the burning man

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niki
June 11th, 2009 on 10:00 pm
this is all very interesting. check out the link below, it provides a short account of many others’ experiences with mantids and the apparent archetypal role they play in the underground unconscious

http://diseyes.lycaeum.org/fresh/mantis.htm
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LuminousNo Gravatar
June 13th, 2009 on 6:23 pm

Super badass. Much obliged.
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Catarina AraujoNo Gravatar
November 12th, 2009 on 11:45 am

Hello!

You may want to check out Aldous Huxley’s “Island”. It’s a great book overall but I’m recommending it to you because in the very last chapter the main character takes a mushroom trip while listening to Bach and at first everything is bliss, he has his eyes closed and just flows with the music, finds nirvana, etc etc etc. But, a while after opening his eyes, the trip starts descending into hell because he sees (guess what guess what?) PRAYING MANTIS FORNICATING. And then the female eats the male’s head and in the eyes of the tripper that represents all the horror and suffering in the world.

Great Hug to you

PS - if you like Burning Man I’m sure you’d love Boom Festival, it’s in Portugal. Amazing! http://www.boomfestival.org
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LuminousNo Gravatar
November 14th, 2009 on 4:31 pm

No way! I did not know that! Thank you so much for posting this crazy info. I love Aldous Huxley and am a I am a HUGE fan of Heaven and Hell and The Perennial Philososphy (which are both nonfiction) in particular. I started reading Eyeless in Gaza but couldn’t get into it. I just recently read (in Rational Mysticism by John Horgan) that Huxley wanted to write a more optomistic, utopian novel (than the pessimistic, distopian Brave New World) after his joyous experimentation with mescaline. That’s crazy about the mantises. What do you think it all means???
I will read Island this week. For sure.

And yes, I heard Rick Doblin talk about Boom 2008 at Burning Man 2008! I’ve been looking into going next year. The idea of having water nearby and of being able to party Burning Man style without all the dust is tempting to say the least. It’s tantalizing.

It’s a dillema. Do I spend the $1300 on plane ticket to Lisbon or do I buy a sweet 8-seater artcar for Burning Man?

Two Questions for you: Do you live in Portugal? And do you know of any other worldwide psychedelic gatherings in the same eschelon as Boom and Burning Man?

Thanks again for posting!
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Luminous
November 17th, 2009 on 3:05 pm

Oh shit! Listen to this…this is from Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi! I meant to post about this when I first read Yogananda, but I was living in the boonies without internet (or running water for that matter) and I was still lazy with post-burning man bliss. And my back went out and…. Anyway…this is AWESOME:

“Among the fallen dark angels expelled from other worlds, friction and war take place with [PRANIC WEAPONS]* or MENTAL MANTRIC VIBRATORY WAVES. These beings dwell in the gloom-drenched regions of the lower astral cosmos, working out their evil karma”

Are all the “astral planes”… are they all right here in terms of space-time? Is Heaven just a found emotion hiding somewhere in the night? Christ says “The Kingdom of God IS on eath and Men do not see it.” That was one of Joe Campbell’s favorite quotes. Is Hell right here, too? Are these various archetypal planes and platonic realms, and the ancestral lands of the dead and of ghosts…are all these just like T.V. frequencies? You know what I mean?

Is it possible, just as all the various FM waves drfift through your T.V. or radio, even though it is only tuned into one channel, that, in a similar way, all the heavens and hells in the cosmos are right here right now and that vajrayana and tantra and various raja, kundalini, and kriya yogas–including psychedelics–sort of change the channel in terms of what our brains tune in to? Sometimes the fickle raja yoga of eating mushrooms launches you up into the higher astral cosmos–and othertimes you only get enough lift to launch into the lower psychesphere and you don’t have the velocity to escape the pull of…of purgatory?

Is that what the mantises are? Are they demons from the lower astral planes working out their evil karma by controlling, subduing, manipulating, and destroying each other with prana–with the psychic, intentional, etheric equivalant of sound waves?

“They could read my mind and could control my body and my emotions with sound waves. They could, with their voice boxes, instantaneously cause limb paralysis, anxiety, sexual arousal, feelings of being in the presence of the divine, or total existential terror simply by uttering the correct vibration, as though my whole bodymind were nothing more than a kazoo in the hands of master flautists.”

Was I in purgatory…or… hell? Creepy.

These reptiles people talk about…and the insectoids. Are they demons? Are aliens and demons and angels and fairies all similar beings….are they “astral beings”–beings from the here and now, but from other channels, other frequencies?

My head is spinning. It’s just crazy at this point…all the confluences. Huxley. Leary. McKenna. USWs. And now Yogananda? And the Burning Man thing? Some weird ass Mothman shit going on, I tell you.

*Some clarification from Yogananda:
Sri Yukteswar used the word prana; I have translated it as lifetrons. The Hindu scriptures refer not only to the anu, “atom,” and to the paramanu, “beyond the atom,” finer electronic energies; but also to prana, “creative lifetronic force.” Atoms and electrons are blind forces; prana is inherently intelligent….mantra…chanted seed-sounds discharged by the mental gun of concentration. The Puranas (ancient shastras or treatises) describe these mantric wars between devas and asuras (gods and demons). An asura once tried to slay a deva with a [mantra]. But due to mispronunciation the mental bomb acted as a boomerang and killed the demon.

I have reverted back to Yukteswar’s phraseology. I think “pranic weapon” is truer to what Yogananda was trying to communicate than “lifetronic bomb.” He was trying too hard to comunicate in English concepts. If anything, “psychic ray” would be a better metaphor as it accounts for the intentional and directional nature of pranic weaponry. “Bomb” is too connotative of sloppy, indiscriminite destruction. And the whole notion of “lifetrons” was just Yogananda’s way of stressing the objective (UR) reality of these subtle energies. But I think emphasizing the intentional (UL) origin of these rays/waves is more important. Prana travels across the psychic networks connecting one conscious being to another, both beings existing in a greater field of shared consciousnes, what Alex Grey calls a “mind lattice.”

And if the notion of gods and demons fighting with words seems silly because…I mean sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me, therefore they really shouldn’t hurt demons and GODS…we need to remember that, as Ram Dass says, “Sanskrit is a conscious language–that is, the VIBRATIONAL SOUND of each word is supposed to do something to your NERVOUS SYSTEM.” So it’s not the “concept” portion of the mantra that is the primary source of power. It’s not the “signified” for all of you Philosophy dorks; it’s the “signifier,” itself; it’s the spoken sound that has the power. So while words–in terms of concepts–may never hurt your body (certainly concepts can hurt our egos, our conceptual selves, which in turn could obviously have psychosomatic reprecussions on the body), vibrations absolutely can hurt your body directly. Cases in point: tsunamis, earth-quakes, and Gamma Rays.
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LuminousNo Gravatar
November 19th, 2009 on 1:59 pm

I have to say one more thing about all of this. I have had some weird-ass roomates in Los Angeles and up North in Humboldt County. I had a roomate who claimed to have killed someone once. I had a roomate who was literally the international spokesperson for “Furries”–people who dress up in furry mascot uniforms and then give each other hand jobs. But my weirdest roomate was a schizophrenic. On the second night that he lived in my house, he heard the voices of extraterrestrials telling him to do terrible things. In order to stop their voices, he took a rock that a caveman might have used as an axe and he smashed the sharp end into his third eye as hard as he could. Luckily, a local policeman found him in the park before he bled to death. He walked right up to the policeman and said, “I am the archangel…and I don’t want to hurt anybody.” Now, here is my question: is schizophrenia what happens when your brain/mind complex tunes into frequencies that it’s…not supposed to? Was this roomate, in some sense, possessed? Was he tuned into a channel where dark, fallen, demonic beings of the lower astral channels were able to communicate with him? I mean, I think we’re jumping the gun if we conclude that the beings he heard were non-existant simply because the right medications (lithium and so on) prohibit him from hearing them. If I drank wood alcohol and went blind, that wouldn’t mean that the ugliness of the world had merely been a figment of my imagination all along, now would it? There is this interesting argument concerning psychedelics. What are they? What do they do? Some people call them “hallucinogens.” But others argue that that’s not quite right. They don’t really make you hallucinate, per se. Other people call them “entheogens” because they reveal your own inner divinity. Others, like Terrence McKenna, think that’s white-washing it just a bit considering the vast diversity of possible psychedelic experiences. Stan Grof, who just came out with a book called “LSD: Gateway to the Numinous” calls psychedelics “holotropic” because they turn us or move us toward wholeness. Some still call them “psychomimetics.” That’s how they were known a while back–because it was thought that they mimic psychoses. Now, I think it’s only fair to admit that at least some of the time, in at least some people, psychedelics do in fact mimic or trigger psychotic episodes. But that brings us back to square one: What are psychotic episodes? Whatever they are, they are related to the brain. But all of experiential reality is related to the brain! Just because there are neurological corrolaries for various altered state experiences, including entity experiences, that in no way rules out the possibility of there also being non-neurological (externally extant, objectively real) corrolaries, such as…well, such as aliens, ghosts, and demons. Fucked-up thought, huh?
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Noia
November 20th, 2009 on 9:18 pm

Some related thoughts from Gloria Feman Orenstein:

“Shamanism teaches us that everything has a spirit and that via a variety of shamanic practices, humans can make contact with the spirits of the…dead…Over time, one can begin to see the shape of the agency of other-worldly spirits upon events in this world…Through the spiritual journey, Shamans pick up vital information from other realms, in much the same way that we get our news from abroad via satellite and TV.”

That seems to echo what you were saying about being tuned into different channels and about the dead existing on other frequencies.

And some thoughts from Mircea Eliade:

“The shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to…descend to the underworld…It will easily be seen wherein a shaman differs from a ‘possessed’ person, for example; the shaman controls his ‘spirits,’ in the sense that he, being a human, is able to communicate with the dead, [with] “demons”…without thereby becoming their instrument…Psychopaths or not…shamans are expected to pass through certain initiatory ordeals, and to receive an education that…transforms the candidate from a possible neurotic into a shaman recognized by his particular society…And recognition as a shaman is bestowed only by the whole community and only after the aspirant has undergone the initiatory ordeal.”

So maybe your friend who is “neurotic” or “psychotic” is definitely “possessed.” But maybe he is just a shaman who didn’t receive the appropriate education and initiation from his culture. =)
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anothershamusNo Gravatar
November 20th, 2009 on 11:07 pm

I was dosed on the playa with some mescaline (I think) and I was really tripping through the playa and I saw the “MAN” for what he was, an alien mantis overlord! It was very non threatening and somewhat comforting.
Viva la Burn!

A.Shamus
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LuminousNo Gravatar
November 21st, 2009 on 1:41 pm

No way! Crazy! I’m telling you. There is some weird burning man/mantis connection. I’m glad I’m not the only one who realizes this. But in what way is a MANTIS OVERLORD comforting or nonthreatening?!?!? The Man-tis used his pranic mind-control rays on you. That’s the only explanation. =P
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M
November 21st, 2009 on 6:26 pm

Hey so here’s a potentially interesting synchronicity for you. I just read all the stuff on this page before watching the movie “Funky Forest” which I had no idea what it was but it got recommended to me. And in the movie there is a passing reference to a mantis, a guy in a furry costume who get a “hand job”, and the use of sound as a weapon for mind control. Not sure what that means, just passing it along.
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OmnivibeNo Gravatar
November 22nd, 2009 on 3:32 am

You wrote:

“Was he tuned into a channel where dark, fallen, demonic beings of the lower ast