Luminous Numinous

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 indeed. 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 in 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 their starlight was displaced (the stars appeared to have moved) just as Einstein had predicted and relativity, therefore,  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,” says 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 an 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 only five Lie groups (exceptions) 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.

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.

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.