Health Benefits of Magic Mushrooms [Psilocybin - Psilocybe Cubensis]

Mushrooms, Ayahuasca et al are like sex. I claim you've not lived an informed life unless you've experienced the consciousness of entheogens. 

Sex isn't for everybody though. 

Only you know what level of reality maxes you out.

This is an excellent educational video. He's a most excellent presenter.

Was Jesus A Flavian Dynasty Propaganda Invention?

I've posted interviews with Joe Atwill before over here. He asks a great question. In an area where Qumran, Jericho and Jerusalem are a stone's throw from each other in 'shoebox sized' Judea how did the Christian story emerge with two conflicting narratives? One from the Dead Sea Scrolls talks about killing the gentiles and the other talks about turning the other cheek and rendering unto Caesar that which is his.

They also cover Aramaic scholar John Allegro's mushroom and the cross which I've posted about previously, and I recommend reading my Was Jesus An Arsehole Zadokite? and this Dead Sea Scrolls post.

There are so many conflicting accounts of Jesus that I just a pick a couple of lines here and there like, love thy neighbour, and hope they're the right ones to keep and are not elite manipulation of the kindness of humans. Religion has after all been their most powerful tool to get us killing each other. Their latest religious cult is called Government and a lot of people are hooked on it.

Here's the details from Jan Irving's post:

This episode is an interview with Joe Atwill, author of Caesar’s Messiah, part 2, titled “On Caesar’s Messiah, John Allegro, and mind control” and is being released on Monday, August 06, 2012. My interview with Joe was recorded on June 09, 2012.

This is our first video episode, so if you’re getting this in audio only, please go to the Gnostic Media website if you’d like to see the video version.

We had Joe on back on April 1, and today he’s back.

Joseph Atwill spent his youth in Japan where he attended the only English-speaking school in the country, St. Mary’s Military Academy. The school was run by Jesuits so removed from the events of the modern world that they did not even consider shutting it down during World War II, and taught a curriculum that had not changed since the eighteenth century. Atwill describes that, “The majority of every one of my school days was spent studying Greek, Latin and the Bible, which for some reason I found fascinating.”

After studying computer science in college, Atwill began working with one of the most renowned programmers in the world, David Ferguson. David had been granted the first two patents ever issued in computer software. Over the next twenty years, between 1975 and 1995, David Ferguson and Atwill started a series of companies including Ferguson Tool Company and ASNA. “After selling my interests in our companies to investors in 1995, I returned to my earlier interest; the origins of Christianity,” Atwill says of this time period.

Atwill continues, “Though I had drifted away from the Catholic faith, my study of Christianity never stopped. Over the course of my life I had read perhaps six or seven hundred books relating to the historical Jesus and early Christianity, but none of them left me feeling like I really knew anything about how the religion began or its founder.” Atwill contends that the more he studied Christian origins the more he saw the question of how the religion began as an open one. Atwill held this position in spite of the fact that in the popular mind, and in the minds of most scholars, Christianity began as a movement of lower class followers of a radical Jewish teacher in the 1st century CE.

Says Atwill, “I did not share in this certainty.” What contributed most to his skepticism was that at the exact time the followers of Jesus were purportedly organizing themselves into a religion that urged its members to “turn the other cheek” and to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, another Judean sect was waging a religious war against the Romans and seeking a Messiah who would lead them militarily. Atwill continues, “It seemed implausible to me that two diametrically opposite forms of messianic Judaism would have emerged from Judea at the same time. So the Dead Sea Scrolls became of such interest to me that I began what turned into a decade-long study of them.” Like others, Atwill was hoping to learn something of Christian origins in the 2,000 year old documents found at Qumran. To assist in his understanding of them, Atwill began studying the history of the era.

It was then that Joseph Atwill came across the key that led to his discoveries. “While reading Josephus’ War of the Jews, and his account of Titus’ destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE,” Atwill recounts, “I noticed some curious parallels. At first I could make no sense of the parallels between Titus’ campaign and Jesus’ ministry. So I tried to look at the Gospels with fresh eyes, as if I had never seen them before, giving up any preconceived notions about what they meant.” This perspective resulted in the discoveries Atwill presents in Caesar’s Messiah and his soon-to-be-published book, The Single Strand. A Roman imperial family, the Flavians, had created Christianity, and, even more incredibly, they had placed a literary satire within the Gospels and War of the Jews to inform posterity of this fact.

Understanding the symbolic framework for the Gospels opened up the hidden history of Western Civilization to Joseph Atwill. That framework enabled him to recognize the typology that underlies authors such as Marlowe and Shakespeare and see the incredible story their typology tells us, and is the basis for The Single Strand.

Joseph Atwill concludes, “I am an avid chess player and proud to state that I have more than 100 victories over Grandmasters and International Masters. I hold an ICC Masters rating of 2358.” It is this form of strategic thinking that enabled Atwill to uncover the strategy behind the Romans’ invention of the Gospels.

Books by Joseph Atwill include Caesar’s Messiah, Ulysses Press 2006, the best selling work of religious history in the US in 2007, and its German translation Das Messias Ratsel, Ulstein 2008, achieving #1 Best Seller status. Atwill’s upcoming book, The Single Strand is also slated to be published by Ulstein. The German Magazine Focus published a cover article of Atwill’s work: Issue #52 December 25, 2008.

Consciousness Sovereignty

Graham Hancock author of Fingerprints of the Gods is a top bloke. However ever since he embarked on a personal odyssey to South America to drink the jungle tea brew of Ayahuasca with South American Shamans his spirituality has sky rocketed and he has become a wonderful ambassador for confronting the ignorance that entheogens are the same as the loosely banded drug term which applies to a pharmacy and heroin. Well worth a listen and of course there's more on DMT and entheogens on this blog if your curiosity is wetted.

Abracadabra - אברה כדברא

John Allegro was an Aramaic scholar who was invited to inspect the Dead Sea scrolls by the Vatican. Prior to this, his intention was to become a Methodist Priest but he changed career to Oriental studies and then during his radical translation and interpretation of the scrolls he made the mistake of releasing his findings earning the vindictive wrath of his peers who excommunicated his views and trashed his career with accusations of anti Catholicism. To this day the Vatican prevents us from knowing what other information contradicts the epistemological teachings of the present day Pope from their findings and as will one day be shown the Vatican library is chock full of ancient texts that don't support their erroneous and paternalistic business model.

There's a much more visually explanatory video of the discussion through the Pharmacratic Inquisition videos on Youtube though I think it's important to champion the Aramaic scholar first and also point out the two chaps who are interviewing him were famous 70's Dutch comedians who merely pursued their own interest in the topic of metaphorical mycology and so you need to contextualise the Citizen Smith headgear they are wearing at the end, even though a bit of silliness is very integral to this topic as you may have picked up from my Twisted post.

Update: As the years have passed I've often reflected that even if John Allegro was right, he was remarkably pompous and this might have contributed to our understanding.

HTML5

I've embedded this in the new Youtube iframe embed code for HTML5. I'd appreciate it if you could leave a comment for any viewing difficulties; particularly on mobile phones. Thanks a lot.

Mushroom Mayhem

There's no point trying to conceal my man crush for Terence McKenna. I like a polymath who isn't frightened to say odd things like 'the mushroom said to me' as it often did during his ethnobotanic experiments of hallucinogen plants and mushrooms.

That's how he talks about the Logos while sharing a couple of ideas he pursued over a long period of time in and out of that post hypnogogic yet pre-sentient state of mind. Hypnogogia being the first stage of hallucinating, and well documented within its sleep/awakening related contribution to creativity.

Recently I came across another Gigabyte or so of his recorded talks on the internet through peer to peer file sharing. He died in the year 2000 of a brain tumour, which when he was informed it was mushroom shaped provoked an 'of course it is' response out of him. He had a sense of humour. I think his second most provocative theory is the one regarding the alien nature of some mushrooms (I think it's the ones with Dimethyltyptamine) . Since reading that I've come across evidence that supports the suggestion that mushroom spores can indeed travel unharmed (by space X rays mainly) and thus might not be indigenous to our planet.

Yesterday I was having a conversation on twitter with a medical and health importer to Thailand. I suddenly realised I'd probably missed a rendezvous with a friend of mine who is setting up hospitals in Cambodia, so one email/phone call later I was sitting in their serviced apartment overlooking an horizon of empty office/accommodation space in  Bangkok. His room mate/travelling companion and I chatted a while, and we got talking about TED talks where he reminded me of the Paul Stamets talk on mushrooms that I had yet to see.

Well, here it is below, and if it kindles your interest in mushrooms then that's a good start because the next step is (if you don't mind) a bit of tie-dyed hippy post production (as many are) in your podcasting content, then get stuck into the bard McKenna. 

I've listened to over a hundred hours of his talks (and more including his trialogues with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abrahams) and so probably unlike you I really enjoy his candid 'the mushroom said to me' moments but just as rewarding are the indiscriminate and wide range of topics he covered, with in my mind the most eloquent and unscripted vocabulary I've ever come across (Though I imagine that other Irishman Oscar Wilde was a compelling  voice too). I'd say McKenna was the most interesting generalist in the world at one point and that doesn't mean he isn't a specialist either. Watch this TED there's nothing in it which diminishes the credibility of the wilder stuff that Terrence talked about and so the mushroom journey (for me) continues.