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</A> -Cui Bono?-
This has been the most interesting post that I have received while
subscribed to this list...thank you.
Andy
www.bluehoney.org
With the most recent scholarship in entheogens and the roots of
Christianity,
Jesus can now be recognized as the king and paradigmatic example of the drug
policy reformers. Let us hope that our success at making psychedelics freely
available for everyone comes sooner than his success has so far.
Psychedelic Christian theologists should run out and get two books. A new,
most-excellent book is The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of
the
Bible. Dan Merkur.
The other one is Patriarchy and Drug Propaganda, by Dan Russell. This
explains the transition from very common psychedelic plant usage to the rise
of the authoritarian Catholic Church, which persecuted users of entheogenic
plants.
Both explain the psychedelic origin of Christianity, and the tension between
those who want everyone to access psychedelics, and the exclusivists who
only
want the elite power wielders to access psychedelics. There is now a strong
case for psychedelic allusions in the Bible. Also Barbara Thiering's Jesus
The Man. Together, these books imply the strong hypothesis that Jesus was
crucified for providing ergot-bread directly to everyone for free, making an
end-run around the artificial scarcity and controlling power of the priests.
Common between the priest family who ran Eleusis, the Jewish temple priests,
and perhaps even the Catholic priests: they took free access to psychedelics
away from the people. "Mystery" means "keep your mouth shut about how to
make
ergot, or we'll get rid of you." I first read in Strange Fruit the proposal
that Socrates was put to death for revealing the formula for Kykeon, the
ergot beverage used in the mystery cults such as Eleusis. I think this is
extremely plausible when you consider that the ceremonies were controlled
and
run by families who only permitted a single experience. They had a secret
that was always at risk of publication, and their income depended on it. It
would have been easy to turn this entheogenic formula into a source of
power,
income, and manipulative and possibly oppressive systems of belief, by
creating and controlling an artificial scarcity.
Buddhism as well has an exclusivism that Buddha didn't intend. A research
programme would be to investigate if Mystery Religions, Catholicism,
Judaism,
and Buddhism all had psychedelic foundations but the public knowledge of the
psychedelics was deliberately suppressed in order to gain power over the
people. The book Strange Fruit tells how Moses used the poisonous type of
ergot to put the Egyptians out of commission -- an example of how knowledge
of psychedelics can be turned into political power. God's word told the
Jewish priests to always put ergot bread on public display in the temple,
but
the priests moved it into the restricted secret zone -- the Holy of Holies,
taboo and off limits to all but the inner circle (Merkur). Jesus however
wanted everyone to access the Holy bread, rather than restricting the people
to the Common bread/loaves (Thiering). Taking this a bit furthur, it even
suggests that Jesus' real complaint in the temple courtyard was that the
priests were selling ergot, and at exorbitant prices, and only to a very
select few. That way, the poor could never afford to buy a hit of ergot to
experience ego death, unity consciousness, and heaven-on-earth. But Jesus
gave them ergot for free, so that they could experience ego death, and the
priests -- who had a thriving business -- were infuriated and seriously
threatened, and had to get him out of the way to preserve their artificial
scarcity. Then the miraculous healings were actually healings of the
illusory
split between self and world, and Jesus gave them religion meaning
re-connection of the separate-self-sense with the world.
The conspiracy activists should assume that like the temple priests, the
prohibitionist leaders actually are heavy drug users and their real goal is
to gain power through The acid-rock group Rush, in the album 2112, complains
about the priests controlling everything and controlling consciousness and
forbidding psychedelics. However, the real problem with the priests is that
they hoard ergot technology all to themselves and won't let the public have
it -- so that the starving public then can be strung along on lies and false
promises of delayed fulfillment and empty assurances to give a feeble sense
of reconciliation of self and reality, while seeking that which they really
thirst for, while being robbed by the manipulative priests, like
televangelists with a cache of psychedelics who use psychedelics just to
think of more ways to fleece the flock.
I think prohibition will be repealed when prohibition is understood as a
conspiracy rather than as mere accidental confusion, an innocent
misunderstanding of human nature. The prohibitionist leaders know damn well
what they are doing. You think you have anything to teach them?! The Mystery
Religion leaders (families) in Greece were conspirators and monopolists of
ergot technology, same with the Jewish priests and possibly the Catholic
hierarchy, Buddhist high gurus, and possibly the prohibitionist leaders.
Bush
likes coke and brought in coke to target blacks for addiction and jail, and
the CIA loves LSD, so it is totally likely that the prohibitionist leaders
love to trip. The utmost in naivete is to assume that LSD makes you a nice
person, or that if a person takes drugs, they want drug users to walk in
freedom.
None of these authors seem to have discovered the passages I found in the
Manual of Discipline, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls which obsesses over the
sacred meals and the worst punishment being forbidden to eat the sacred
meals, and prohibiting sharing one's sacred meals with a violator of the
community's rules. I recall that's part of the Qumran community's scrolls,
which would prove that this extremely regimented and radically
predestinarian
community was *centered around* psychoactive food (ergot loaves). It is not
firmly established, from what I've read, that Jesus was in the Qumran
community, but at this point I believe Barbara Thiering's Jesus The Man is
correct and he was a rebel from within the Qumran religious community. Her
theory of pescher reading technique agrees with the end of The Mystery Of
Manna (Dan Merkur) -- we should read the Bible and scrolls as utilizing
magical stories to describe actual, inner mystical experiences. The Other
Bible: Ancient Alternative Scriptures - includes Manual of Discipline on
page
208 -- that is part of the Dead Sea Scrolls and was used by the Qumran
community. "If... a man... lies... he shall be excluded from the sacred food
of the masters for a year, and shall be deprived of a fourth of his food
ration. ... he shall not touch the sacred food of the masters [or] touch the
drink of the masters. ... If any man of the community partakes with him of
his sacred food... his sentence shall be like his. ... he shall be separated
from the sacred food."
Thanks to Merkur's book, I can finally tell a complete, simple, plausible
story about Jesus' real mission and why the priests tried to get rid of him.
I have also become confident that the cross experientially is the
altered-state perception of oneself being frozen in spacetime, suspended and
controlled consciously by the all-powerful ground of being which one has no
choice but to trust in -- no ultimate choice, since the Ground is ultimately
the source of each and every thought and movement of one's own will. Jesus
then becomes not so much a savior as a *model* offered to us just as the
saviors in the dramatic enactments of the mystery religions. He provides a
particularly vivid symbol of the death of the sovereign ego, and symbolic
proof that one can go through ego death and yet be permitted to live, and
recover. I have to repeat for those who haven't read me, that the purpose of
the Shroud of Turin is to demonstrate that Jesus' "death" on the cross was
merely a dramatization of death (The Jesus Conspiracy, Holger Kirsten, is
now
back in print thank goodness); by his leaving proof that he didn't die
bodily, Jesus explains to us his spiritual descendents that the real meaning
of the cross concerns the experience of ego death, and heaven is something
reached in this world through ego death, not in the afterlife after bodily
death. All magic and prophetic aspects of the Bible are to be discarded by
the spiritually mature.
Psychedelics in manna and in the eucharist had to be suppressed for reasons
of power struggles. Barbara Thiering thinks that the
pescher-writing-technique (systematic obfuscation/encoding) was required
because Jesus really was a rebel leader. We don't know if Jesus really did
want the throne he inherited from David. But he did use the opportunity put
before him to bodily and vividly tell a story about putting down our
experience of sovereign rulership (the ego) to experience ego death and
attain knowledge of truth -- in this life, for free, for everyone. This
message was intended for anyone accessing the lysergic peak state, which he
*hoped* would be a large audience. He thought that if heaven is knowing the
truth about our inner nature, reaching heaven is a matter of ego death
(seeing through the illusion of the inner king), not a matter of bodily
death
and of surface morality and the afterlife. He told his story of genuine
mystic inner experience in a way that could also be taken by the spiritually
immature *and* by the enemies the priests/exclusivists/prohibitionists as
silly magic tales -- that's why he talks of miracles and magic and confirms
all sorts of nonsense such as questions about hell, and put on a dramatic
hoax of dying on the cross. That hoax can be read one way by the immature,
and another way by the tripper, and made the priests believe that Jesus
"Trips for All for Free" Christ was safely out of the way so that they could
continue their business of doling out ergot only to the highest bidders and
only to the most well-connected, the inner circle of the elite.
As much as I fear Merkur invading my area -- explaining the experience of
ego
death in terms of self-control cybernetics -- there is much still to put
together, to truly understand how the founding dramas of Christian symbolism
equate to contemporary ergot peak experiencing.
I don't see that it was a good or effective idea for Jesus to put on this
mystery drama; it didn't accomplish his wish of everyone having access to
ego
death, though it is quite a coherent symbolic drama packed with meaning,
when
finally understood through the resonant lens of the psychedelic peak. If the
Jews are to finally "believe in Jesus and worship him", that means that the
Jews -- the intellectuals -- will again publicly access the ergot loaves and
put the ergot loaves back out in the open in the temple, on the sacrifice
table, rather than hiding them in the exclusivist holy of holies inner
sanctum trip-room where only the priest family can enjoy knowing the Truth.
This train of explanation also leads to a clearer relationship between the
ergot bread and blood sacrifice. No scholar of psychedelics and/or
Christianity has addressed this connection, but ergot's lesson of ego death
lead Abraham to being willing to terminate his family's bloodline if so
commanded -- but finally the command of truth is ego death, *not* bodily
death. Finally, the would-be sacrifice of Isaac is about ego death, not
blood
sacrifice, and the Cross is about ego death and enlightenment, not bodily
death and resurrection. Ergot, death, symbolism, self-transgression,
breaking
of conventional moral restraint, and sacrifice... these elements come
together in Abraham at the foundation of Judaism and are reflected again in
the drama of the cross, but with a shift from winning land and mundane
worldly power, to winning the consciousness of heaven and the accompanying
self-knowledge that -- from the point of view of unity consciousness -- we
are not really prime movers or sovereign kings or responsible agents.
Merkur suggests that the secret which had to be suppressed for political
reasons is the psychedelic nature of the sacrament (manna and the
Eucharist),
and the secret of the procedure for extracting desirable type of ergot from
the poisonous kind, from grains. However, he is a psychoanalyst and a
historian, but not a philosopher: the secret that one had to keep was also
that responsible moral agency is an illusion (from the point of view of high
metaphysics). This was common belief, anyway, in ancient Greece; only Fate,
the ultimate ruler even of the gods, could really be blamed or praised. The
death of the responsible egoic agent is an affront to the entire human
system
of morality which is part of civilized culture. Before civilization, there
wasn't much reason to prop up the delusion of the responsible sovereign
egoic
agent, the individual as prime mover. There was a primitive unity
consciousness, though ancient Greece just before the legal invention of
personal responsibility in the city-states could hardly be called
"primitive". Since people then had psychedelics, some of them were more
advanced in their self-understanding than typical people are today, in some
fundamental respects.
Exodus 16:32, Yahweh commands Moses to preserve manna throughout the
generations, so that they all would *see* the bread with which their
ancestors were fed in the desert. But the power-hungry priests eventually
moved this displayed ergot bread into the secrecy of the inner sanctum.
Leviticus 14:10, Jesus asked the healed leper to take a sample of ergot
bread
to the priests, as proof that Jesus had the power to kick down the temple
and
undermine their false scarcity by giving away ergot bread for free to any
and
all -- like Microsoft trying to destroy Netscape corporation by giving away
a
web browser for free, thus destroying the possibility of anyone making sales
of web browsers into a financially profitable and viable business. If you
have a religion based on charging fees for religious fulfillment and
reconciliation, but the same result is available for free in ergot bread,
openly released onto the Web by Jesus: the people's hacker, you can bring
down that entire temple and that entire business/religion, just as David
brought down the temple by pulling together its two main supports. The main
support of the Jewish temples and the Eleusian priest-families was the
*artificial scarcity* of ergot extractions. Destroy that artificial scarcity
(which is really pretty easily, as far as natural resources), and you
destroy
the temple-business, the money-making machine, built upon that artificial
scarcity.
Ironically, I doubt that Jesus used psychedelics while on the cross, unless
the coma-inducing drugs he took happened to have had a psychedelic
side-effect. His bodily dramatization of mystic death and resurrection would
likely have been unconvincing had he actually been on psychedelics at the
time. However, he could have had some mystic state consciousness due to the
traumatization of the ordeal.
Also reading these books, and Strange Fruit, I picked up the equation:
mushrooms = the little mysteries, ergot = the great mysteries.
In Strange Fruit, the author proposes that Christian psychedelic experience
used the Amanita entheogen. I do think there could be a place for Amanita in
the foundation of Christianity; however, I think ergot is the main
psychedelic/entheogen that founded Christianity. In Christianity, the *main*
vehicle for the Holy Spirit has been ergot, rather than mushrooms.
Way back in the 60s, reformers argued that psychedelics effectively mimic
authentic mystic techniques. Lately, we argue that psychedelics are more
authentic than meditation -- that the authentic technique for causing the
mystic altered state is psychedelics (entheogens) and the flimsy and
untrustworthy simulation is other techniques, such as meditation and sensory
deprivation without augmentation with psychoactives. Now, for Christian
entheogens, we are moving on to taking for granted all that, and getting on
with debating *which* entheogens founded Christianity, debating what the
most
open channel is for the Holy Spirit -- mushrooms or ergot, and which strain
and extraction techniques were used. Merkur's book shines enough brilliant
light on the suppressed entheogenic roots of Christianity and Judaism to
warrant its copyright date of 2000.
This western religion offers us a cup of ergot extraction and a loaf of
ergot
bread, leading to effective death of the illusory, false, inner egoic king
and consciousness of heaven in which everything fits together as one; shall
we refuse the cup that we have been given by this religion? The price is
that
we must figuratively kill the magical savior and the magical resurrection,
to
gain a merely mystical savior and mystical resurrection. I remember the day
I
shed my skin of magical thinking and differentiated it from rational
mystical
thinking. I don't remember if I wept when the magic Jesus died and left me
instead holding the shroud of a living man, gazing upon the returned
4-footed
image of Jesus the human mystic trickster.
Merkur makes a strong case for the Holy Grail being a vessel and/or platter
for ergot-bread, but he overlooks again and again the Shroud. I think it is
likely that the Holy Grail will turn out to involve *both* the ergot-vessel
idea *and* the worship of the Shroud. The passion tells of Jesus' chalice
and
the eucharist at the Last Supper, *and* it tells of his shroud. Just so, the
Holy Grail worship includes a psychedelic chalice *and* worshipping the
image
of Jesus in his shroud, where the psychedelic opens the mind to see the
shroud as forensic evidence that Jesus was prematurely removed from the
Cross, so that the Holy Grail participants are aware of literally gazing
upon
the image of a living Jesus who never had died. This makes the tripper look
upon the shroud and weep and tremble and gasp, saying anew, "oh.. my..
God...
he's alive, Jesus lives! Look upon the living Jesus... that changes
*everything*..." It changes resurrection from a matter of bodily death and
miraculous recovery, to a matter of mystic "ecstatic death" (Merkur) and
post-rapture recovery. It shifts, all together, all the magical tales of the
Bible into mystic allegories referring to the genuine mental phenomena that
occur in this life.
Jesus does return, in the Shroud; he does live, in the picture in the
Shroud,
and heaven does arrive, metaphysically, and one does die and is resurrected,
spiritually. The book Holy Blood, Holy Grail argues that Jesus did not die
on
the cross, but went on to have children and pass on his royal blood to the
Cathars in France, who worshipped the Holy Grail -- but he struggles to make
sense out of references which are obviously, now, references to the Shroud
of
Turin, which both shows the 4-footed image of Jesus and is a container of
his
blood, *and* is concrete forensic evidence that his death on the cross is a
virtual, mystical death rather than mundane bodily death -- which explains
why the shroud was such a threat to the Church and had to be kept absolutely
secret by those who possessed and worshipped it.
The tales in the Bible are true, as far as psychedelic phenomena are
concerned -- they are mystically true, as well as accurate, rational,
coherent, and meaningful (that's how Merkur concludes the book).
He also points out that in the verses in which Jesus defends consuming
anything because impurity comes from within, he starts off implicitly
talking
about meat, but switches -- remarkably -- to talking about plants. That
stands out as a strong signal to trippers because plants never were involved
in purity/impurity, only meat -- so why defend taking in any and all
*plants*
that God planted in the Earth? For plant, here, think especially ergot of
grain -- a cultivated plant which could be deliberately brushed with a wild
inedible grain which favors the good kind of ergot, as Albert Hofmann
concludes in The Road to Eleusis.
The most relevant religious freedom is that freedom which Jesus wanted and
which the word of God gave to the Israelites: the freedom for every person
to
eat manna, "What is it?", the holy ergot-bread, and experience truth and ego
death. Other religious freedoms are valid but secondary to this, the most
central and relevant religious freedom. Psychedelic religion is the most
important religious freedom. Jesus' burning desire was for everyone, even
the
poor, to be able to consume the holy ergot bread, and his hatred was
specifically against those who would hoard the holy ergot bread, charge
exorbitantly for it, and take it away from the common people and make it
against the law for the "impure" to consume it. Thus Jesus is the
figurehead,
model, and leader of the drug law reformers, and drug law reform is the very
essence of the most sincere, informed, and insightful followers of Jesus.
Fundamentalist Christian author Dave Hunt has a new book out, Occult
Invasion, with significant coverage of psychedelics. Interestingly, his
objection to psychedelics is purely that they are associated with spirit
guides. He doesn't mention the idea of psychedelics giving a vision of the
Christian Holy Spirit, though such would fit. A more coherent fundamentalist
position that is informed by true understanding of psychedelics would be
that
psychedelics are the main vehicle for the Holy Spirit, but beware of occult
spirit guides.
I suspect that Moses wanted others who consumed the ergot bread to reach the
same views he did and have a similar experience of unity consciousness -- a
rational experience with little anthropomorphism. A central part of his view
was that God was a single controller-entity that had full control over each
person's actions. But many who consumed the ergot bread instead adopted a
partying approach and experienced a variety of magical spirit-beings. Moses
disapproved of that response to the psychedelic food; he felt it was
regressive and careless.
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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