Originally Posted on: July 17, 2008 10:11 AM, by Mo
In the January 4th, 1961 episode of One Step Beyond, director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.
The programme was apparently inspired by a 1959 book called The Sacred Mushroom, by parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, who is known for taking the spoon-bending fraudster Uri Geller to the United States for investigation.
In the first part of the programme (embedded below), Newland, Puharich and others travel to Mexico to collect mushroom samples. They then return to Puharich’s lab in Palo Alto, where Newland’s ESP abilities are tested before and after ingestion of several mushroom stems.
The programme is of historical interest, as it was made some years before the widespread use of LSD led researchers to stop conducting psychedelic research. It therefore includes a brief mention of the potential therapeutic effects of psilocybin for psychiatric patients.
Parts 2 and 3 of the episode are also available on YouTube.
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“And then, oddly enough, the first sound we hear as the chemical in the mushroom takes effect is… laughter.”
This video is a lot of fun and introduced me to Andrija Puharich, who wrote The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity (1959). UCLA research psychologist Barbara Brown (who invented biofeedback), also makes the trip down to Mexico. But it is most fascinating to see the show’s host, John Newland in an on-camera lab setting, have his extrasensory perception skills tested under the influence of mushrooms. Really makes me wonder where we might be now if science had continued to have access to these substances.
And then down the rabbit hole! I’m a big fan of a book called ‘Myself and I’(1962) by Constance Newland, which is the pen-name of Thelma Moss, who was a parapsychology researcher at UCLA. ‘Myself and I’ tells the story of her LSD-assisted psychotherapy. She had specific symptoms she was trying to address, and years of traditional psychotherapy had gotten her nowhere. Under LSD she makes profound connections to long-lost childhood experiences which open the way to her cure. I learned a lot about my own mind from reading about her insights. I would highly recommend this book.
But I wonder if Thelma Moss ever met John Newland through Barbara Brown who was also at UCLA. I found one clip on the net that connects Moss and Brown… “In Prague I was warmly and hospitably received by Dr. Rejdak, who is perhaps the most active parapsychologist in Czechoslovakia. In the company of two other Americans, Dr. Thelma Moss and Dr. Barbara Brown, we were shown films of recent experiments in the telepathic transmission of taste impression on a hypnotic subject. I’m not sure why I’m even curious but somehow it’s interesting. Another connection to this whole cast of characters is Uri Geller. As mentioned above, Andrija Puharich was responsible for bringing Uri Geller to the US for experiments. You can easily find Uri connections to Thelma Moss and Barbara Brown.
A free biography of Andrija Puharich by his ex wife H.G.M. Herman, found on Uri Geller’s site offers up such gems as… In 1955 he had heard from a Mr. Wasson that a ritualistic mushroom cult had existed in Mexico for hundreds of years, and was still practiced in some remote parts of the country. (Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Wasson wrote a book entitled Mushrooms, Russia and History. It was published in 1957).Anxious to find out for himself, Andrija set out for the village of Juquila in the state of Oaxaca, 200 miles south of Mexico City in June of 1960. The original expedition was made up of nine people, including Paul Jones. When Paul returned after about four weeks saying that all members of the team had become ill, and that Andrija had been crazy to go on alone with an even crazier missionary, I became not only greatly concerned, but furious as well. How the hell did Andrija dare risk his life, being the father of four children and a fifth on the way? I hadn’t even known that he was off to a dangerous remote place in Mexico. Besides, he had left me with barely enough money to buy food, and with unpaid bills. We no longer lived in Carmel Valley, but had moved to the chic part of Carmel, called Carmel Meadows. How Andrija had been able to buy the beautiful, spacious patio house, had been “none of my business.” This from Chapter 6.
While browsing Uri Geller’s site I noticed this in his sidebar: are your eyes attracted to 11.11? But we’ll save that for another day.
This is amazing! Lovins was on the Charlie Rose Show saying this too. This is in complete contradiction to supposed “Greens” like Stewart Brand, James Lovelock (Mr Gaia , himself!), and others, saying we have to go Nuclear Power Plants to save ourselves!? WTF?! And a 4th media hit! Neil Young on Letterman mentions Lovins!
from Democracy Now
Amory Lovins: Expanding Nuclear Power Makes Climate Change Worse
There’s one issue that President Bush and presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama all agree on: expanding the use of nuclear power. We speak with Amory Lovins, the co-founder, chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, who has been described as “one of the Western world’s most influential energy thinkers.” [includes rush transcript]
Check out some of these topics and links to more clues. Immortality, Neurologic, Space Migration emerged in the early 1970’s and morphed into Life Extension ( life_X) , intelligence increase, and local Space Stations. We still need back-up mini biospheres of the biosphere! Gaia! Gaea! Later these morphed into
SMI2LE. Early Bible stories of communicating with God, traveling UP to Heaven, living for 500 years! So this is the latest update!
When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the distribution of vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.
George Lakoff is well known as a cognitive linguist who looks at how language affects culture, specifically how much the metaphors we use impact the way we think. During the last presidential election, he grabbed a lot of attention with his book Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, about how Republicans are masters at “framing” debates to their benefit. His new book, The Political Mind, explores the same territory but in the context of cognitive science. The New York Times reviewed The Political Mind yesterday and it sounds fascinating. From the NYT:
Lakoff blames “neoliberals” and their “Old Enlightenment” mentality for the Democratic Party’s weakness. They think they can win elections by citing facts and offering programs that serve voters’ interests. When they lose, they conclude that they need to move farther to the right, where the voters are.
This is all wrong, Lakoff explains. Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a “New Enlightenment,” progressives will exploit these discoveries. They’ll present frames instead of raw facts. They’ll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It’s not the platform that needs to be changed. It’s the voters.
The basis of Lakoff’s theory is simple: the mind is the brain. Any connection that forms between your thoughts also forms between your neurons. As you internalize a metaphor, a circuit in your brain “physically constitutes the metaphor.” This parallel development continues as mental complexity increases. “Narratives are brain structures,” he proposes.
Link to NYT review, Link to buy The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain
Previously on BoingBoing:
• George Lakoff on how to argue with conservatives Link
• George Lakoff on why the conservatives seem to be winning Link
Along with a host of other literary, artistic and scientific luminaries of the period, novelist Anais Nin was one of the new wonder- drug’s early guinea-pigs. At the dawn of the psychedelic sixties, she saw herself as part of a larger social organism that was liquefying; opening like a sea-anenemone to countless imaginary worlds of the imagination made flesh. Like the generation of psychonauts that followed in the wake of the bomb, she experienced an epiphany that, for a few brief and glorious hours, exploded her right out of history. The term ‘psychedelic’ was coined to describe this experience of the ineffable. It means “mind- manifesting” and represents the transposition of inner and outer psychological and experiential realities; the detonation of the ’self’.
SPECIAL Event Date:Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Location: Baxter Lecture Hall
Speaker: Dr. Stuart Kauffman
Tickets: First come first served at the door. Sorry, no advance ticket sales for this lecture. Seating is limited. $8 Skeptics Society members & Caltech/JPL Community; $10 General Public.
In this controversial lecture based on his new book, the world-renowned complexity theorist Dr. Stuart Kauffman argues that people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality,
from BioComplexity site
An essay outlining Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred thesis is contained in a new series of 13 essays by distinguished thinkers on the topic “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” currently published on the John Templeton Foundation website at: http://templeton.org/belief/. The preface and first chapter of the book are currently published as an essay titled “Breaking the Galilean Spell” on Edge.org at:http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman08/kauffman08_index.html
An essay by Kauffman titled “Reinventing the Sacred” is also scheduled to be published in the May 10 issue of New Scientist magazine.
“My new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, is just out (May 10). The idea for Arts, Inc. hit me when I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, during Bill Clinton’s administration. I became convinced that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, copyright extension, and Clear-Channel-style media consolidation were undermining our basic rights to an arts system that really serves the public.”
Bill Ivey was the seventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton and served from 1998 to 2001.
If, as Walter Ong suggests, technologies of communication and information affect noetic economies (structures of thought); and if noetic economies have to do with what it means to be human; it seems important to consider how the spoken and the mediated word and image contribute to the human soul – or to the sacred. How have technologies and the larger media world altered our experiences of the sacred?
Secret Black-ops Iron-ons, and the Wrath of KHAN! this weekend at Machine
On Friday, May 23rd at 8pm, geographer and artist Trevor Paglen will be giving a talk on the network of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people that military and intelligence insiders call the “black world.” Suprisingly, these “black sites” and non-existent military installations have also given rise to an incredible catalog of black-ops iron-on membership patches that have to be seen to be believed. Trevor recently compiled these patches into a book called I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me, which can be seen (and may be for sale?) at the event.http://www.machineproject.com/ 1200 D North Alvarado StreetLos Angeles, CA 90026213-483-8761
For as long as it takes a Tyrannosaurus Rex to devolve into a chicken, just so long will we have to wait for religion to scale down into a harmless nourishment for the soul. Then again, considering cock fights in Latin America, maybe the chicken isn’t so chicken after all.It is just smaller than we are.So how long do we have to wait before religion becomes spiritually smaller than we are?Judging by the recent exposures of the geriatric fundamentalist Mormon sect in Texas and the Pope’s recent damage control on priests’ child molestation, we have a long wait ahead of us. continued here
News You Might Have Missed: Court Confirms President’s Dictatorial Powers 
