their swastika-like logo stand not for the underdog, but for exterminating the under-dog.

But the common man is uniformed; he loves the Yankees because their winning is predictable. It’s something he can count on in a chaotic world. And because he loves the Yankees, the average Joe loves Yogi Berra. The average man understands the paradoxical poignancy, the non-dual knowing of Yogi Berra’s bromides. Berra uttered such wise witticisms as “It aint over til it’s over” and “baseball is 90 % mental and the other half is physical.” But Berra’s most quick-witted quote was surely “I really didn’t say everything I said.” Yogi was a Yoda amongst Jabas.

By playing on the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) of Yo-gi B-erra, Yo-gi B-hajan is re-routing our neurocircuits and re-wiring our synapses to think that he, too, is so powerfully and poetically insightful. But that’s only half of his conniving scheme.

You and I may know that Yogi Bear isn’t “real.” But that doesn’t matter to the Kelly Bundys of the world (and there are more of them than you might think.) Yogi Bear exists as part of the noösphere, part of the collective unconscious; Yogi Bear has left an indelible morphogenetic imprint on our minds that, if Nick at Night has anything to say about it, may never be eroded. By utilizing the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) of Yogi Bear in his alias, Yogi Bhajan is telling us that he is a bear that can outsmart humans! Since Yogi Bhajan is a human, we are only left with the natural conclusion that this is some sort of metaphor. In this analogy , are we not supposed to surmise that bears represent humans and humans therefore represent gods? Pick-a-nic baskets must stand for sacred secrets, don’t you see? Isn’t it clear to you that Yogi Bhajan is trying to tell us that he can steal secrets from the gods just as easily as Yogi Bear stole pick-a-nic baskets from Jellystone’s tourists? Well, even if it’s not clear to you, it’s clear to me.

Well, I’ve had enough, damn it. Why does it always have to be Yogi Bhajan all the freakin’ time? What about me? I want people to think that I am special. I want them to think that I am a mystic master. What does this Yogi Bhajan dude have on me? What’s he got that I don’t? What’s that you say? A clever, manipulative name that triggers people’s mental and emotional fondness for both the Yankees and the Cartoon Network? Well, hold your horses. Two can play at that game!

Henceforth and forever, I shall be known as…Mickey Mhajan! (I had considered going with “The Maha-Mickey-Mantle-Mahesh-Mouse,”  but decided that was a bit much.) That’s right, I, too, can play on the average man’s love for the Yankees and, at the same time,  his love for cartoons!

By borrowing the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) from Mickey Mantle’s name, I am sending the message that I am a psycho-spiritual winner. I’m saying that I am not only a VIP, but the MVP. My new name says that I am a mystical hard-hitter; the hardest in fact. Not only can I “knock it out of the park,” yogically speaking, I can knock it 734 feet, baby. That’s enough to, tantrically, knock it out of two parks! My new name says that when the guru game is on the line and you need somebody to hit a walk-away homer, that I am the best in the business, bitches.

But I’m also stealing the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) from that most recognizable of all anthropomorphic rodents—Mickey Mouse, who is more than a cartoon; he’s an icon. By choosing a name that sonically seduces your psyche with the first five sounds and seven letters of Mickey Mouse, I am programming you to think that I, Mickey Mhajan, am humble, happy, high-spirited, and even heroic.

And let’s not forget that Mickey Mouse is mighty mighty; he’s a much mightier mouse than, say, Mighty mouse. Mickey’s dominance resonates with the message I want to send as Mickey Mhajan: power!  As the mascot and trademark of the almost omnipotent Disney Corporation, Mickey Mouse, like Mickey Mhajan, is a force to be reckoned with. For, Disney, like the Yankees, like all great American corporations, and like America herself, isn’t afraid to play dirty in order to dominate. 

This article is playfully and apologetically dedicated to Yogi Bhajan, a truly great man with a great sense of humor; and to John Horgan;  Alyne Rose Keller;  Lyle Williams;  and Sgt. Jay Soccoccio, all of whom have, in different ways, served as my teachers.

To actually learn something useful about the venerable Yogi Bhajan or about Kundalini Yoga, click here.

 

 

 

 

This is old news at this point and you’ve probably heard. But soon, we may have some idea of whether it’s all true.

A couple of years ago, Antony Garrett  Lisi, (who goes by his middle name, Garrett), a theoretical physicist and Burning Man regular, discovered something strange.

Lisi, who graduated with a 3.9 cum (and a 4.0 in Math and Physics) from UCLA (Go Bruins!), was trying to nudge the science world closer to a “Grand Unified Field Theory,” a theory that would adequately explain all the known forces and particles in the Universe.

As I’m sure you know, when Classical Newtonian physics was overthrown in the Twentieth Century, two new theories replaced the old one. One theory, the theory of quantum mechanics, describes the strange behavior of infinitesimally small objects. We are told that such objects sometimes behave as propagating waves (like sound waves or water waves) and sometimes they behave as solid, stable particles (like billiard balls). Weirder still, we’re told that these objects behave differently when we are watching them. Strangest of all, these objects seem to be able to occupy two spatial positions at the same time, and they are known to magically disappear from one place and then re-appear, across vast distances and impenetrable barriers, at entirely new locales WITHOUT TRAVELING THROUGH THE INTERVENING SPACE. And these objects, once they have shared a common state,  can forever communicate with each other, no matter how far you remove them, and they can do so instantly–not at light speed, mind you, but INSTANTLY, as though the communication between them took absolutely no time whatsoever.

The other theory, the theory of relativity, applies to astronomically large objects (and huge forces). This theory tells us that space and time are really aspects of the same thing. Because space and time are equivalent and interchangeable, it turns out that if you add up any object’s momentum through the space AND time, that all objects in the cosmos are always traveling at the same speed (”C” the speed of light). For you and me sitting on our butts in front of computers in stationary houses or in slow (by cosmic standards) trains or planes, we are expending most of our momentum in the time dimension, literally traveling toward the future at 99% the speed of light. Time flies in deed. Any object traveling faster than light speed, (a “tachyon”) would have to travel BACKWARD through time at a rate proportional to its rate through space in excess of “C,” so that its total velocity through space and time remains fixed at the speed of light. For objects that travel right at light speed, time freezes, moving neither forward nor backward.

That space and time are the same is evident if you think about it. When asked “how far away” the supermarket is, for instance, you might answer that it’s “ten minutes”  away, or, you might say it’s “seven miles” away.” We use space and time interchangeably in such instances.  And if you and I want to MEET, we need four coordinates. We could meet at the Northeast corner of 7th Avenue and 119th Street on the 22nd floor, but if you show up at 11:00 am on Wednesday and I show up at 4:00 pm on Thursday, we won’t be at the same “place-time.” It took an Einstein to figure out that space and time exist as a unified phenomenon, but it seems obvious in retrospect.

We’re also told that gravity  (the force exerted by material objects) is equal to acceleration. That means that if you are in an elevator with no windows and you are standing on the floor, you never really know for sure whether the elevator floor is pushing up against your feet because the elevator is at rest on a planet or whether the elevator is in fact traveling upward at a great speed through empty space. That acceleration is equal to gravity is obvious in such examples as the movie Apollo 13 simulating zero gravity (a lack of the floor pushing up at you) by filming in an airplane as it falls. It works the other way, too, of course, and you can simulate increased gravity by accelerating quickly in a roller coaster or a jet airplane or a “Gravitron” centrifuge at the County Fair. We measure accelerative force in “Gs,” one “G” being equivalent to the force of gravity on planet Earth.

Weirder still, we’re told that space can bend, stretch, and shrink. Time too, is elastic and flexible and people traveling at different velocities or standing in different gravitational fields experience the flow of time at dramatically different rates.

Further, we’re told that no matter how fast you travel toward or away from a light source, that you will measure the speed of light relative to yourself as constant and unchanging.

If you and I are both in cars on the freeway, traveling at 65 mph, and we are traveling parallel to each other, we will experience each other’s relative velocity as zero. And if we were traveling away from each other (or toward each other) in a straight line, we would measure the other’s speed, relative to ourselves, as 130 mph. This is called “Galilean relativity.” But light is bizarre. It doesn’t care what direction you are traveling or what your speed is, it always runs toward you or away from you at the exact same speed.

Relativity even tells us that we could measure the length of an object or the duration of an event and come up with different measurements…and both of us, depending on our “inertial” frame of reference, could be right. Given two events in time, we could even disagree about which event happened FIRST, and we could, again, both be right, turning causality on its head. (I need to point out that there is ALWAYS a right answer–and only one–concerning measurements for each inertial frame. Relativity is actually quite absolutist in this regard. So you can ditch any nihilistic notion that there is no such thing as truth. You still have a right to your opinion, but that doesn’t mean you’re not wrong!)

Lastly, and this is the most famous piece of the relativity puzzle, like gravity and acceleration, and like space and time, matter and energy turn out to be flip-sides of the same coin; they are interchangeable. Not only did Einstein tell us that you can turn matter into energy and vice versa, he actually calculated the precise exchange rate with his legendary equation: e=mc2

As weird as all this is, particles in two places at the same time, bent space, dilating time, matter turning into pure energy, entangled particles that not only seem aware of each other’s properties but seem to know whether or not  we are watching them, the weirdest part is that quantum mechanics and relativity don’t totally jibe. We have one theory for the quantum world of particle physics and another for gravitation.

Each theory has been proved true by innumerable experiments and measurements. Einstein carefully predicted the extent to which starlight would be bent (or, more aptly, travel through bent space) as it traveled past the Sun. Pictures were taken of stars on either side of the sun during a solar eclipse on an expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington (a genius in his own right) and relativity was proved true, instantly making Einstein the most famous person in the world. Long before this, tests had confirmed that clocks at sea level (or in fast moving jets) experience a slower rate of time than clocks at higher elevations (or at rest).

And if quantum theory were incorrect, we’d have no Wi-Fi networks, no base stations for mobile phones, and no MRI machines.

And yet, theories which try to unify ALL of the fields and forces (and particles) that we observe remain ungainly, gawky, awkward.

Superstring theory, which posits that the varied particles we observe are the result of one dimensional loops (if you can’t envision a one-dimensional loop, don’t fret; neither can anyone else) vibrating at different pitches or frequencies. So far, superstring theory is the most elegant Grand Unified Theory, but it has all kinds of problems (as do most theories that attempt to provide quantum descriptions of gravity). For one, some people debate whether string theory is really all that scientific in that it makes few  predictions that are testable (falsifiable)..at least at present. Secondly, string theory is inexact and requires many tweaks and modifications in order for it to fit the data.

But back to my boy, the Bruin, the BURNER.

Lisi was working on a version of “the Standard Model,” the most accurate model to date regarding particle physics, when he got a wicked case of déjà vu. Some of the equations seemed eerily familiar to him. He had seen them before: in a graduate level  ”elective” class he had taken in a field called topology, which studies the mathematics and geometry of hyper-dimensional objects. Some of the equations that Lisi was using in his particle physics research were the exact same equations used to describe a particular polytope–the most symmetrical, and some would say most beautiful, object in mathematics, the so-called E-8 polytope.

Lisi noticed that he could easily plot all  known particles (as well a couple of the particles predicted by  the Standard Model of particle physics) along the 248 symmetries of the E-8.

“I think our universe is this beautiful shape,” say Lisi.

Assuming our 4-dimensional Universe is stretched over the surface of an E-8 polytope like the skin on a drum, it can only twist, wrinkle, bend and fold in a finite number of ways–248 to be exact. These 248 possible topological features would, in turn, give rise to what we would observe as 248 possible forces and “particles,” (I remind you that these particles have little in common with classical objects like billiard balls). These, in turn, would explain ALL KNOWN INTERACTIONS IN THE COSMOS. That’s why we call such theories, theories of “everything.” Lisi’s E-8 theory won’t explain why the French love Jerry Lewis, but it would explain why we have the fundamental physical forces that we do.

It seems that our boy, Dr. Lisi is not only expert at math, physics, surfing, and skiing; he’s pretty damned adept at puns as well. He named his theory, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” There are two puns in the title, the words “simple” and “exceptional.” The E-8 is the last and largest in a group of non-abelian (simple) Lie groups. The E-8 is one of five Lie groups that do not regress infinitely into a series of subgroups necessitating higher and higher numbers of dimensions.

If my mathematics are correct, Lisi’s pun is a QUADRUPLE entendre. It’s not enough that he’s the next Einstein. He’s trying to be the next Oscar Wilde to boot. Bastard.

Lisi’s theory gives us a prediction, something testable: we ought to, in the future, find twenty more particles until we arrive at an even 248. Lisi is currently working on the calculations of the masses of the remaining 20 particles. If new particles are found that fit neatly into the E-8 model, you can bet your ass that Lisi will win the Nobel prize and he will be the 21st Century’s answer to Einstein.

So far, the predictions of Lisi’s model match what we find in the real world. Lisi asks, “How cool is that?”

When the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful atom smasher, goes back on line in February, we may well get a chance to crown Lisi the new King of Physics. The LHC accelerates particles and then forces them to collide. When they hit each other head-on, they break into smaller fragments. That’s how we find newer, smaller, and more fundamental particles.

Not only am I rooting for Lisi because we have the same alma mater; I’m also pulling for him because we share the same HOME–Black Rock City.

Here’s what Lisi has to say about the Festival of the Burning Man:

“Burning Man is the most amazingly great social gathering this side of the Andromeda galaxy. It’s a huge artistic pseudo-hippy techno love fest out in the desert where people make and are great art and then go around torching everything. You just gotta go to believe it. No, you still won’t believe it. It is the best of what a community of humans can be. Neither words nor pictures can suitably describe the Burning Man festival.”

After just three days on the playa, Lisi said…

“To transcribe my memories of the past few days would take the other 362 days of the year… The most amazingly great social gathering I’ve ever experienced.”

Sure sounds like the smartest man alive to me.

I ask you: What would it mean if the entire cosmos had the most beautiful artistic shape mathematically possible? And what would it mean if the entire Universe were a “mandala”–a sacred shape fashioned to draw one’s consciousness upward toward Spirit?

Tantric Buddhists and Hindus have always held that mandalas were symbols of completeness, emblems for all that IS.

They hold mandalas to be microcosms of the Universe as a whole.

It may just turn out that they are right.

Have I told you about the time I shared the warmth of a fire and the smoke of a good cigar with history’s most esteemed storyteller this side of Shakespeare? Really? You don’t know about my exclusive interview with Spielberg? You haven’t heard about the time Tom (Cruise) and I were acting together in that big budget Extra-Terrestrial Sci-Fi flick Steven was directing? Well, I suppose I ought to tell you. I’d better give it to you straight. I’ll just lash together a few raw facts….throw in a bit of old Negro wisdom.

It all came back to me the other night. I was watching Where the Buffalo Roam. At the very top of Chapter 10, there is a shot of Piru, CA—a pan on a car. Piru’s where it all happened, you see.

Call it heroism, call it destiny, call it trespassing. Steven Spielberg, the grand-daddy shot-caller of them all was in my town, on my territory–my turf. And I was going to get to him, boy. And nothing—no militant lesbian production manager and certainly no grabassing P.A.–was going to keep me out. No, sir.

A lot of filming happens in Piru. Murder She Wrote. The Dukes of Hazzard. Reno 911. And that truck commercial where the guy hitches that restaurant to his pick-up and then tows the whole diner, pretty waitress and all, behind him.

Piru is no stranger to the stars, either. A lot of Hollywood blue-blood has rolled through town—the iconic elite. Burt Lancaster. Judy Garland. Dolly Parton, Sly Stallone, Jennifer Lopez, The Rock, and “The Dude” himself, Jeff Bridges. They’ve all shot pictures in Piru. But this was something else. This was big, boy. Tom Cruise? Steven Spielberg? A remake of War of the Worlds? You don’t get any bigger than that. The Circus had just rolled into town.

“Great Scott! What the fuck are those lights? Are they having the Super Bowl in our backyard?”

“They’re shooting something, Nash Bridges or Carnival maybe,” my girlfriend says.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a great big fucker from the looks of it. Let’s go sneak a peak.”

I know Piru like the back of my hand. Piru’s about the size of the back of my hand. Piru is located in what is called the Santa Clara River Valley and sometimes the Heritage Valley by those less Catholically or less Mexicanly inclined. The Santa Clara is the last undeveloped river valley in Southern California. Located just south of the Los Padres mountains and just north of the Santa Susannas, the Santa Clara River Valley is a hidden Eden only now becoming sullied by the White Man with his khaki condominiums and his taupe tract homes. In the spring, parts of the valley near Piru, up Sespe Canyon in Fillmore, and down along Grande Canyon back behind Val Verde all light up in a floral display of purple lupine and golden mustard that would make you swear that Jehovah himself, like the white-bearded Jew Spielberg, was a Lakers fan.

But the point in any case is that Piru is a small town. Rural. When you live there, you know your way around. You know how to cut through the abandoned lot with the rotting pomegranate tree down the train tracks and past the machine shop, bypassing several levels of security, right to the center of a major motion picture, should its nucleus happen to be located in downtown, Piru. That’s what we did, my girlfriend and I. We took the short-cut.

Deception was the only way. We wanted at Spielberg bad. It’s not as though we could be forthright with these Hollywood goons. Saying “take me to your leader” wasn’t going to fly. Ingenuity was called for. We played like we were A.D.s when that suited us and played like extras when that seemed more fun.  We kept defecting from our assigned extra groups to new groups, closer to the stars, closer to Cruise and to Spielberg. Finally, we ended up acting in a scene with Cruise, actually being directed by Stevie Spee himself. As we stood around, Cruise smiled and waved at us. It was difficult to tell who was more excited about their close proximity to Tom Cruise:  my girlfriend… or Tom Cruise?

When we started rolling, Cruise was driving this car. Dakota Fanning was in back with the camera operator. Our job was to try and get to the car and to bang on the windows. Well, now, I’m an actor. A trained actor. UCLA. A doctor of thespianism. I played Romeo for the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival, damn you. So get out of my way, boy, I’m comin’ through!

I charged at the van and it didn’t matter how they re-arranged us extras. Even if put in back, I steamrolled my way through like O.J. Simpson in the Rose Bowl or a murder trial. I banged on the window, scaring the crap out of weird little Dakota and even startling the camera guy as well. I growled and snarled and gnashed my teeth and I pounded furiously against the glass. I had a close-up. There could be no doubt. A big sucker, too. A BCU as the boys say. But when the movie aired, I was disappointed. Sure, I was terribly disappointed at the picture’s low level of artistry, but I was even more disappointed that I had been CUT from this bloated piece of cinema trash. The nerve of those evil rat bastards! I was thrown into the terrible dark oubliette of the proverbial cutting room floor. No one would ever see my BCU. Piru as a whole suffered much the same fate. There was hardly a frame of Piru in the whole picture. And those wasteful fuckers spent days blowing shit up and raining on people. All for a few frames that could have been shot on the lot. We, my girlfriend and I, opted not to get rained on. That was to be the final destiny that night for the car-charging, window-pounding extras. They had a great big rain machine and they wanted to give us pneumonia for fifty filthy bucks. We decided to walk home, take showers, smoke some pot. Our labors went unpaid and uncredited.

The next night, the girlfriend had to work. She was a waitress. (I’m certain she was hoping some handsome buck would haul her away in his full-ton pickup).  She couldn’t stalk Steven Spielberg with me this particular night. But she sent over a little buddy who served as her understudy, a fellow from her film classes at the nearby California Institute of the Arts. CalArts is the best animation school in the world, maybe. But the theater and film schools are otherwise overpriced consolation prizes for students who are rejected, like Spielberg in his day, from the acronymic pantheon of SC, UCLA, AFI. The little buddy’s name was Andy. A bright-eyed and star-struck fellow, Andy owned a fancy HD camcorder and had done some film work, including serving as the personal assistant on an NBA commercial for one Kobe Bryant, whose greatness and historical weight Andy seemed to not adequately grasp. But Spielberg’s greatness Andy grasped perfectly. You might say little Andy was obsessed with Stevie Spee. (It was, in fact, Andy who coined this familiar vernacular for his idol.)  It was something like Andy’s Great American Dream to meet Stevie Spee. And for a few bowls of chronic sativa, I was to be Andy’s guide on this historic quest. I’d hand him his hero on the half-shell.

Sufficiently stoned, Andy and I made our way through the abandoned lot with the rotting pomegranate tree, down the train tracks and past the machine shop into the center of the Universal universe. We wore serious expressions. We kept our arms folded. “Yeah, buddy. We’re legit. What the fuck are YOU looking at?” We could have been anybody. We were young—I, 26 maybe, and Andy probably 18 or 19—and that made it worse. You see, all the powerful people in Hollywood are young these days. There are seven-year-olds running studios. Hell, we could have been the representatives of rich Saudi investors for all anyone knew. Or maybe we were government henchman supervising the film to make sure it was action-packed and bloody enough and emotional enough on subjects like sacrifice and heroism to convince at least a few thousand more poor black kids to enlist as Marines. The pentagon controls Hollywood and always has. Like I say, we could have been anybody. Best not to fuck with us. And no one did.

We had heard overheard Spielberg giving a note. There was a hole in Cruise’s windshield after he crashed. The people in charge of smashing the windshield asked Spielberg what he thought of their hole. He said, “A little bigger.” They made it bigger with a hammer and a chisel and looked at him the way a blacksmith looks at the king who’s fond of beheading people when handing him his best attempt at horseshoes. “Yeah, that’s good.” Spielberg said. I turned to Andy and said, “That’s why he makes the big bucks. He knows how big the hole needs to be.”

Andy and I sneaked closer and closer to Spielberg. Finally, we found him alone, standing near the Piru Bridge, near the impromptu movie diner, near where Tom Cruise crashes his car into a phone pole or power pole. Spielberg had drawn first blood. As one of the more evolved species indigenous to Piru, I had ruled the roost. But now Speilberg was king of the hill,  top of the food chain. By coming to town and blaring his damn floodlights into my living room, Spielberg had invaded my world. But now I was about to invade his!

We had Spielberg cornered. It was just us and him. The Young, the Crazy, and the Famous. We approached. Spielberg was smoking a stogie and warming himself near an electric heater. Andy was maybe two and a half feet from Spielberg and I was between them, right next to Spielberg. I could  breathe the insidious secondhand smoke of his cigar. I couldn’t help but breathe his smoke, actually. And the whole metaphorical, archetypal, allegorical nature of the whole thing hit me. How shamanic was this?!?! Here we were breathing in the wafting fumes of a mind altering plant (tobacco) this man was smoking; we were sharing his smoke and his fire, this electrical, artificial fire, as he, the world’s most celebrated storyteller, was taking a breather in the midst of telling another of his epic extra-terrestrial extravaganzas, a film whose budget could have bought you any number small island nations and banana republics. We were so close we could touch him. I could smell his cologne. Obsession, I thought, by Calvin Klein. This was a close encounter of the third kind. Not just a sighting, but a full-blown interaction.

He turned to us and smiled. I assume that he assumed we must be there for a reason. If I’d wanted to make the headlines, I could have jumped him right there and snapped his neck. He’s a small guy, too. Somewhat wimpy seeming. So much for the security. Universal was paying the fucker a cool hundred million to direct the picture. They could have spent a bit more keeping him safe. Finally, Spielberg turned to me and spoke. He said, “Mr. Heater” and then he pointed at the electric heater that was keeping the three of us warm. It had a brand logo that read, “Mr. Heater.” I smiled back, thinking perhaps that this man was actually some sort of utter imbecile, a complete cretin. Able to read, apparently, but perhaps just barely. “Mr. Heater.” Was that all he had to say for himself? Was this the man who had, at 27 or 30 depending on who you ask, made the world afraid to go in the water? Who knows,  maybe he read my mind or felt my vibes as I was thinking of how easy it would be to do him in on the spot. Maybe he was trying to make small talk so I wouldn’t assassinate him,  and “Mr. Heater” was the best he could muster.

About that time, one of the militant lesbians found us and asked us if we were extras. While I was contemplating an appropriate response, Andy answered in the affirmative. As she began booting us back to where she supposed we were supposed to be, out on the bridge, in the cold air, far from Mr. Heater,  Andy, ever the D.P., was thinking photojournalism. He asked for a picture. Spielberg said no. Then, I, a man of the written word, asked for his autograph. He looked at me squarely. It was a look of disdain, like he was taking in one rotten doozie of a fart and said, “I don’t think so.” He lisped somewhat–a sibilant “s” like you’d hear from a Spaniard or an East Village queen. You don’t catch it when he’s on T.V., but it was there, clear as a hissing snake. Had it been “Mithter Heater?”  Or was it more like  “Mishter Heater?” And was it “I don’t think tho”  or “I don’t think sho?” It was neither. I’m sure of it. The man’s “s” sounds were a rare hybrid between “th” and “sh”  that only he could utter. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, you know. A subtle form of autism. I’m sure it’s irrelevant to his speech impediment, but I thought I’d better mention it.

Spielberg had rejected me, sure. I won’t debate that. But he had spoken to me. I’d asked him a question and he had answered. There was no disputing that much. I asked; he answered. You can call it what you want, but it was an interview in my eyes. Now I could say that I had acted in a Spielberg pic (in a scene with Cruise and Dakota Fanning, no less) and that I had interviewed the autistic auteur. I would say it, too, and often.

As we were ushered away rather briskly, I made a final desperate plea. This bastard had to have a soft-spot. I figured I’d appeal to his sense of artistry. “Sir, is this really how you’re going to to treat the extras…we’re the ones who create the atmosphere!” Spielberg, with his index finger,  motioned me towards him.. and as I leaned in,  he said, “Fuck the atmosphere.”

Fine. You have it your way. Spoil the fun. I fabricated that last small paragraph, I admit it. But the rest is true to the letter. A weird tale to be sure. Aliens. Billionaire Jews with smuggled Cuban stogies. Short, narcissistic Scientologists with sinister smiles. Little girls with too many adult brains (and too many adult admirers) for their own good. Armies and legions of people committed to making make-believe. And machines pissing man-made rain down on cinema’s untouchables–the extras, a lot whose very name points at their superfluousness. For regular folks, for you and me, the atmosphere rains on us, but Hollywood can rain ON the “atmosphere.”

There are some parts of this account some people can’t believe. I can accept that. They want to believe, sure, but they just can’t. It’s all just too absurd for workaday folk. But that’s not my problem. No, my problem is that it never got weird enough for me.

I was in New Leaf Market in downtown Santa Cruz moments ago when I saw the most beautiful and sacred of objects. It looked like some sort of fractal, extra-terrestrial surrealist seashell–more psychedelic than Grateful Dead album art and more structurally divine than St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. It stared at me like a futuristic sculpture from Burning Man. I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could something so wondrous, so infused with sacred mathemetacics have been put here in the produce section of the grocery store? Was this left here on accident by aliens? By angels? This wonder of the world turned out to be merely…broccoli…a variety of cauliflower, in fact. And it was on sale for $1.99 a lb.

I stood awe-struck. I made every passerby take a look. One older woman was as amazed as me. She thanked me genuinely for making her look. A wizardly hippie with an arabesque hempspun costume  smiled knowingly as he told me that he had, indeed, taken notice of this marvelous vegetable before. I told him that this broccoli reminded me of  DMT visions. He admitted that it was “quite psychedelic”  (you gotta love Santa Cruz). I feel bad for everyday garden variety broccoli. Sure,  broccoli was novel when you were a kid because it looked like little trees, but regular broccoli will always seem mundane after you’ve beheld the perfect fractal fantasticness of a Romanesco.  Spirals within spirals within spirals, all logorithmically inlaid. When you see a fractal, that’s one thing. When you see a perfect equiangular logarithmic growth spiral, a Spira mirabilis, (literally: “the marvelous spiral” or “miraculous spiral”), that’s another thing. To see a 3-D spiral fractal pyramid made, by definition,  of smaller fractal spiral pyramids…(which are in turn made of smaller fractal spiral pyramids)… is almost too much; it is almost too trippy.

I want to take this broccoli and preserve it somehow and put it on my altar. I want to paint the smallest pyramids alternating colors of the rainbow and hand the painted broccoli out as gifts at Burning Man. Please…go find a piece of Romanesco broccoli (mine came from Pinnacle Organic Farms in Hollister, California) and see what I mean. I don’t see how anyone who’s ever seen Romanesco broccoli could be an atheist. There is intelligent design in the cosmos. And yet, I don’t see how anyone who has ever seen Romanesco broccoli could really be a classical theist either. The universe has an entelechy of its own. The cosmos is evolving itself. At a certain level, creator and creature/creation are one. Christ said “I and the Father are one.” When the morning star shone, The Buddha said “Together as one, The Great Earth and I, have at this moment attained the Tao.” This crazy cosmos is a panvitally living, panpsychically thinking/willing, artistically expressive,  novelty-generating machine/organism and you, you my friend, are a piece of it. Sound crazy?  If you don’t believe me, you’ve never seen a piece of Romanesco broccoli. And if you have, maybe you didn’t really look.

These days it seems that everybody practices “tantric sex.” People who otherwise seem rather narcissistic and ego-contracted are pronounced as gurus because they can put their legs behind their ears during coitus or because they can direct their ejaculations inwardly or orgasm without losing their erections. In a country where yoga tends to be synonymous with calisthenics, I suppose it’s not surprising that tantra would be reduced to pornographic parlor tricks. The real meaning of tantric sex, as I see it (I’m earning a Graduate Certificate in Buddhist Psychology from John F. Kennedy University) is sex that awakens, enlivens, respects, and heals the whole person.

Infinette, a fellow Integral Psychology student who has been involved with the S.F. group One Taste,  and I were discussing the notion of sexual healing. She had asked me if I thought that sex and orgasm were predominantly second chakra affairs. My response was that sex and sexual touch could potentially heal at any and all of the chakras.

At the 1st chakra, you think, “Hey, sweet! There is an ‘I,’ which is a separate, independent subject who can experience OTHER subjects as pleasurable objects AND who can, myself, be experienced as a pleasurable object by OTHER subjects.

At the 2nd chakra, sexual touch heals because you think, “Hey, sweet! As weird as I sometimes feel, I am a human. Half of all humans have genitals roughly like mine. And anyone who is familiar with these will have an idea of how to play with ME. And my genitals and fingers and mouth fit lock-and-key with the fingers and mouths and genitals of other humans.”

At the 3rd chakra, sex and orgasm have the potential to heal because you think, “Hey,  I am good at getting off, good at getting other people off,  and I am good at getting other people to WANT to get me off, and good at getting them to want to get off WITH me… Sweet!” The third chakra is the first chakra at which giving becomes at least as important as getting, but the giving could still be rooted in an achievement-based egotism.

At  the 4th chakra, it dawns on you that, “Hey, the separate you in there is ‘the same’ as the separate me in here… so we are not really totally separate after all.” I would argue that sex is possible at the first three chakras, but that “making love” necessitates the opening and activating of the heart chakra.  At any of the first three chakras, it is possible to be merely having sex with a body. At the fourth chakra, you are having sex with a person.

5th chakra sex, which I think is fairly rare, incorporartes communicating freely and spontaneously at each of the four lower chakras, which are all fully activated and integrated into a kind of erotic symphony. Fifth chakra sex is art.

6th chakra sex is some pretty trippy shit. I have had full-blown, full-scale sixth chakra sex only once, personally. Two very interesting things took place. First, I was able to see through my lover’s skin–as though I had x-ray vision–to her vascular system, her muscular system, her circulatory system, and her skeletal system. This was all a year or two before I’d seen my first Alex Grey artwork (the cover to Nirvana’s In Utero notwithstanding). I was blown away, not just by Grey’s talent (he may well be the smartest guy on the planet), but by the fact that he was painting something I’d actually seen! I later heard (with this particular lover present) Alex say that he considers it the highest of compliments when people tell him that they have seen the very things he paints. Later during my sixth chakra lovemaking session, I saw my lover morph into all sorts of various people, whom I interpreted to be her past incarnations even though I didn’t really believe in reincarnation before. If you see the Richard Linklater film, A Scanner Darkly, based on the novel by Phillip K. Dick, which I also saw with the the same lover in the theater some years later, Keanu Reeves wears  a “scramble suit” which causes his appearance to continuously morph from one identity into another. The scramble suit is eerily close to what I saw taking place with my girlfriend.

If sexual communion with another being activates the 7th chakra, the individuals involved begin to pour not just into each other’s souls but into the soul of the whole cosmos, into the Divine Ground of All Being; and, indeed, the whole cosmos pours into them. I think that the moment of orgasm is almost always–albeit an ephemeral one–a seventh chakra experience. There is a reason why orgasm is referred to as “la petite mort,” the little death. Orgasm is the closest most people will come to previewing the cosmic dissolution that occurs at death while they are still alive.

In any psychospiritual path, the important thing is to be present to reality just as it is. In the words of cult guru Adi Da Samraj, “reality is all the God there is.” Ram Dass has said that the most important aspect of conscious sex is that you are present to your partner and that you have no expectations at all. While five hour erections and acrobatic flexibility and vaginal contractions that can turn coal into diamond (like Superman’s fist in Superman III) are all impressive things to boast about at bars, real tantra is first and foremost about mindfulness (paying attention) and equanimity (going with the flow and not being judgmental).

I can’t stress enough how little tantric sex necessitates contortionistic positions (you don’t have to be Prince) or hours upon hours of delayed ejaculation (you don’t have to be Sting, either). One of the most powerful tantric sex practices doesn’t even involve touch! You can generate an enormous amount of powerful sensual energy by merely breathing into each of your lover’s chakras. You start with a form of tonglen. As you breathe in, you remind yourself that the plant world is part of your greater body. The trees and the algae of the sea are part of your respiratory system. You take note of the fact that the Earth loves you enough to breathe for you. As you exhale, you take note of the fact that you, in turn, are part of nature’s lungs and your breath nourishes the plant kingdom. Then you sit very near your lover and you do some gazing. Look deep into their eyes and send your breath, and with it your love, to their third eye. Then you move from chakra to chakra sending your breath and your love to the crown of their head, to their throat, to their herart, to their navel, to their genitals, and to their sphincter. You send a different kind of love to each chakra. To the anus, you send love and appreciation for their physical being. To their genitals you send thanks and appreciation for their sensual and reproductive aspects. To their navel, you send gratitude and admiration for their being a part of your clan, a member of your tribe. To their heart, you send your love in communion with their love. To their throat you send thanks for their ability to communicate with you…in person…on the phone…..via email and text message….you rejoice in their ability to reach out to you through words. To their third eye, you give thanks for their intellect. You send love to the part of them that thinks and plans and daydreams and imagines. Even those of us with more modest minds are geniuses of the animal kingdom. Our brains perform a million minute tasks every minute. To the very top of their skull, you send thanks and love for their soul. You recognize that they are a piece of the divine fabric of the cosmos, a spark of the firelight of God. These little prayers that you send to each chakra can be merely thought silently, your intention sent with the breath, or you can speak to their chakras. You can whisper or even sing to them, humming and using the pranic power of sound to stimulate them. Use your imagination!

It’s that time of year again. All across temperate regions of the western United States–and in the central and southern regions of the most populous state, California, in particular–the Jimson Weed is in full bloom. Datura Inoxia. Angel Trumpet. Stinkweed. Thornapple. Hell’s Bells.

Yeah, yeah, I know: technically, Jimson weed, which gets its name from the Jamestown settlement, where early arrivers to America were poisoned by ingesting the plant, is actually Datura Stramonium. But the more famous Datura is Datura Inoxia, nacazcul, toloache, the sacred Datura of the Aztecs and the Datura of Don Juan lore made famous by the writings of Carlos Castenada (Go Bruins.)

Every year a handful of bored, adventurous, and foolhardy teenage boys will get sick or even die from overdosing on the poisonous alkaloids in Datura. And it seems like every year the editors of magazines such as High Times and Heads have to write another series of polemic articles admonishing us that there is absolutely no safe and effective way to get high off of this most infamous of psychoactive plants.

It’s true, no doubt, that the conventional way of using Datura (making tea from the seeds) is stupid at best and lunatic at worst. It’s also true that the method of using the plant described in the Castaneda texts (making a tea of the root bark) is ineffectual; it’s bullshit; it doesn’t work. But are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Is there a way to use Datura that is more effective than making a tea of the roots (which does NOTHING) and safer than ingesting the highly toxic seeds (which are either chewed or, again, made into a tea)? My personal experience says “yes!”

“Hunter S. Thompson used the stuff,” I (my id?) tell myself. “Yeah, but Thompson would have ingested chlorine bleach if he thought it would have gotten him high,” another part of me (my super-ego?) responds. I’m out in the field, harvesting various parts of the plant to ingest. All in all, I spent the better part of a year fooling around with Datura. I’ve ingested every conceivable part of the plant: the roots, the rootbark, the leaves, the seeds, the shells of the seedpods, and each and every part of the flowers. Usually, the most I got was a headache (from elevated blood pressure) and cottonmouth. But I did figure out a way to put the stuff to good use. Eventually.

Datura is a fickle plant. Castaneda got that part right. Allegedly, Don Juan taught that some plant allies have dependable, loyal “male” spirits, while other plant teachers are highly potent but highly capricious–even coquettish. These spirits are (you feminists are going to have a field day with this) described as “female.” Datura is the quintessential female plant teacher. To borrow phraseology from the famous Faces song, Don Juan more or less thinks that Datura will “come on strong and it aint too long before [she'll] make you feel a man. But love is blind and you soon will find you’re just a boy again.” This is why Don Juan warns against Datura: she gives you too much power too quickly and then rends it back from you when you least expect it.

Cocaine would be another hallmark example of a female ally. White as a vestal virgin–just like Datura– cocaine has a whorish side, to be sure. The white lady will fuck you over in the end, despite Clapton’s crooning contention that “She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie.”*

So Datura is demonized even in the Castaneda books that are most responsible for their use. (It’s interesting to note that the mythic relationship between femininity, evil, and mind-altering plants goes all the way back to Genesis and the Garden of Eden.)*

But when I say Datura is fickle, I, for one, do not mean to describe her as evil. What I mean is that she displays herself in an array of ways to different people. And she changes chimerically throughout the season and even throughout the course of the day. Her fragrance, for instance, ranges from the ambrosially aromatic to the pungently putrid. I have joked to friends that Jimson weed can smell like “Jasmine Weed” (with a fragrance resembling freesias, gardenias, or honeysuckle) or “Jism weed” (I swear to god that on its worser days, the plant smells exactly like stale semen), depending on when you smell her blossoms. This is why the plant is sometimes called “Stinkweed.” And, while I am no expert in Latin, I would wager that the “Inoxia” in “Datura Inoxia” is related to the English word, “noxious.”

And then there is her appearance. Some find her beauty mesmerizing; others find it menacing. The plant is commonly referred to as “Angel Trumpet” on the one hand, owing to her beautiful, long tubular blossoms of bright white which dilate as the seasons (and hours of the day) become increasingly warmer.

But, on the other hand, the same plant is also known by more sinister names, such as “Devil’s Weed,” and “Hell’s Bells,” a name synechdochically applied to the whole plant because of the minatory appearance of the spiky seed pods which are vaguely reminiscent of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.

And indeed the plant’s twofold nature, invoking metaphors of heaven and hell, has at least as much to do with her neurological effects as it does with her aesthetic attributes. The plant provides a passport to either beatific or demonic astral realms depending on dose, set, and setting.

Personal experiences and interviews with psychonaut friends have led me to the conclusion that making a tea out of 50-300 seeds is suicidally stupid. DON’T DO IT. You may well have fucked-up visions of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. But you are more likely to just have fucked-up vision. In particular, everything takes on a bright hazy halo, making it very difficult to navigate through the world. One close friend who drank a tincture made from about 200 seeds told me that he had trouble reading for a few weeks! Another well documented optical delusion stems from the fact that the alkaloids in the plant seem to affect the way the eye focuses light. Objects are shifted upward, downward, to the left, or to the right. When you go to reach for a glass of water, you are unable to grab it because it appears to be somewhere in space other than where it actually is. If you do drink the tea and are lucky enough to survive, you will find yourself itching and scratching your skin and running to the urinal every fifteen minutes as your overloaded kidneys struggle against failure to purge your body of the potent toxins.

The eye thing is important to take note of. While traditional psychedelics (the phenethylamines and tryptamines) affect the brain’s level of neurotransmitters like seratonin and dopamine, altering the way that sensory data is interpreted, deleriants like Salvia and Datura affect the body in less subtle ways. After smoking Salvia a dozen or so times, including a hellish experience with some home-grown, re-concentrated 60x (that may well have been more like 100x) and after having witnessed someone on Salvia go into some sort of epileptic seizure where her eyes rolled back into her head and her tongue shot out and spasmed about like an eel out of water, I think that Salvia directly effects the nerves. I would describe the effects of a fullblown Salvia experience as sort of like a migrainesque MSG-overdose multiplied by one million. I’m told that chewing Salvia, as the natives do, is the way to go. All I know is that smoking strong salvinorum-crystal-covored extracts is like a ticket to hell. It’s only purpose is to show you what hell is like. Or maybe it would serve as the world’s worst fraternity prank. Give it to someone and tell them it’s weed. After they’ve taken a bongload, they’ll end up running around the room like a chicken with its head cut off, or more aptly, a body with its soul cut off. This, again, would be the most fucked-up prank ever.

A deleriant, It seems clear that Datura, also, does not so much affect neurotransmitter chemistry (although it reportedly does increase acetylcholine levels) as it does the actual physical mechanism of the optic nerve. That Datura affects the eye is well known to medical doctors. Scopalomine, one of the principal alkaloids in Datura, is used by optomotrists–in those yellow eyedrops–to dilate the pupil. And belladonna, the plant from which all belladonna alkaloids get their names, gets its name in turn from the Italian words for pretty (bella) and lady (donna). Belladonna is named “pretty lady” because miniscule amounts of the plant were used in ancient times by Italian women to dilate their pupils–large pupils being considered beautiful. So while psychedelics are non-neuro-toxic, and seem subjectively to affect subtle aspects of the brain and to transform the “mind” and even “soul” or “Spirit,” deleriants like Datura are actually and most definitely fucking with your body! This is especially true if you make a tea of 50 or more seeds. DON’T DO IT. Anything could happen.

And, as mentioned before, if you make a tea of the root bark, you can expect the opposite to happen: that is, nothing at all will happen. Don’t do it.

And then there is the balm method. Supposedly the powerful belladonna alkaloids in plants like Mandrake and Deadly Nightshade and Datura can be made into lotions that are rubbed on the skin. If you are extremely brave, the most effective method of transport for the alkaloids is to rub the balm on your temples. Some scholars (I took a seminar at UCLA from this cool feminist professor from Cambridge called “The History of Science and Gender.” Awesome class.) think that witches may have used these alkaloids to “fly” by rubbing the balms on broomsticks and then rubbing the broomsticks on, or inserting them in, their vaginas. This, some have even claimed, is the secret to witches being able to–astrally at least–fly. My advice is to avoid balms and lotions altogether. I’ve heard too many horror stories. Don’t do it.

The middle path, as I see it, is smoking the flower, specifically its pistils. And to achieve maximal effects, you’ll want to harvest the pistils at the right time of the year. And note that different flowers on the same bush may ripen weeks apart.

I have no biochemistry to back this, but anecdotally, here is what I have discovered (and many of these discoveries are really those of my good friend and amateur shaman, Blake). You want to harvest the pistils from the inside of the flower when they are maximally covered in resin. There are several clues that a flower’s psitils are ready for harvesting. For one, flowers that smell like Jasmine–and not Jism!–are best.

Next, you’ll want to find a flower that has a faint purplish hue highlighting its more obvious whiteness. You’ll want to find a flower that is partly open. A blossom that has not yet opened is premature and one that is completely opened is over-ripe. Lastly, a flower that has insect holes on it has already been pillaged by bugs, but a blossom that has an insect or two on it or in it AS you harvest it, is likely perfect. The bugs seem to know just when the pollen is at an optimum.

If smoked, the pollen produces some rather interesting effects. The first and most noteworthy is that all Datura plants in your field of vision appear to glow. I am sure there are any number of positivist explanations for this, but I am more of a sheep than a goat and I can’t help but finding it odd that Datura plants in particular seem to be haloed in a luminous, silver silhouette when you are under the influence of the plant. Other plants and animals also seem to glow, particularly humans, but not as pronouncedly as Datura plants. Living things are much more visually distinguishable from non-living things than when looking with non-altered vision.

One EXTREMELY bizarre effect is that photographs of humans take on a very magical air. The people in posters and  pictures seem to glow, to have auras, and to stand out in a more 3-D way. Gazing meditation with puja tables replete with pictures of saints and swamis (Jim Morrison, Jimmi Hendrix) is significantly enhanced by smoking Datura. In fact, the effects are so compelling, that I began to wonder if my eye was responsible for them. I knew my ocular vision was altered, that much was certain,  but it seemed that my subjective way of seeing had been transformed, too.

The psychic affects are subtle, but profound. Natural beauty is enhanced, but man-made objects take on a preternatural ugliness. One friend remarked that he had never noticed all the power lines in a meadow near Santa Clarita, California before. Suddenly aware of their imposition, he said, giggling, that someone ought to cut them all down. That is one thing I noticed about Datura. It seemed to inspire anarchistic, eco-terrorist sentiments. While marijuana makes you want to hide from the great and terrible machine, Datura gives you the mischievous confidence to try to thwart it.

At this point, I need to come forth with my most whacked-out observation of all. Datura seems to thrive under and around man-made infrastructure. I never noticed it before I smoked Datura, but under its influence, I noticed that populations of the plant seemed to congregate under and around power lines, street lamps, transformers, and (to a lesser extent) in straight lines running parallel to roads and fences. Again, I am sure that there is a rational explanation for this. Perhaps high-energy electromagnetic fields prompt seeds lying dormant in the soil to sprout. But again, I am a bit of a believer and a mystic, and under the influence of the plant, I had the intuitive feeling that the plants were some sort of antibodies, macrophages, immunoglobulins shot up from the earth to absorb the bad juju of encroaching suburban sprawl. While my suppositions are so unscientific that Carl Sagan is squirming in his grave as I write this, the hypothesis that Datura grows in greater abundance near strong EMFs is eminently testable or what Karl Popper called, “falsifiable.” Look for yourself and you will see. A giant Datura bush under a street lamp. Four Datura plants at each inside corner of the base of a transformer or lined up, linear as a light beam, underneath a power cable or phone line.

Please remember that harvesting and ingesting Datura remains illegal in most places. And please remember that the alkaloids are highly poisonous. But if you’re Hell’s-bells-bent on trying the stuff (and you probably shouldn’t), I beseech you to experiment with small doses of smoked pollen rather than large doses of the seeds (including teas and tinctures thereof). Taking a birth as a human is a rare and blessed cosmic happening. Don’t throw your life away.

*A less sexist way of labeling the drugs on either side of the dualistic, dichotomous borderline demarcating “good” from “bad” is Terrence McKenna’s. Rather than calling the “good” drugs “male” and the “bad” ones “female,” the all-wise Terrence talks about drugs of liberation (the psychedelics) vs. drugs of enslavement. Enslaving drugs have a tendency to enslave at both the individual and societal levels and would include caffeine (from coffee beans and cola berries), alcohol and sugar (which are kissing cousins), tobacco, and, of course, cocaine. While I believe that the ephedra alkaloids are positive spirits, it is clear that crystal methamphetamine is a drug of enslavement–perhaps the worst to hit the streets since television. Psychedelics have the potential at least to be liberating on both the individual and societal levels. The Anti-war, civil rights, and women’s lib movements all were arguably propelled forward by the psychedelic revolution.

I used to date this hippie girl who was a bit of a crystal worshiper. I thought she was silly. But over the years, I’ve come to see how rocks can and do have “magical” properties. And there is good science to back this.

I’d like to start a series of posts that examines a number of rocks, minerals, and crystals whose powers to create and destroy are nothing short of miraculous.

Let me start with the most obvious: with Plutonium and Uranium.

Do you know what nuclear bombs are? No, really, do you really understand what makes atomic energy work? No? Well, then, sit back, relax, kick off your shoes and don your reading spectacles, because I am going to tell you in the simplest, clearest language possible exactly what nuclear bombs are and how and why they work. And I’ll bet you a dollar that you walk away understanding nukes better than you ever have before.

Okay…are you ready? Without further ado, here goes.

To make a nuclear bomb (or thermonuclear bomb…and if you stay tuned I’ll explain the difference) what you need is…magic rocks. What kind of magic rocks? Well, magic rocks that unleash the same power that fuels the sun and all the stars in the heavens.

Where do we get these magic rocks? Well, they come from supernova explosions, of course! The only place in the universe where you can get these magic rocks is from exploding stars. Luckily, (or unluckily I should probably say), Earth itself is a huge repository of cosmic debris that clumped together due to gravity.

The cosmic dust and rocks that coalesced to make our planet include some heavier elements that were cooked into being and then blasted out into space by exploding supernovae.

The Carbon that forms the basis for life on this planet, for instance, comes from stars.. The Calcium in your bones comes from stars.

In fact, while Hydrogen and Helium were created in the initial phase transition which birthed our universe–the so-called “Big Bang,” all elements heavier than Hydrogen and Helium were, with rare exception, created through fusion in stars. And, deep within the earth, there are teeny tiny specks of super magical rocks called Uranium and Plutonium.

Now, at this point, you might say something like “Uranium and Plutonium aren’t magical; they are radioactive.” My response to this is that the word radioactive has no meaning whatsoever. At the time when radiation was first discovered, radio waves had also just been discovered.

Because radio waves were so intriguing and mysterious, scientists called the mysterious properties of Radium and similiar minerals, “radioactive.” The truth is that these elements have nothing to do with radio waves whatsoever. The term magic, however, seems most apt at explaining the nature of these rocks as I hope to demonstrate.

You probably think that the physics involved in creating a nuclear bomb is very complicated, and there is some truth to that notion. But the basic engineering principle behind nukes is astonishingly simple. All you need to do is get some magic rocks made from exploding stars and then either pile those rocks up into a big ball (in the case of Uranium) or just squeeze them really hard (in the case of Plutonium) and…..that’s it….that’s all….kaboom! You have a nuclear bomb.

Now, I know what you are thinking. “There has to be more to it than that.” Well, yes and no. There are lots of details of course, but in principle, all you really need to do is pile up magic rocks or take some magic rocks and squeeze them.

As it so happens, the most difficult aspects of building an atomic bomb are, by far, 1.) getting the magic rocks in the first place and 2.) holding the bomb together long enough for all of the magic rocks to explode before they are blown away in the initial nanoseconds of the blast. Luckily, these two details are rather difficult. That’s good news, because otherwise any delinquent 8th grader with a bootleg Xeroxed copy of The Anarchists Cookbook could go and build a nuclear device!

But before I get ahead of myself, explaining the intricacies and complexities of nuclear weapons manufacturing, let me get back to my point—to the simplicity of it all. Uranium 235 (the REALLY magic version of Uranium) is so magical that all you have to do is create a ball of it about 13cm in diameter and it will, of its own accord, without your having to do anything else, explode with the power of the sun. And with Plutonium, all you have to do to get it to unleash the power of the stars is squeeze it REALLY hard.

[Just to be absolutely clear, you don't even need fire or heat to make a nuclear bomb. You only need to squeeze or pile up magic rocks. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing most people on the planet don't realize this fact.

The fact that the United States is the most powerful country on Earth has almost everything to do with the fact that they were the first country on the planet to harness the power of these magic rocks. They were certainly the first (and, thank God, only) nation to prove itself insane enough to use these weapons in "battle" (if incinerating civilian women and children from the sky by dropping a star on them can be called battle.) The five most powerful nations on Earth-- which make up the so-called United Nations "Security Council"--are simply the first five countries that learned how to use the magic rocks as weapons. But alas, the relationship between nuclear weapons and the current power structure of nations on this planet deserves its own post and will be discussed later in this series on magic rocks. An in depth look at the particulars of the destruction caused by these devices on both humans and on the earth also deserves its own post later in this series. But for now, I only want to establish unequivocally that certain rocks are as magical and supernal as anything in any Fantasy or Sci-Fi story.]

Now, those of you who are physics buffs might, at this point, say, “Wait a minute, the fissioning of Uranium or Plutonium atoms isn’t the same force that powers the sun and stars.” And you’re absolutely right. Nucleus for nucleus, atom for atom, there is actually MORE energy released in the fissioning of one Uranium atom or Plutonium atom than in the fusioning of hydrogen into one Helium atom. So if you take issue with my saying that Uranium and Plutonium unleash the power of the stars, alright, fine; have it your way: they unleash an energy that is even more powerful still! Because thermonuclear Hydrogen bombs are many levels of magnitude more powerful than atom bombs, we tend to think that the process of fusion is more efficient and powerful than fission, but this isn’t exactly the case.

But where was I? Oh, right. So…you need only pile up Uranium to make it go boom and you merely squeeze Plutonium to get it to.

The first three atomic bombs ever created used these simple methods. The first nuclear bomb ever exploded on Earth (”Trinity”) near Alamogordo New Mexico and the third nuclear bomb ever exploded (”Fat Man,” which instantly killed almost 40,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan) were both Plutonium fission devices, wherein Plutonium was placed within a hollow sphere of Nickel with dynamite charges circumferencing it. The dynamite charges were exploded inward, thus imploding or squeezing the Plutonium to a critical density.

The second atomic bomb ever exploded on Earth–and the first one ever used in combat (”Little Boy,” which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan)–was a “gun” type bomb. What this means is that you take one chunk of Uranium about the size and shape of a volleyball, but with a thermos-sized (and shaped) hole in the center, and then you take a thermos-sized (and shaped) chunk of Uranium and “shoot” it into the hole in the first chunk, filling that hole, and creating a whole chunk about the size of a volleyball. At this point, the U235 has reached a critical mass and fissions. This is so simple and foolproof that this type of device was never tested. The Manhattan Project scientists were so absolutely positive that it would work that they dropped the first one they ever made on the people of Hiroshima without ever conducting a trial run. Unfortunately for the people of Hiroshima, the scientists were right. It did work.

Although, those bombs dropped on Japan could be thought of as duds by today’s standards, since only about 2 or 3 % of the fissionable material actually split. The other 97 or so % was blown free in the first instant of the explosion. Modern physicists today know how to reflect stray neutrons that escape back into the fissionable material, allowing for much higher efficiency (and smaller bombs that require less raw material). Today’s bombs are close to 99% efficient. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you exactly how the stray neutrons are reflected back into the core because the science behind magnetic lensing and tampers is HIGHLY classified. You know the cliche: I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. In Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, only a measley 600mg of matter was converted into energy. (600 mg is approximately the weight of one and a half aspirin tablets). And yet that was enough to cause an explosion equal to what you’d get if you blew up about thirty-two MILLION POUNDS of dynamite. And Little Boy killed around 140,000 people all told.

All that destruction from less than two aspirin tablets worth of magic rocks! Einstein’s famous E=mc² is a fancy (and extremely precise) way of saying that you can turn a whole bunch of energy into a tiny bit of mass OR turn a tiny bit of mass into absurd quantities of energy.

Okay, now that I’ve driven home my point—that Uranium and Plutonium are magic since they come from exploding stars and since all you have to do is pile them up or squeeze them to get them to explode with untold force—I suppose I owe you an explanation of why it is exactly that Uranium and Plutonium are so volatile.Well, it goes something like this. Uranium and Plutonium are both “heavy metals” and what that means is that if you were to look at a single atom of either, that you would see a whole grip of “nucleons.” Nucleons are the particles that exist in the center, or “nucleus,” of an atom. Nucleons come in two varieties: protons, which have a positive charge; and neutrons, which have a neutral charge. Technically—and this is a little known fact—neutrons aren’t really a particle in their own right, since each is actually a proton and an electron that have been smushed together. The electron cancels out the proton’s positive electromagnetic charge. That’s why a neutron has no charge and its mass is exactly equal to the mass of a proton plus the mass of an electron. But anyway, every nucleus of every atom contains protons. And some nuclei also contain neutrons. It is the number of protons in an atom that determines what element the atom is–its atomic number. But both protons and neutrons determine an element’s atomic weight. Again, since a neutron is really a proton and an electron that have been smushed together, neutrons weigh a teeny bit more than protons, but since the weight of an electron is trivial—even in relation to a subatomic proton—we can generalize the weight of protons and neutrons as being more or less the same and so, again, together they determine an isotope’s atomic weight. Really quickly, I will remind you that it is the number of proton’s that determines what element (like hydrogen) you have, but it is the number of protons AND neutrons that determines what isotope (what version of an element you have–like Deuterium or Tritium, two of the heavier versions of hydrogen). Many elements have several different versions or isotopes. Uranium, for instance, has two main isotopes, U235 and U238.

Well, the thing is that Uranium atoms and Plutonium atoms are really heavy (they have lots of nucleons) and they are really awkward (the position of the nucleons is unstable). So what happens is that the force that holds the nucleons together is eventually overwhelmed. We call the force that holds the nucleons in the nucleus of an atom together the “strong nuclear force.” What is the strong nuclear force? Well, if you get two nucleons close enough, they kind of stick together. Normally, they resist each other (particularly in the case of protons which repel each other due to their mutual positive electromagnetic charge), but if you get them REALLY, REALLY close together, what happens is that each nucleon sort of loses track of where it ends and where the other begins. You see, each nucleon is made of quarks, and what happens is that if you get two nucleons close enough together, they star sharing quarks. It would be like me standing so close to you that we started swapping arms and legs back and forth over and over again so quickly that it was impossible to tell whose limbs were whose. Why do neutrons and protons swap quarks when they interact? Well, we’re starting to get REALLY technical here, and to a certain extent we are bumping up against the current edges of human knowledge and the limits of what can be expressed in non-mathematical language, but scientists claim that the quarks themselves are interacting by emitting and absorbing even smaller (in this case perhaps 0entirely massless) particles called vector gauge bosons or “gluons.”

It should be noted here that, at the level of gluons and quarks–and even protons, really–that the concept of solid, local, “particles” starts to become outmoded. The universe isn’t really constructed of tiny billiard balls at all. The concept of “atoms” interacting in the “void” as put forth by Democritus of Abdera is rendered utterly obsolete by modern physics. In fact, the cosmos isn’t split into pieces separated by empty gaps at all. The very fabric of space-time and matter-energy is nonlinear, corporeal, continuous, and viscous. To quote Allan Combs and Mark Holland: “The cosmos is of-a-piece, not empty, but filled with itself, much as a painting is filled with itself. There are foreground and background regions, but the canvas is continuous.” But thinking of the universe as points with boundaries and limits separated by emptiness is a useful model and it’s the current paradigm shaping how modern science looks at and talks about the object world.

But…Hinduism aside…

If protons and neutrons get close enough, their constituent quarks start exchanging gluons and they get “glued” together to the point that you can’t tell whose quarks are whose. That’s sort of what the strong nuclear force is.

And when I say it’s strong, I mean it is STRONG, boy! For example, if your left bicep were to represent the force of gravity, to represent the force of electromagnetism, your right bicep would have to be bigger than the observable universe! And yet, even the electromagnetic force is tiny compared to the strong nuclear force. But whereas electromagnetism works at great distances and gravity acts to infinity, the strong nuclear force only kicks in when two tiny nucleons are so close that they are touching together so that they can swap quarks.

Okay, back to magic rocks. What happens in the nucleus of a Uranium or Plutonium atom is that the nucleus is so big that most of the nucleons aren’t touching each other. Sure, each nucleon is  touching (and trading quarks with) its immediate neighbors, the nucleons right next to it—above it, below it, beside it, behind it, and in front of it. But the nucleus is so big that there are hundreds of nucleons that each nucleon is not touching and is therefore not immediately stuck to. And while each nucleon is not attracted to these other nucleons that it isn’t touching, each proton is repelled away from all the other protons due to electromagnetism.

So in any atom—be it Helium or Gold—each proton is confused. Each proton suffers a kind of cognitive dissonance, wherein it feels a pull toward each other proton because it, indirectly, is stuck to protons that are stuck to protons that are stuck to protons… that are stuck to even the farthest protons at the other side of the nucleus by way of the strong nuclear force. But each proton also feels a push away from each other proton (except the ones that it is immediately swapping quarks with) because positive repels positive; like repels like just as opposites attract.

So in an atom like Uranium or Plutonium where there are so many protons that aren’t touching each other, eventually the electromagnetic repulsion or push is so strong that each end of the nucleus pushes against the other side  until the atom splits in two. Scientists refer to this pushing affect as the “weak nuclear force” and there is even a named particle that corresponds to this force (the weak gauge boson)… but really and truly the weak force isn’t a fundamental force (like gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force) at all. Rather, the weak force is epiphenomenal, secondary, subsidiary, accessory to the electromagnetic force that causes it.

Let’s say you took a cookie and broke it into two pieces. The two pieces aren’t quite going to weigh as much, together, as the whole cookie did before, right? Why not? Because there are tiny crumbs that break off. You have two big pieces—two halves—and a hundred itsy bitsy little crumbs. That makes sense, right? Well, let’s try this then. Imagine that you have a rubber band and you snap it in half. Now, it’s possible that there are tiny little bits of rubber “crumbs” that might break off in addition to the two halves. But let’s say that there aren’t any crumbs. Nevertheless, the two halves of the rubber band don’t quite weigh as much as the one whole rubber band weighed before you snapped it in half? How come? Well, before we get into why the two halves weigh less than the unbroken whole, let’s just agree that it takes energy to hold the rubber band together. You have all of these rubber molecules and they aren’t stuck together by glue; they are stuck together by energy. In the case of rubber molecules, they are stuck together by electromagnetic energy.

When you break the rubber band or when you break anything, really, you are releasing energy. So while there might be material crumbs that break away, there are also energetic “crumbs” that break free as well. How much energy is released when you break something? Well, that depends on how much energy was being used to hold that something together!

In the case of Uranium and Plutonium, a LOT of energy was being used to hold them together. Remember that the extremely strong electromagnetic force was always trying to break the nuclei apart anyway and that the force that held them together in spite of this electromagnetic push, the strong nuclear (or quark swapping) force, is the strongest force in the known universe. So when that Uranium or Plutonium atom snaps in two, all of that force, all of that power, all of that energy is released! In nature, when a Uranium or Plutonium atom splits, it breaks into two smaller elements and there are two or three nucleons that are left over. These nucleons goes flying off unimpeded. The kinetic energy released when the Uranium atom splits is sufficient to propel its freed neutrons about 13cm. In the Earth’s crust, Uranium never exists in large piles because it is so rare. It is rare because only a little bit of it was made in the first place in the supernova and also because Uranium is so volatile that it is constantly and rapidly decaying into other elements like Molybdenom and Lanthium. So whenever you find Uranium, you only find it sprinkled amidst a blend of other rocks. You never find it anything even remotely approximating a pile with a 13cm radius.

But if you have enough Uranium, the probability of a given stray nucleon “escaping” eventually reaches zero. In this case, rather than flying off free, this nucleon smacks into another Uranium nucleus, which is now too “heavy” (there are too many nucleons NOT directly attached) and so this new nucleus now splits, sending more energy and another stray nucleon flying off. Put another way, it’s not so much that the Uranium nucleus becomes too “heavy” when it absorbs a new nucleon; what’s really happening is that the new nucleon causes the Uranium nucleus to shift its balance and its shape becomes awkward. The nucleus “elongates” and becomes just long enough for the electromagnetic force to be able to gain the upper-hand in its battle with the strong nuclear force which dominates at close range. If you have a “critical mass” of Uranium, the Uranium chunk is so big that ALL of the stray nucleons keep smacking into other nuclei, which then also elongate and split, sending off more stray nuclei. And on and on. This is called an “uncontrolled chain reaction.” While we can think of these reactions happening sequentially, many millions of nuclei are splitting in the blink of an eye and a tremendous amount of energy is released instantaneously.

With Plutonium, again, the trick is not mass, but density. When a Plutonium atom splits, stray nucleons go flying off freely. But if the Plutonium atoms are packed tightly enough together, rather than escaping, each stray nucleon is smacks into another Plutonium nucleus, which then splits, and an uncontrolled chain reaction (nuclear explosion) takes place. All nuclear (fission) weapons use Uranium or Plutonium (or both).

All thermonuclear (fusion) bombs also use Uranium or Plutonium bombs as “starters.” This means that you use the heat and energy released from an atomic (nuclear, fission) device to start the thermonuclear fusioning of hydrogen isotopes. Fusion bombs work EXACTLY the way stars do. The reaction that turns Hydrogen into Helium in our sun is the same reaction that powers thermonuclear hydrogen bombs (”H” bombs). So while we might be able to debate oer whether a nuclear bomb is actually a miniature star, a thermonuclear bomb most certainly is a small manmade star. End of story.

Our sun overcomes the repulsion that normally keeps protons from fusing with two key ingredients: pressure and motion. Both come from gravity. Because the sun is so huge, gravity pushes all of the protons together into a very cramped space. They try to get away from each other electromagnetically, but there isn’t much room to do so. Secondly, as all of the gases rub against each other in the sun, friction causes heat (and then there is the extreme heat once the atoms start fusioning of course). Heat means motion. That’s exactly what heat is if you ever wanted to know: it’s random molecular motion.In the sun you have all of these protons wiggling and jiggling about randomly (because of heat) and they’re also already packed like sardines (because gravity smushes them together). And so since they are all bouncing around with such intense fervor in such tight quarters, direct collisions occur. When this happens, when the protons bump right into each other or right up next to each other, the strong nuclear force (the quark swapping force) takes over, completely overwhelming the electromagnetic force that holds the protons apart and, eventually, Hydrogen is fused into Helium. [The fusing of any smaller atoms into larger atoms is always "exothermic," or energy producing until you get up to Iron. The fusing of iron into "neurtonium" in neutron stars is actually endothermic and creates an infinite vacuum resulting in a black hole.]

The exact same thing that happens in a star occurs within a Hydrogen bomb. A Hydrogen bomb absolutely is a little, man-made star. Doesn’t it shock you to  know we can make STARS? I was shocked when I learned this. It’s one thing that we can make Shamwows and Snuggies. Making stars is a totally different magnitude of engineering!

The surface temperature of the sun is about 5,780 K, which is 5,500 °C or about 9900 °F, while the sun’s core is around 15 million °C or 27 million °F. Since the earth is not as hot as the sun (thank God), we need to artificially create an environment that is sun-like in its temperature. And the only way to do that is to make an atomic (fission) device, using Plutonium or Uranium. The heat, remember, is what’s needed to get those nucleons bouncing around.

And since the Earth does not have the intense gravity that you’ll find at the sun’s core, we need a synthetic way of mimicking the sun’s pressure, its power to squeeze. To mimic the squeezing power of the sun, nuclear physicists use a very mysterious (magical?) substance called…”styrofoam.” That’s right:  everyday household styrofoam (which is actually a brand name for a product patented by Dow Chemical) is one only a feww substances in the known universe that shrinks when you heat it (ice is another). Most substances expand when heated (because their molecules get excited and start bouncing around more). But not styrofoam. No, Sir. Styrofoam gets smaller and smaller as you heat it.

So here’s how you build a Hydrogen bomb (star).You put an atomic bomb at one end of a long tube. (You already know what an atomic bomb is. It’s a device that either piles up Uranium into a “critical mass” or squeezes Plutonium to a “critical density.”) This fission bomb provides the heat. Then, at the other end of the long tube, you put some Hydrogen (almost always a heavy Hydrogen isotope like Deuterium or Tritium) and you surround this Hydrogen “fuel” with styrofoam. You need a long tube; otherwise the atomic starter bomb blows the Hydrogen fuel to smitherines before it gets a chance to nucleothermally fuse.The shockwave of the starter bomb travels at the speed of sound. The electromagnetic energy released from the starter bomb, (mostly x-rays and gamma rays) however, travels at the speed of light.Light travels much faster than sound, of course. That’s why you always see the lightning before you hear the thunder.

So if you have a long enough tube, the x-rays and gamma rays travel at light speed from the fission ignition device at one end down the tube to the styrofoam-wrapped hydrogen isotopes at the other, heating and shrinking the styrofoam, and exciting and smushing the protons together. And when the Hydrogen fuses into Helium….well, you’ve seen the sun before and that sucker is (on average) 93.6 million miles away! Because light travels faster than sound, the gamma rays and X-rays from the starter (fission) bomb have time to fuse the Hyrdrogen into Helium before the shockwave blast from the starter tears the whole bomb apart.

The largest thermonuclear explosion ever, the “Tsar Bomba” created a blast equivalent to what you’d get if you blew up Two BILLION pounds of dynamite. It generated enough heat that any person within 62 miles of the blast would have suffered 3rd degree burns! The blast was felt over 600 miles away, and for the split second that the bomb was doing its thing, it produced 1.4 % as much energy as the sun did during the same instant.

Okay. I’m done for now. This has been a long and somewhat technical post.

But let me restate my thesis for the umpteenth time really quickly. If we can use rocks from exploding stars to MANUFACTURE our own stars, then that’s some magic shit!

If you don’t think making stars out of infinitesimal amounts of rocks that themselves come from stars is magical, then you need to get your head examined!

So the next time you tease some hippie for thinking that minerals are magic, remember Hiroshima. And remember that Hiroshima was, by today’s standards, a dud.

I would like to begin a new series of posts that looks at the issue of Ken Wilber, Integral (writ large), and the AQAL model from a perspective that both honors the brilliance of Wilber and his work, while also critically analyzing what needs to be refined, elaborated, fixed, or jettisoned as the integral community moves forward.

Ken will not be with us forever. When Ken has shuffled off the mortal coil of his earthly body, it will be up to us to decide how “his” ideas will evolve.

I don’t presume, by any means, to be the first person or for this to be the first website which attempts a balance or middle ground between Wilberphilia and Wilberphobia. In point of fact, I am quite sure that every site dedicated to Wilber and his work sees itself as fair and balanced. No doubt.

And yet, most of the sites, in the end, do tend to fall into one dualistic category or the other: those who think Wilber is wrong and those who think he is right.

What I would like to do here is create a forum for people across the spectrum to respectfully dialogue.

Because I am an Integral Psychology and Integral Theory student at John F. Kennedy University, I have the privilege of knowing a great many people who are familiar with Ken and his work. These people cover the entire spectrum from extreme Wilberphilia to extreme Wilberphobia.

But if we are, in the end, integralists, synthesizers, and integrators, then surely we must try to create a working synthesis of Wilberphilia and Wilberphobia. We must honor the truths evident in each perspective and work to create a meta-perspective that weaves these truths together. That is what Integral should be all about.

And so, rather than getting into all the muddy details myself, I would simply like to start with a few premises that I think are more or less given or self-evident. And then let’s collectively see where we go from there.

My first premise is that Wilber is necessary. To attempt to create an Integral philosophy that ignores or refutes Wilber’s work and ideas wholesale would be seriously misguided. There are simply too many treasures in the AQAL model for us to throw the baby out with the bathwater: the clarification of the differentiation between lines, levels, and states;  Integral Methodological Pluralism and the refinement of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspectives and  the novel introduction of  zones; and the differentiation between “pre-” and “trans-”  in terms of conventionality, rationality, archetypes, and absorption.

My second premise is that Wilber is insufficient. It is not enough to take Wilber’s ideas as gospel truth. If we are truly advocates of consciousness evolution, then clearly we must aim for a Trans-Wilberian perspective, a Post-Wilberian perspective–even if such a lofty goal is unattainable in the next, say, five minutes or so. It could and should be our eventual goal. Because brilliant though he is, I think we can all intuit that Ken has something less than the “complete package.”

Restated, my first premise is that a great deal of Wilber’s thinking must be included in any Trans-Wilberian model or system of Consciousness Studies.

My second premise could be reworded thus: Wilber’s work must be transcended. Evolution is not stagnant. The Cosmos is always in flux. Ken is a far cry from the end-all-be-all. He is neither alpha nor omega (though one gets the impression sometimes that he’d like us to believe otherwise). He is merely an interesting and beautiful stop on the road from non-verbal caveman to the angelic superhumans into which we can only hope Nature is evolving us.

The greatest homage we can pay to Ken is not to follow in his footsteps, but to seek what he sought. And on the other hand, the greatest defeat you could hand him would be to one-up him by fitting his ideas into an even more complete model.

So love him or hate him, your goal should be the same.

What would Ken Wilber do if he met Ken Wilber on the road? He would synthesize him. Just as he has with all of his heroes–Habermaas, Aurobindo, Baldwin, James, Watts, Maslow, etc.

And so let us do likewise.

Let us synthesize. Let us dialogue.

How is Wilber necessary? What must we include?

How is Wilber insufficient? What must we transcend?

On your marks, get set, go!

Do you identify as a mystic (Zen Buddhist, Vedantist Hindu, Gnostic Christian, Kabbalistic Jew, Islamic Sufi)? Does the Perennial Philosophy speak to you?

Are you an advocate for the responsible use of psychedelics to achieve creative solutions to problems and to reach “peak” zones or states?

Are you an advocate of consciousness evolution, cognitive development, and transcendence?

If so, now that the NBA playoffs are upon us, I hope you are rooting for The Los Angeles Lakers. Because, and you may not realize this, the Lakers stand for LSD, mysticism, and self-realization.

Let’s look at the LSD connection first. Even if you’re not into basketball, you probably know the name of the Laker’s head coach, since Phil Jackson, a.k.a. the “Zen Master” is the most famous coach in all of sports. Phil has the highest winning percentage of any coach in the history of the NBA (both in the regular season and in the playoffs). He has more playoff wins than any other coach in history and is tied (for the time being) with Red Auerbach for the most championships of any NBA coach, having won it all an incredible 9 times (out of 11 trips to the Finals)–6 with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and 3 with Kobe Bryant and the L.A. Lakers. To further put Phil’s greatness in perspective, out of the last 18 years, Phil has won 50 % of the championships. And if not for injuries to Karl Malone and Andrew Bynum, Phil might have as many as eleven championships during those 18 years. All speculation aside, if the Lakers win this year (and they just might), Phil will have won MOST of the last 19 championships. That is truly astounding.

Phil admitted, in print, that an LSD-induced vision helped him to see basketball in a new way. While tripping, Phil envisioned a new brand of basketball where the players were more versatile and the positions more inter-changeable. Phil realized that, since players often have to switch on defense, you would want tall, strong guards, and active, skilled centers. On offense, too, it helps if your centers can pass and shoot and if your guards can post up and play with their backs to the basket.

Phil would later become the most famous advocate of Tex Winter’s Texas Triangle Offense for just these reasons. (Tex is a consulting coach for the Lakers.)

There is an LSD connection on the roster, too. Lakers Forward Luke Walton has a Grateful Dead tatoo, and he’s the son of UCLA legend and NBA standout Bill Walton, a long-time, vocal advocate of LSD use. You do the math.

And let us not forget the acid head watching the game from center court near the visitor’s bench, heckling the opposing players and working the refs during all important games (and most of the trivial ones, too). For if the Lakers have the most famous coach in all of sports, they certainly also have the most famous enthusiast. No team in all of sports has a marquis fan even remotely like Jack. Jack Nicholson has been sitting courtside at Lakers games for decades.

Jack is quite possibly the most beloved actor in the history of cinema. Even bad impersonations of Nicholson are instantly identifiable by their nasal tone, slowed rate of utterance, and flattened vowel sounds. Jack is so famous that people commonly refer to him by his first name alone.

How did Jack become so famous? Well, to begin with, he wrote a screenplay for a B movie that was directed by Roger Corman. Jacko’s script was called The Trip and it’s about…you guessed it…an LSD trip. The Trip put Jack on the map in Hollywood, but as a writer, not as an actor.

However, when Rip Torn was fired from Easy Rider, after getting in a heated argument with Dennis Hopper, Jack took his place and rose to stardom soon after. Easy Rider, which is flat out one of the best films ever made (it won the palm d’Or–the most prestigious award in all of film–at the 1969 Festival de Canne), is largely about drugs of course. The two protagonists pick up a hitch-hiking hippie who gives them 4 strong doses of LSD for their kindness. The protagonists end up eating the LSD in a cemetery in New Orleans with a couple of hookers. Their acid trip is one of the most avante-garde scenes in the history of American cinema.

But the movie that really made Jack famous was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack won his first of 3 oscars (Jack’s 3 acting oscars, including 2 for “Best Actor,” are most among male performers–only Katherine Hepburn has more). Cuckoo’s Nest was written by Jack’s friend, Ken Kesey.

Kesey of course was one of the original LSD advocates. His psychedelic beginnings are most interesting. While in graduate school as a creative writing student at Stanford University, Kesey had volunteered to take part in a CIA experiment called MK-ULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The CIA was trying to find an ideal mind control mechanism (the CIA would later conclude that the best mind control mechanism was television). As a participant in the study, Kesey was given an array of psychedelics: LSD, psyllocybin, mescaline, and even DMT. While the experiment proved a failure for the CIA (because psychedelics make the idea of authority ridiculous and even hilarious, they are not great mind control drugs), the experiments were very fruitful for Kesey, who quite liked expanding his mind with chemicals and continued using LSD and other entheogens illicitly long after MK-ULTRA had concluded. Kesey and his acid-eating cronies became famous as the “Merry Pranksters” and their antics were documented in Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test. The “acid tests” were simple. If you had a good time and “turned on” after drinking the dosed cool-aid, you were alright; you were hip. But if you freaked out and panicked, then you were wound too tight; you were a square.

My point in mentioning The Trip, Easy Rider and Cuckoos Nest, which were Jack’s three most important early projects, and all of which relate to acid in one way or another, is that connecting Jack Nicholson to LSD is about as difficult as connecting Kevin Bacon to other movie stars (like Jack for instance….let’s see…A few Good Men…. I got it in one!)

I can’t prove that Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss has taken acid, but he earned his PhD in CHEMISTRY when he was only 24, just as the psychedelic sixties were about to explode. Again, you do the math.

But the Lakers don’t just stand for acid. They stand for Eastern religion and mysticism.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar, long-time Lakers center and current centers coach, is a Muslim.

Phil Jackson self-identifies as a Zen Buddhist.

Phil was the first coach in major sports to have his players meditate and do hatha yoga. He also has them do positive visualizations. The results are hard to argue with, given that Phil’s record is unparalleled in history.

But beyond acid and Eastern spirituality, the Lakers stand for self-realization, cognitive development, and transcendence.

Owner Dr. Jerry Buss is a master strategist. A self-made man, Buss started off with a $1000 real estate investment and steadily parlayed his dividends into millions.

Buss’ strategic mind manifests not only in basketball and real estate, but in tournament poker. Buss has previously come in 2nd and 3rd in the World Series of Poker, no small feat by any means.

Kareem, too, is a genius.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar was arguably the most dominant basketball player ever. Kareem was always in motion. He always kept you one step behind. If you favored toward his right, he’d beat you with his left, He kept you fighting for position so that when he went up for a shot, you had no chance of measuring it or accurately timing a block because you were still trying to stand your ground when he took to the air. And even if you did measure or time his shot–and you couldn’t but if you did–it didn’t matter because his infamous sky-hook was indefensible. Even Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t block the skyhook and Kareem could hit his silky smooth signature shot out to twelve feet. Kareem scored an incredible 38,387 points during his tenure in the NBA; that’s more points scored than by any other player in history. Kareem also won three rings in college with legendary coach John Wooden at UCLA, winning an astounding 88 games and losing only twice. Even Kareem’s high school team once won 71 straight games.

A standout scholar at UCLA, Kareem was highly regarded as an essayist by his English and History professors. Kareem is, like Phil Jackson, a published author, having written an impressive scholarly history of the 761st Tank Batallion in WWII, called Brothers in Arms.

Kareem’s stardom extended beyond the Hollywood hardwood to the silver screen. He appeared in Fletch with Chevy Chase and also in Stephen King’s apocalyptic mini-series, The Stand. However, Kareem is most famous for his classic roles in the comedy Airplane! and as the antagonist in the epic Bruce Lee film, Game of Death.

To return to the Eastern Philosophy/Spirituality thread, Kareem is a devout muslim as his name quite obviously implies. But what you may not know is that he’s also an expert in Shaolin Kung Fu. He learned Kung Fu at UCLA in order to keep his arms and legs strong. Not only do the Lakers have the only Buddhist head coach in major sports, they have the only muslim coach in the NBA in Kareem, there center’s coach and mentor to Pau Gasol and young Andrew Bynum.

Lastly, a word or two needs to be said about Kobe Bryant. Kobe is not a Sufi or a Mahayana Buddhist as far as I know (although he practices concentration and insight meditation). But With Jackson as his coach and with a chemist who came of age in the sixties as his owner, anything’s possible. And I can’t connect Kobe to acid, although one wonders when he sinks 62 consecutive free throws (he had a separate streak of 50) or goes apeshit and hits an NBA record 12 three pointers in a single  game!

(There is, after all, a basis for such theorizing in sport’s history. You will recall that Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while tripping on Acid in 1970.)

People argue, but there has never been a perimeter player as talented as Kobe in the history of the game. No one has ever been as transcendent at putting the ball in the basket from anywhere (and everywhere) on the court. Say what you want about Michael Jordan, MJ never had to play against (”illegal”) zone defenses and quadruple teams! And he still never scored anywhere near 81 freaking points in a game.

My friends Jay and Alexis and I once saw, in person, Kobe score 62 points in only 3 quarters of an NBA game! That’s simply unheard of. No one else has ever scored 62 points in a whole game at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. (This year Kobe also set a new record at Madison Suare Garden in NYC with 61 points) and Kobe scored his 62 in 3 against a Dallas Mavericks team that was the best in the NBA that year. The Mavs had the best record in the league that year, went to the Finals, and got jobbed by the refs who were told by commissioner David Stern to hand the series to the Miami Heat on a silver platter as reported by whistle blower (double entendre fully intended) Tim Donaghy. Can you wrap your head around that? 62 in 3 against the Western Conference Champs (and the League MVP, Nowitski)?

I tell you that everyone in the building was in awe. Defenders would be frozen in astonishment, watching as though they, too, were merely fans in attendance. Even Mavs fans, at a certain point, began chanting “Kobe” (like the Russians chanting “Rocky” in Part IV), hoping and knowing that each shot was going in, because they too were witnessing a miracle and becoming a part of history.

The player assigned to guard Kobe that night, more than embarrassed or shamed, was also awed. Following the game, he asked Kobe for his shoes. Kobe happily took off his sneakers and signed them. Can you imagine: a professional athlete who makes millions of dollars a year asking another player, who had just bested him, for his autographed sweaty sneakers? Rather than being humiliated, Kobe’s rival just wanted to be able to give his own son a piece of memorabilia signed by Kobe. That’s amazing.

Talk to anyone who has seen a game like Kobe’s 81 against the Raptors or 62 in 3 against Dallas and they will all tell you that witnessing such greatness is almost spiritual; it’s trans-personal, transcendent, numinous.

Take it to the bank, no perimeter player will ever score 81 again. And if someone does, it will be Kobe himself.

NBA stats analyst John Hollinger says that the three most impressive basketball games ever played by a single player are, in descending order, 1.) Kobe’s 62 through 3; 2.) Kobe’s 81 against (triple and quadruple teams in) Toronto; and 3.) Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point game in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Hollinger has taken into account each game’s pace, the number of possessions, and so forth. In Chamberlain’s day, there was no zone D, there was a much faster pace, and there were many more baskets scored at both ends of the court. And don’t forget that Chamberlain was HUGE and was playing two feet from the basket, not launching 32-footers like Kobe and leaping over people 7 inches taller than himself to dunk on them. Keep in mind Hollinger is an admitted San Antonio Spurs fan and no Kobe-lover. He’s just a mathematician who calls it like he calculates it.

Love or hate Kobe, but he is the most transcendent scorer in the game’s history, Kareem is #2  and Michael Jordan, sorry, is #3. But either way, is it merely coincidence that both of them are meditators, yoga practitioners, and students of acid-head Jackson–The Zen Master?

Again, maybe you don’t really care about basketball. Or maybe you root for some ordinary team that, like almost all sports teams everywhere, stands for……I don’t know…sitting on couches, gorging yourself on beer and potato chips…or the military industrial complex….or just sad, boring, overweight white people in bland mid-western towns passionate and angry because they have nothing else in their lives to cheer for. Go ahead and root for mediocrity. I can respect that.

But me, I’m rooting for LSD. I’m rooting for meditation and mysticism. I’m rooting for transcendence. I’m rooting for self-realization. I’m rooting for greatness. I’m rooting for the L.A. Lakers.

This post is respectfully dedicated to Sgt. Jay Soccoccio, to the vivacious Vivian Garcia, to Joey “The Toad” Genitti, to Ed Lee, to Lil Abner and Joel Navar, to Michael Sopko, to Geoff Robertson, to Dr. Syd Gris of Opulent Temple, and to Alexis Forni who has purple and gold in her veins even in India. Go Lakers!!!