A special episode of In A Perfect World featuring a lecture by author and podcaster of the Entheogenic Evolution, Martin Ball Ph.D, conducted at Burning Man 2009. In which Martin expouses at length about issues from his recently released book, "Being Human: An Entheological Guide to GOD, Evolution, and the Fractal Energetic Nature of Reality", aka the world's most radical and provocative book! Martin discusses "infinity loops", the fractal nature of reality, the consciousness behind the evolutionary drive across history... and crystalline dimethyltryptamine... What role does DMT play in making us self-aware, and how has the evolutionary drive created this crystalline catalyst to dress higher dimensional consciousness in matter forms? Is DMT an ingression of the Godhead, and what role does it and altered consciousness play in the history of religion? Let Martin Ball rap lyrical – and tell you his take on the DMT elves...

[Thanks, Rak!]

On September 19 this year, 12 people gathered in the suburban Hermsdorf district of Berlin for a group psychotherapy session that allegedly involved illegal drugs. A day later, two of the participants were dead and another in a coma. The substances used and exact cause of death have yet to be confirmed. Local newspaper reports have claimed that heroin and MDMA (ecstasy) were taken, but other drugs may have been in circulation.

Garri Rober, the therapist who led the session which included his wife, Elke, is facing possible charges in connection with the deaths and on suspicion of supplying illegal drugs. The other nine participants were released from hospital the next day.

This tragedy, which received international coverage, threatens to derail a fledgling renaissance in legitimate research using psychedelic drugs in the management of common disorders from migraines to obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.

Thanks to Jonathan for sending this to us, and as he pointed out, the comments to this piece are actually better than the article itself.

The drug flibanserin, which was originally created as an antidepressant, is effective in treating women with low libido, pooled results from three separate clinical trials have found.

These trials were the first ever to test a therapy that works at the level of the brain to enhance libido in women reporting low sexual desire, said John M. Thorp Jr., M.D., McAllister distinguished professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and the principal investigator for North America in the studies.

"Flibanserin was a poor antidepressant," Thorp said. "However, astute observers noted that it increased libido in laboratory animals and human subjects. So, we conducted multiple clinical trials and the women in our studies who took it for hypoactive sexual desire disorder reported significant improvements in sexual desire and satisfactory sexual experiences.

"It's essentially a Viagra-like drug for women in that diminished desire or libido is the most common feminine sexual problem, like erectile dysfunction is in men," Thorp said.

Dead heads and pot heads take note. While the straight economy goes up in smoke with double digit unemployment, job prospects for hippies are booming -- and not just for boomers.

Denver's alternative newspaper Westward his hiring a pot reviewer to write a column, "Marijuana Highs and Lows," about the medical marijuana scene.

At the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) they're looking to hire an official Grateful Dead archivist.

And in Denver, where Colorado's medical marijuana industry is legally flourishing, there are these two recent job postings:

The alternative newspaper Westword is advertising for a pot reviewer, asking for a short essay from applicants on "What Marijuana Means to Me".

Similarly, a new biotech company, Full Spectrum Laboratories, needs scientists to test the potency of cannabis samples and salesmen to market their quality-control tools.

They don't call it the Mile High City for nothing.

To quote the Onion, "Drugs win War on Drugs".

The United States' first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration's move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it -- as long as they are out of public view -- despite a federal ban.

"This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members," said Madeline Martinez, Oregon's executive director of NORML, a group pushing for marijuana legalization.

"Our plans go beyond serving food and marijuana," said Martinez. "We hope to have classes, seminars, even a Cannabis Community College, based here to help people learn about growing and other uses for cannabis."

The cafe -- in a two-story building which formerly housed a speak-easy and adult erotic club Rumpspankers -- is technically a private club, but is open to any Oregon residents who are NORML members and hold an official medical marijuana card.

'Tryptamine Palace' was written by Oroc over a period of many years, and the subtitle "A Journey from Burning Man to the Akashic Field" sets the basic tone for this book. I felt instantly overwhelmed with Oroc's attempt to re-brand spiritual elements of psychedelic mythology, including a quirky deconstruction of the word "God" into the mathematical formula G/d, which he presents on page 5 and uses throughout the remainder of the text. The technical information presented on DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and Bufo alvarius is all well researched and will be interesting for people who have not read other source materials, but much of Oroc's material is re-tread of popular theories of transcendent metaphysics or well-worn historical events like Leary's High Priest days and the CIA's MK-ULTRA experiments. 'Tryptamine Palace' reads like a big jumble of psychedelic lore, none of it covered in much detail, making it seem more like a garden-variety psychedelic primer than an important new treatise on 5-MeO-DMT.

Oroc does try to bring some new material to the table by linking the Akashic field of Eastern spirituality to the zero-point energy field of quantum physics. While this connection is alluring I found it frustrating that Oroc buries his case within chapters touting Burning Man as an example of the coming transcendent culture shift. The proof of the central thesis of this book, that 5-MeO-DMT is a gateway to God consciousness via the Akashic field, somehow gets lost in all the meandering, but the chapter entitled, "The Zero-Point Field and the 5MDE" is dense enough to be read two or three times, and links consciousness to quantum Bose-Einstein condensates as interference patterns of space interacting with time. Oroc presents a neat collection of source material on East/West quantum consciousness and sums it all up with some of his own mathematical descriptions of consciousness as a form of light condensate. The few chapters he spends discussing quantum models of God are worthy and fully steeped in Western science and Eastern philosophy. A quantum 5-MeO-DMT deconstruction of the Tibetan bardos is just what we would expect from such a text, and of course Oroc does not disappoint.

Here’s a hysterical animation about Major League Baseball player Dock Ellis and his infamous 1970 no-hitter game against the San Diego Padres while under the influence of LSD. "Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No".

Thanks Mason!

Someone is arrested in the United States for a drug-law violation every 18 seconds, an FBI report released Monday shows.

More than four-fifths of those arrests were for possession only and nearly half were for possession of marijuana. Of the 847,863 marijuana arrests -- one every 37 seconds -- 89 percent were for possession alone.

And those folks do spend time in jail. University of Maryland drug policy expert Peter Reuter told the Huffington Post that in Maryland, roughly a third of those arrested for marijuana possession spend time in jail, from a night to several days or more.

There are profound consequences to spending even a short stint in jail. "You can get get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction," said Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics detective who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) in a statement.

Eeesh. Of course, LEAP has its own thoughts on the topic:

Last December, LEAP commissioned a report by a Harvard University economist that found that legalizing and regulating drugs would inject tens of billions a year into the U.S. economy. In California, medical marijuana is currently taxed and generates several hundred million dollars per year in revenue for the state treasury.

It's not just taxable revenue, obviously - it's the opportunity cost of the enforcement efforts required to bust someone every 18 seconds, the legal efforts required to prosecute, and the additional resources required to keep them in jail for some inane number of years because of it. But yeah, here in the land of opportunity, a bust every 18 seconds has got to start looking like a preposterous waste of serious money at some point.

Oh wait, it started looking like that a long time ago. Never mind then...

The visible galaxies in the universe are not isolated and disconnected but are interwoven by a filamentary web-like structure - which is the invisible dark matter scaffolding of the universe. The web-like structure is both a signature feature of invisible dark matter and magnetic plasma. The appearance of this web bears an uncanny resemblance to a cross-section of the brain. (Refer: Brain vs Universe)

But it is not only the morphology (i.e. structural aspects) of the large scale structure of the universe which is similar to the human brain but also the physiology (i.e. the functions). These filaments carry currents of charged particles (ions) over large distances that generate magnetic fields - similar to a nerve fiber. And they form circuits, just like the neural circuits in the brain.

The high degree of connectivity is what sets the brain apart from an ordinary computer. Connectivity is also apparent in the cosmic web. Galaxies are formed when filaments pinch or cross each other. A nexus of filaments (including thousands of tiny filamentary currents) will provide the connectivity for the transfer of not only energy but information from one galactic nucleus to another.

The author, Jay Alfred, then ties this networked universe theory into mystical concepts like the Akashic field, the collective unconscious, and a global brain.

The Earth appears to have a brain but how does it get sensory inputs? One way is to generate life-forms. The myriad of life-forms (including human beings) on Earth are in fact the many eyes and ears of the Earth. The networks of currents in the brains of life-forms are an integral part of the network of currents in Earth's brain. It is in the universe's interest to generate life-forms so that it can see, hear, taste, touch and smell and become aware of itself.

If we are indeed connected to the Earth's brain, which is connected to a universal brain, it also means that we share a universal brain which can have contact with the brains of other planets that nurture life-forms that generate their own memories. Intelligent life-forms can send information (either intentionally or unintentionally) via the universal brain directly to our brains.

This is not entirely new stuff, but it is probably the most succinct argument for collective consciousness I have seen.

Thanks to Boris for finding this!