Re-Evolution
by Terence McKenna
Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently Western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn't going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendance, is confirmed, it's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of the universe, and the evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future, this is what shamanism is always been about, a shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's someone who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded language, into the domain of what Wittgenstein called "the unspeakable," the transcendental presense of the other, which can be absanctioned, in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can be brought back into ordinary social space for the good of the community, so in the context of ninety percent of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery I believe, and what shamans are, I believe, are people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on. Shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world. The planet has a kind of intelligence, that it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind, I mean I think it's fairly profound, it's fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept.
If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
The emphasis in house music and rave culture on physiologically compatible rhythms and this sort of thing is really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, that sound, properly understood, especially percussive sound, can actually change neurological states, and large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community of bonding that hopefully will be strong enough that it can carry the vision out into the mainstream of society. I think that the youth culture that is emerging in the nineties is an end of the millenium culture that is actually summing up Western civilization and pointing us in an entirely different direction, that we're going to arrive in the third millenium, in the middle of an archaic revival, which will mean a revival of these physiologically empowering rhythm signatures, a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature, to feminism, to ego. All of these things are taking hold, and not a moment too soon.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
An inherently perfect universe...
Precepts and Environment
Dharma Discourse by Abbot John Daido Loori, M.R.O.
Imagine, if you will, a universe in which all things have a mutual identity. They all have a codependent origination: when one thing arises, all things arise simultaneously. And everything has a mutual causality: what happens to one thing happens to the entire universe. Imagine a universe that is a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism - a universe in which all the parts and the totality are a single entity, all of the pieces and the whole thing at once, one thing. This description of reality is not a holistic hypothesis or an all-encompassing idealistic dream. It is your life and my life. The life of the mountain and the life of the river. The life of a blade of grass, a spider web, the Brooklyn Bridge. These things are not related to each other. They're not part of the same thing. They're not similar. Rather, they are identical to each other in every respect. But the way we live our lives is as if that were not so. We live our lives in a way that separates the pieces, alienates and hurts.
The Buddhist Precepts are a teaching on how to live our lives in harmony with the facts described above. When we look at the Precepts, we normally think of them in terms of people. Indeed, most of the moral and ethical teachings of the great religions address relationships among people. But these Precepts do not exclusively pertain to the human realm. They are talking about the whole universe and we need to see them from that perspective if we are to benefit from what they have to offer, and begin healing the rift between ourselves and the universe.
First among the sixteen Precepts are the Three Treasures. We take refuge in the Three Treasures - the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Understood from three different perspectives, the Three Treasures present different virtues. The first perspective is called the One-Bodied Three Treasures. The second is called the Realized Three Treasures, and the third is called the Maintained Three Treasures.
From the perspective of the One-Bodied Three Treasures, anuttara-samyaksambodhi, supreme enlightenment, is the Buddha Treasure. Being pure, genuine, apart from the dust is the Dharma Treasure. The reason it is apart from the dust is that it is the dust. That is what the virtue of purity is about. There is nothing outside of it. The merits of harmony are the Sangha Treasure. Together, these are the One-Bodied Three Treasures. To realize and actualize Bodhi or enlightenment is the Buddha Treasure of the Realized Three Treasures. The realization of Buddha is the Dharma Treasure, and to penetrate into the Buddhadharma is the Sangha Treasure. These are the Realized Three Treasures. Among the Maintained Three Treasures, their manifestation in the world, guiding the heavens and guiding people, sometimes appearing in vast emptiness, sometimes appearing in dust, is the Buddha Treasure. Sometimes revolving sutras and sometimes revolving the oceanic storehouse, guiding inanimate things and guiding animate things, is the Dharma Treasure. And freed from all suffering and liberated from the house of the Three Worlds is called the Sangha Treasure. This is what we take refuge in. These Three Treasures are the universe itself. They are the totality of the environment and oneself.
Next are the Three Pure Precepts. The first of the Three Pure Precepts is not creating evil. This is based on the assumption that there is an inherent purity and goodness in the universe. Actually, there is neither goodness nor badness, neither good nor evil. These polarities don't exist until we create them. This precept is saying that not creating evil is the abiding place of all Buddhas, the source of all Buddhas. The second of the Three Pure Precepts is practicing good. Not to create evil means not to get involved in any activity that is going to give rise to evil. Although from the absolute perspective, there is neither good nor evil, every activity is going to create some consequence in the world of phenomena. The minute there is action, either good or evil comes up. So, do not let evil come up, but rather practice good. This is the Dharma of samyaksambodhi, the way of all beings. The third of the Three Pure Precepts is actualizing good for others. This is to transcend the profane and go beyond the holy, to liberate oneself and others. The Three Pure Precepts are a definition of harmony in an inherently perfect universe, a universe that is totally interpenetrated, codependent, and mutually arising. But the question is, how do we accomplish that perfection?
The Ten Grave Precepts point that out. Looking at the Ten Grave Precepts in terms of how we relate to our environment is a step in the direction of appreciating the continuous, subtle and vital role we play in the well-being of this planet - a beginning of taking responsibility for the whole catastrophe.
The First Grave Precept is affirm life - do not kill. What does it mean to kill the environment? It's the worst kind of killing. We are decimating many species. There is no way that these life forms can ever return to the earth. The vacuum their absence creates cannot be filled in any other way, and such a vacuum affects everything else in the ecosystem, no matter how infinitesimally small it is. We are losing species by the thousands every year - the last of their kind on the face of this great Earth. And because someone in South America is doing it, that doesn't mean we're not responsible. We're as responsible as if we are the one who clubs an infant seal or burns a hectare of tropical forest. It is as if we were squeezing the life out of ourselves. Killing the lakes with acid rain. Dumping chemicals into the rivers so that they cannot support any life. Polluting our skies so our children choke on the air they breath. Life is nonkilling. The seed of the Buddha grows continuously. Maintain the wisdom life of Buddha and do not kill life.
The Second Grave Precept is be giving - do not steal. Do not steal means not to rape the Earth. To take away from the insentient is stealing. The mountain suffers when you clear-cut it. Clear cutting is stealing the habitat of the animals that live on the mountain. When we over-cut, streams become congested with the sediments that wash off the mountain slopes. This is stealing the life of the fish that live in the river, of the birds that come to feed on the fish, of the mammals that come to feed on the birds. Be giving, do not steal. The mind and externals are just thus, the gate of liberation is open.
The Third Grave Precept is honor the body - do not misuse sexuality. Honor the body of Nature. When we begin to interfere with the natural order of things, when we begin to engineer the genetics of viruses and bacteria, plants and animals, we throw the whole ecological balance off. Our technological meddling affects the totality of the universe and there are karmic consequences to that. The three wheels: body, mind and mouth; greed, anger and ignorance are pure and clean. Nothing is desired. Go the same way as the Buddha, do not misuse sexuality.
The Fourth Grave Precept is manifest truth - do not lie. One of the very common kinds of lying that is popular these days is called green-washing. Green-washing is like whitewashing - it pretends to be ecologically sound and politically correct. You hear Monsanto Chemical Company tell us how wonderful they are and how sensitive they are to the environment. Exxon tells us the same thing. The plastic manufacturers tell us the same thing. Part of what they are saying is true. You couldn't have a special pump for failing hearts without plastic. You couldn't have an oxygen tent without plastic. Sure, fine, thank you. But stop making plastic cups and plates that t are not biodegradable and are filling up the dumps. Another kind of lying is the lying that we do to ourselves about our own actions. We go off into the woods, and rather than take the pains to haul out the non-biodegradable stuff that we haul in, we hide it. We sink the beer cans, bury the cellophane wrappings under a root. We know we have done it, but we act as though it didn't happen. Gain the essence and realize the truth. Manifest it and do not lie.
The Fifth Grave Precept is proceed clearly - do not cloud the mind. Do not cloud the mind with greed, do not cloud the mind with denial. It is greed that is one of the major underlying causes of pollution. We can solve all the problems. We have all the resources to do it. We can deal with our garbage, we can deal with world hunger, we can deal with the pollution that comes out of the smokestacks. We have the technology to do it, but it is going to cost a lot of money, which means that there will be less profit. I f there is less profit, people will have to make do with a little bit less, and our greed won't let us do that. Proceed clearly, do not cloud the mind with greed.
The Sixth Grave Precept is see the perfection - do not speak of others errors and faults. For years we have manicured nature because in our opinion nature didn't know how to do things. That manicuring continues right here, on the shores of our river. We have concluded that the river is wrong. It erodes the banks and floods the lowlands. It needs to be controlled. So, we take all the curves out of it, line the banks with stone, and turn it into a pipeline. This effectively removes all the protective space that the water birds use to reproduce in, and the places where the fish go to find shelter when the water rises. Then the first time there is a spring storm the ducks' eggs and the fish wash downstream into the Ashokan Reservoir and the river is left barren. Or we think there are too many deer, so we perform controlled genocide. Or the wolves kill all the livestock, so we kill the wolves. Every time we get rid of one of species we create an incomprehensible impact and traumatize the whole environment. The scenario changes and we come up with another solution. We call this process wildlife management. What is this notion of wildlife management? See the perfection, do not speak of nature's errors and faults.
The Seventh Grave Precept is realize self and other as one - do not elevate the self and put down others. Do not elevate the self and put down nature. We hold a human-centered notion of the nature of the universe and the nature of the environment. We believe God put us in charge, and we live out that belief. The Bible confirms that for us. We live as though the universe were spinning around us with man at the center of the whole picture. We are convinced that the multitude of things are there to serve us, and so we take without any sense of giving. That is elevating the self and putting down nature. In this universe, where everything is interpenetrated, codependent and mutually arising, nothing stands out above anything else. We are inextricably linked and nobody is in charge. The universe is self-maintaining. Buddhas and ancestors realize the absolute emptiness and realize the great earth. When the great body is manifested there is neither inside or outside. When the Dharma body is manifested there is not even a single square inch of earth on which to stand. It swallows it. Realize self and other as one. Do not elevate the self and put down nature.
The Eighth Grave Precept is give generously - do not be withholding. We should understand that giving and receiving are one. If we really need something from nature, we should vow to return something to nature. We are dependent on nature, no question about it. But there is a difference between recognizing dependency and entering it consciously and gratefully, and being greedy. Native Americans lived amidst the plenty of nature for thousands of years. They fed on the buffalo when they needed that type of sustenance. We nearly brought that species to extinction in two short decades. It wasn't for food. Tens of thousands of carcasses rotted while we took the skins. It is the same with our relationship to elephants, seals, alligators, and countless others. Our killing has nothing to do with survival. It has nothing to do with need. It has to do with greed. Give generously, do not be withholding.
The Ninth Grave Precept is actualize harmony - do not be angry. Assertive, pointed action can be free of anger. We can fence the deer out of our garden and prevent them from eating our vegetables without hating the deer. Also, by simply being patient and observing the natural cycles we can avoid unnecessary headaches and emotional outbreaks. Usually we will discover that the things we think get in the way are really not in the way. When the gypsy moths descended in swarms one year and ate all the leaves off the trees so that in the middle of June the mountain looked like it was late fall, the local community got hysterical. We made an all-out attack. Planes came daily and sprayed the slopes with chemicals. People put tar on the bases of trees to trap the caterpillars. The gypsy moths simply climbed up, got stuck in the tar and piled up so others could crawl across the backs of the dead ones and went up the trees to do what they needed to do. Amidst all of these disasters, with the leaves gone and the shrubbery out of the shade, the mountain laurel bloomed like it had never bloomed before. I had no idea we had so much mountain laurel on this mountain. However, the gypsy moths definitely damaged the trees. The weak trees died. By the time July came around, there were new leaves on the trees, and the mountain was green again. But the anger and the hate we felt during those spring months was debilitating and amazing. The air was filled with it.
In another incident, the fellow who owned the house that is now the monastery abbacy had beavers on his property. They were eating up his trees so he decided to exterminate them. A neighbor told him that they were protected, so he called the DEC. The rangers trapped and removed the animals. When we moved into the house, however, a pair of beavers showed up and immediately started taking down the trees again. In fact, they chomped down a beautiful weeping willow that my students presented to me as a gift. I was supposed to sit under it in my old age, but now it was stuck in a beaver dam, blocking up the stream. With the stream dammed, the water rose and the pond filled with fish. With the abundance of fish, ducks arrived. That brought in the fox and the osprey. Suddenly the whole environment came alive because of those two beavers. Of course, they didn't stay too long because we didn't have that much wood, so after two seasons they moved on. Nobody was taking care of the dam. The water leaked out and the pond disappeared. It will be like that until the trees grow back and the next pair of beavers arrive. If we can just keep our fingers out of it and let things unfold, nature knows how to maintain itself. It creates itself and defines itself, as does the universe. And, by the way, the weeping willow came back, sprouted again right from the stump. It leans over the pond watching me go through my cycles these days.
The Tenth Grave Precept is experience the intimacy of things - do not defile the Three Treasures. To defile is to separate. The Three Treasures is this body and the body of the universe, and when we separate ourselves from ourselves, and from the universe, we defile the Three Treasures.
To practice the Precepts is to be in harmony with your life and the universe. To practice the Precepts means to be conscious of what they are about - not just on the surface, but on many levels, plummeting the depths of the Precepts. It means being deeply honest with yourself. When you become aware you have drifted away from the Precepts just acknowledge that fact. That acknowledgment means to take responsibility for your life; taking responsibility plays a key role in our practice. If you don't practice taking responsibility you are not practicing. It is as simple as that. There is nobody checking when you are doing zazen whether you're letting go of your thoughts or sticking with them. It has to do with your own honesty and integrity. Only you know what you are doing with your mind. It is the same with the Precepts. Only you know when you have actually violated a precept. And only you can be at one with that violation, can atone. To be at one with it means to take responsibility. To take responsibility means to acknowledge yourself as the master of your life. To take responsibility empowers you to do something about whatever it is that's hindering you. As long as we blame, as long as we avoid or deny, we are removed from the realm of possibility and power to do something about our lives. We become totally dependent upon the ups and downs that we create around us. There is no reason that we should be subjected to anything when we have the power to see that we create and we destroy all things. To acknowledge that simple fact is to take possession of the Precepts. It is to make the Precepts your own. It is to give life to the Buddha, this great earth, and the universe itself.
Dharma Discourse by Abbot John Daido Loori, M.R.O.
Imagine, if you will, a universe in which all things have a mutual identity. They all have a codependent origination: when one thing arises, all things arise simultaneously. And everything has a mutual causality: what happens to one thing happens to the entire universe. Imagine a universe that is a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism - a universe in which all the parts and the totality are a single entity, all of the pieces and the whole thing at once, one thing. This description of reality is not a holistic hypothesis or an all-encompassing idealistic dream. It is your life and my life. The life of the mountain and the life of the river. The life of a blade of grass, a spider web, the Brooklyn Bridge. These things are not related to each other. They're not part of the same thing. They're not similar. Rather, they are identical to each other in every respect. But the way we live our lives is as if that were not so. We live our lives in a way that separates the pieces, alienates and hurts.
The Buddhist Precepts are a teaching on how to live our lives in harmony with the facts described above. When we look at the Precepts, we normally think of them in terms of people. Indeed, most of the moral and ethical teachings of the great religions address relationships among people. But these Precepts do not exclusively pertain to the human realm. They are talking about the whole universe and we need to see them from that perspective if we are to benefit from what they have to offer, and begin healing the rift between ourselves and the universe.
First among the sixteen Precepts are the Three Treasures. We take refuge in the Three Treasures - the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Understood from three different perspectives, the Three Treasures present different virtues. The first perspective is called the One-Bodied Three Treasures. The second is called the Realized Three Treasures, and the third is called the Maintained Three Treasures.
From the perspective of the One-Bodied Three Treasures, anuttara-samyaksambodhi, supreme enlightenment, is the Buddha Treasure. Being pure, genuine, apart from the dust is the Dharma Treasure. The reason it is apart from the dust is that it is the dust. That is what the virtue of purity is about. There is nothing outside of it. The merits of harmony are the Sangha Treasure. Together, these are the One-Bodied Three Treasures. To realize and actualize Bodhi or enlightenment is the Buddha Treasure of the Realized Three Treasures. The realization of Buddha is the Dharma Treasure, and to penetrate into the Buddhadharma is the Sangha Treasure. These are the Realized Three Treasures. Among the Maintained Three Treasures, their manifestation in the world, guiding the heavens and guiding people, sometimes appearing in vast emptiness, sometimes appearing in dust, is the Buddha Treasure. Sometimes revolving sutras and sometimes revolving the oceanic storehouse, guiding inanimate things and guiding animate things, is the Dharma Treasure. And freed from all suffering and liberated from the house of the Three Worlds is called the Sangha Treasure. This is what we take refuge in. These Three Treasures are the universe itself. They are the totality of the environment and oneself.
Next are the Three Pure Precepts. The first of the Three Pure Precepts is not creating evil. This is based on the assumption that there is an inherent purity and goodness in the universe. Actually, there is neither goodness nor badness, neither good nor evil. These polarities don't exist until we create them. This precept is saying that not creating evil is the abiding place of all Buddhas, the source of all Buddhas. The second of the Three Pure Precepts is practicing good. Not to create evil means not to get involved in any activity that is going to give rise to evil. Although from the absolute perspective, there is neither good nor evil, every activity is going to create some consequence in the world of phenomena. The minute there is action, either good or evil comes up. So, do not let evil come up, but rather practice good. This is the Dharma of samyaksambodhi, the way of all beings. The third of the Three Pure Precepts is actualizing good for others. This is to transcend the profane and go beyond the holy, to liberate oneself and others. The Three Pure Precepts are a definition of harmony in an inherently perfect universe, a universe that is totally interpenetrated, codependent, and mutually arising. But the question is, how do we accomplish that perfection?
The Ten Grave Precepts point that out. Looking at the Ten Grave Precepts in terms of how we relate to our environment is a step in the direction of appreciating the continuous, subtle and vital role we play in the well-being of this planet - a beginning of taking responsibility for the whole catastrophe.
The First Grave Precept is affirm life - do not kill. What does it mean to kill the environment? It's the worst kind of killing. We are decimating many species. There is no way that these life forms can ever return to the earth. The vacuum their absence creates cannot be filled in any other way, and such a vacuum affects everything else in the ecosystem, no matter how infinitesimally small it is. We are losing species by the thousands every year - the last of their kind on the face of this great Earth. And because someone in South America is doing it, that doesn't mean we're not responsible. We're as responsible as if we are the one who clubs an infant seal or burns a hectare of tropical forest. It is as if we were squeezing the life out of ourselves. Killing the lakes with acid rain. Dumping chemicals into the rivers so that they cannot support any life. Polluting our skies so our children choke on the air they breath. Life is nonkilling. The seed of the Buddha grows continuously. Maintain the wisdom life of Buddha and do not kill life.
The Second Grave Precept is be giving - do not steal. Do not steal means not to rape the Earth. To take away from the insentient is stealing. The mountain suffers when you clear-cut it. Clear cutting is stealing the habitat of the animals that live on the mountain. When we over-cut, streams become congested with the sediments that wash off the mountain slopes. This is stealing the life of the fish that live in the river, of the birds that come to feed on the fish, of the mammals that come to feed on the birds. Be giving, do not steal. The mind and externals are just thus, the gate of liberation is open.
The Third Grave Precept is honor the body - do not misuse sexuality. Honor the body of Nature. When we begin to interfere with the natural order of things, when we begin to engineer the genetics of viruses and bacteria, plants and animals, we throw the whole ecological balance off. Our technological meddling affects the totality of the universe and there are karmic consequences to that. The three wheels: body, mind and mouth; greed, anger and ignorance are pure and clean. Nothing is desired. Go the same way as the Buddha, do not misuse sexuality.
The Fourth Grave Precept is manifest truth - do not lie. One of the very common kinds of lying that is popular these days is called green-washing. Green-washing is like whitewashing - it pretends to be ecologically sound and politically correct. You hear Monsanto Chemical Company tell us how wonderful they are and how sensitive they are to the environment. Exxon tells us the same thing. The plastic manufacturers tell us the same thing. Part of what they are saying is true. You couldn't have a special pump for failing hearts without plastic. You couldn't have an oxygen tent without plastic. Sure, fine, thank you. But stop making plastic cups and plates that t are not biodegradable and are filling up the dumps. Another kind of lying is the lying that we do to ourselves about our own actions. We go off into the woods, and rather than take the pains to haul out the non-biodegradable stuff that we haul in, we hide it. We sink the beer cans, bury the cellophane wrappings under a root. We know we have done it, but we act as though it didn't happen. Gain the essence and realize the truth. Manifest it and do not lie.
The Fifth Grave Precept is proceed clearly - do not cloud the mind. Do not cloud the mind with greed, do not cloud the mind with denial. It is greed that is one of the major underlying causes of pollution. We can solve all the problems. We have all the resources to do it. We can deal with our garbage, we can deal with world hunger, we can deal with the pollution that comes out of the smokestacks. We have the technology to do it, but it is going to cost a lot of money, which means that there will be less profit. I f there is less profit, people will have to make do with a little bit less, and our greed won't let us do that. Proceed clearly, do not cloud the mind with greed.
The Sixth Grave Precept is see the perfection - do not speak of others errors and faults. For years we have manicured nature because in our opinion nature didn't know how to do things. That manicuring continues right here, on the shores of our river. We have concluded that the river is wrong. It erodes the banks and floods the lowlands. It needs to be controlled. So, we take all the curves out of it, line the banks with stone, and turn it into a pipeline. This effectively removes all the protective space that the water birds use to reproduce in, and the places where the fish go to find shelter when the water rises. Then the first time there is a spring storm the ducks' eggs and the fish wash downstream into the Ashokan Reservoir and the river is left barren. Or we think there are too many deer, so we perform controlled genocide. Or the wolves kill all the livestock, so we kill the wolves. Every time we get rid of one of species we create an incomprehensible impact and traumatize the whole environment. The scenario changes and we come up with another solution. We call this process wildlife management. What is this notion of wildlife management? See the perfection, do not speak of nature's errors and faults.
The Seventh Grave Precept is realize self and other as one - do not elevate the self and put down others. Do not elevate the self and put down nature. We hold a human-centered notion of the nature of the universe and the nature of the environment. We believe God put us in charge, and we live out that belief. The Bible confirms that for us. We live as though the universe were spinning around us with man at the center of the whole picture. We are convinced that the multitude of things are there to serve us, and so we take without any sense of giving. That is elevating the self and putting down nature. In this universe, where everything is interpenetrated, codependent and mutually arising, nothing stands out above anything else. We are inextricably linked and nobody is in charge. The universe is self-maintaining. Buddhas and ancestors realize the absolute emptiness and realize the great earth. When the great body is manifested there is neither inside or outside. When the Dharma body is manifested there is not even a single square inch of earth on which to stand. It swallows it. Realize self and other as one. Do not elevate the self and put down nature.
The Eighth Grave Precept is give generously - do not be withholding. We should understand that giving and receiving are one. If we really need something from nature, we should vow to return something to nature. We are dependent on nature, no question about it. But there is a difference between recognizing dependency and entering it consciously and gratefully, and being greedy. Native Americans lived amidst the plenty of nature for thousands of years. They fed on the buffalo when they needed that type of sustenance. We nearly brought that species to extinction in two short decades. It wasn't for food. Tens of thousands of carcasses rotted while we took the skins. It is the same with our relationship to elephants, seals, alligators, and countless others. Our killing has nothing to do with survival. It has nothing to do with need. It has to do with greed. Give generously, do not be withholding.
The Ninth Grave Precept is actualize harmony - do not be angry. Assertive, pointed action can be free of anger. We can fence the deer out of our garden and prevent them from eating our vegetables without hating the deer. Also, by simply being patient and observing the natural cycles we can avoid unnecessary headaches and emotional outbreaks. Usually we will discover that the things we think get in the way are really not in the way. When the gypsy moths descended in swarms one year and ate all the leaves off the trees so that in the middle of June the mountain looked like it was late fall, the local community got hysterical. We made an all-out attack. Planes came daily and sprayed the slopes with chemicals. People put tar on the bases of trees to trap the caterpillars. The gypsy moths simply climbed up, got stuck in the tar and piled up so others could crawl across the backs of the dead ones and went up the trees to do what they needed to do. Amidst all of these disasters, with the leaves gone and the shrubbery out of the shade, the mountain laurel bloomed like it had never bloomed before. I had no idea we had so much mountain laurel on this mountain. However, the gypsy moths definitely damaged the trees. The weak trees died. By the time July came around, there were new leaves on the trees, and the mountain was green again. But the anger and the hate we felt during those spring months was debilitating and amazing. The air was filled with it.
In another incident, the fellow who owned the house that is now the monastery abbacy had beavers on his property. They were eating up his trees so he decided to exterminate them. A neighbor told him that they were protected, so he called the DEC. The rangers trapped and removed the animals. When we moved into the house, however, a pair of beavers showed up and immediately started taking down the trees again. In fact, they chomped down a beautiful weeping willow that my students presented to me as a gift. I was supposed to sit under it in my old age, but now it was stuck in a beaver dam, blocking up the stream. With the stream dammed, the water rose and the pond filled with fish. With the abundance of fish, ducks arrived. That brought in the fox and the osprey. Suddenly the whole environment came alive because of those two beavers. Of course, they didn't stay too long because we didn't have that much wood, so after two seasons they moved on. Nobody was taking care of the dam. The water leaked out and the pond disappeared. It will be like that until the trees grow back and the next pair of beavers arrive. If we can just keep our fingers out of it and let things unfold, nature knows how to maintain itself. It creates itself and defines itself, as does the universe. And, by the way, the weeping willow came back, sprouted again right from the stump. It leans over the pond watching me go through my cycles these days.
The Tenth Grave Precept is experience the intimacy of things - do not defile the Three Treasures. To defile is to separate. The Three Treasures is this body and the body of the universe, and when we separate ourselves from ourselves, and from the universe, we defile the Three Treasures.
To practice the Precepts is to be in harmony with your life and the universe. To practice the Precepts means to be conscious of what they are about - not just on the surface, but on many levels, plummeting the depths of the Precepts. It means being deeply honest with yourself. When you become aware you have drifted away from the Precepts just acknowledge that fact. That acknowledgment means to take responsibility for your life; taking responsibility plays a key role in our practice. If you don't practice taking responsibility you are not practicing. It is as simple as that. There is nobody checking when you are doing zazen whether you're letting go of your thoughts or sticking with them. It has to do with your own honesty and integrity. Only you know what you are doing with your mind. It is the same with the Precepts. Only you know when you have actually violated a precept. And only you can be at one with that violation, can atone. To be at one with it means to take responsibility. To take responsibility means to acknowledge yourself as the master of your life. To take responsibility empowers you to do something about whatever it is that's hindering you. As long as we blame, as long as we avoid or deny, we are removed from the realm of possibility and power to do something about our lives. We become totally dependent upon the ups and downs that we create around us. There is no reason that we should be subjected to anything when we have the power to see that we create and we destroy all things. To acknowledge that simple fact is to take possession of the Precepts. It is to make the Precepts your own. It is to give life to the Buddha, this great earth, and the universe itself.
This contamination poses serious threats...to a Sami cultural identity
Chernobyl Fallout: A Hard Rain for the Sami
By Stephens, Sharon
Issue 11.2
June 30, 1987
At the end of April 1986, Swedish nuclear power authorities noted unusually high rates of radiation in routine measurements at a plant north of Sweden. They initially feared that a nuclear accident had occurred in one of Sweden's own 12 nuclear power stations. It was several days later when they learned that they had actually measured fallout from the nuclear fire and explosion at Chernobyl that for more than a week spewed streams of radioactive material into the atmosphere above the Soviet Union, across eastern Europe and into western and northern Europe.
Scandinavia's indigenous minority, the Sami (also known as Lapps), has been particularly hard hit by Chernobyl fallout, resulting in the long-term radioactive contamination of large areas of Sami reindeer-herding pastureland. This contamination poses serious threats not only to the health and economic well-being of Sami people, but to their political strength and to a Sami cultural identity bound by material and symbolic connections between humans and reindeer.
The Sami case makes painfully clear that in trying to assess the effects of a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl, we are confronted not only with technical problems of measuring radioactivity levels, charting fallout patterns, and assessing risk factors, but also with the need to understand the interrelated global, national, regional and local community contexts - much too briefly suggested here. Even those Sami least affected by the fallout itself are affected by changing relations between a Sami minority and Scandinavian welfare state bureaucracies, by tensions and misunderstandings between Sami groups with very different experiences of radioactivity, by long-term threats to a Sami reindeer economy increasingly dependent on an outside market. It is only on the basis of a many-leveled understanding of complex threats to Sami people in the aftermath of Chernobyl that we can begin to consider practical attempts to counter both immediate and long-term dangers.
The Radioactive Fallout Situation
While direct contact with contaminated air last spring was not seen as posing immediate dangers to human health, the concentration of radioactivity in plants and animals that feed on them posed serious problems of widespread contamination of food - milk, sheep and cows, fish, wild game, berries and especially reindeer. Lichen, the main reindeer grazing food, is a biologically remarkable "radioactive sponge." With no underground root system, it must take all its nutrients from the air and thus incorporates airborne contamination to a much greater degree than other vegetation. The absorption of the major Chernobyl pollutant, cesium 137 (with a half-life of 30 years), by the slow-growing northern lichen has meant serious long-term contamination of many northern Scandinavian pasturelands and of the deer grazing them. In some areas, deer are many times more radioactive than is considered safe for domestic consumption or is legally allowable for market sale. Scientists express a cautious hope that in the most contaminated areas of central Sweden and Norway radioactivity levels will drop to "safe" levels in 20 to 30 years.
A bequerel is a new unit of radioactive measurement, representing one nuclear disintegration per second. In November, the Swedish government radioactivity level for salable foodstuffs was 300 bequerels/kilo, while the Norwegian limit was set at a much higher 6,000 bqs/kilo. These differences are important, but they appear less striking in comparison to contamination levels in the hardest hit areas of central Sweden and Norway. In November, deer radioactivity north of Snasa, Norway, averaged about 70,000 bq/kilo, with a few deer as high as 137,000 bq/kilo. Contamination levels gradually decrease to the north. Deer from the Vilhelmina area in northern Sweden averaged 12,000 bq/kilo after November slaughters. During the same period over two-thirds of deer slaughtered in Kautokeino, Norway, were under the 6,000 bq/kilo limit and could be sold. Reindeer pastures in Finland were affected only very slightly by Chernobyl fallout and there are no restrictions on the sale of Finnish deer.
There is little scientific agreement about potential long-term dangers to Sami health drinking contaminated water and eating contaminated foods. There is already some - much debated - evidence of increased incidence of leukemia and stomach cancer among Sami as a result of eating radioactive deer meat, contaminated in the 1960s from atmospheric nuclear testing in the Soviet Union. Reindeer radio-activity levels from this period were at the low end of the current radiation spectrum - about 4,000-5,000 bq/kilo. Analysts stress, however, the extreme difficulty of isolating dietary risk factors from other "lifestyle risks," especially in a population as small as the Sami's (generally estimated to be between 70,000 and 100,000).
The crucial point here is that there is neither any agreed-upon "safe" level of radioactive exposure nor any consensus on potential health dangers. The uncertainty of "risk assessments" on the basis of partial and conflicting information has beset Sami from the first harrowing weeks last summer when news of extensive Chernobyl contamination first appeared. Sami homes were inundated with a flood of contamination of pastures and reindeer, and various scientific and government guidelines for responding to the disaster. There were newspaper articles, television and radio programs with widely varying information about "safe" levels of radioactive consumption, usually scaled down for pregnant women and children.
Some families kept three separate food compartments in their freezer sheds - relatively uncontaminated reindeer meat bought from outside for the children, moderately contaminated meat for the middle-aged, and the most radioactive deer for the old people.
Bequerel became a household word, though there was much misinformation about what radioactivity is and how it spreads. People feared seeing radioactive surveillance helicopters landing near their homes, in places where children may have just been playing. Rumors spread about unimaginably high bequerel levels requiring the immediate slaughter of whole herds; others predicted the birth of genetic monstrosities during the coming spring's calving period. Some pregnant women sought abortions; others agonized over the future of their children.
A mother of two children, Britt-Inger Gustaffson-Blind of Sansa, Norway, recalled the initial confusion and fear. "I remember lying in bed, unable to get any kind of clear picture of what was happening. I began to think of our deer and who would be affected by their loss - not just my man and my children, but our old parents and other relatives dependent on people in the reindeer work. Then the Sami doing handicrafts and those in the reindeer administration and the teachers at the Sami school and the people at the Sami cultural center. The webs of people I knew just got wider and more tangled, and my heart grew heavier and heavier."
Herders' immediate, most easily articulated fears centered on simple economic survival in a business with no market for its products. In early August, the Swedish and Norwegian governments promised to compensate herders for deer they could not sell legally. At this time there were a few mass slaughters of deer which were piled in mounds and pushed by tractors into large pits by those who feared that state compensation would be only a temporary measure. However, both Swedish and Norwegian governments continued to promise that compensation programs would be maintained for as long as it took for herding to return to "normal" and counseled herders to go back to work and continue to slaughter deer "as usual."
In practice, this meant that slaughtered deer, normally staple food on the tables of Sami families or luxury food on northern European tables, now were bought by the state. Meat was dyed blue to mark it unfit for human consumption and sold as fodder for fox and mink in northern fur-breeding farms, or simply buried in large pits - essentially nuclear waste disposal sites - in uninhabited areas. Sami herders began to face the everyday difficulties of going about "work as usual" in a transformed world, in order to maintain their herds for an uncertain future.
A Sense of Dislocation
The situation of Scandinavia's native Sami minority is in certain important respects very different from that of many indigenous peoples, whose physical survival is threatened by the neglect or outright hostility of national governments. No Sami family in the modern Scandinavian welfare state fear starvation as a result of Chernobyl contamination of its herds. But present threats to Sami culture are serious and far-reaching, even if sometimes difficult to apprehend and untangle.
People in the most contaminated areas express feelings of profound dislocation, a sense that "things have split apart" in the aftermath of Chernobyl in ways that go far beyond the immediate sense of economic threats. "One of the worst things is the pretending," said Ivar Toven, a South Sami herder from Snasa, Norway.
We know that the work of our hands just ends in animals being thrown into the ground. But the only ways we know how to handle the deer are the careful ways our fathers taught us and that we hope to teach our children. So we pretend and we hope. What else can we do 7 This is the life I know. His wife, Sig-Britt Toven, went on.
It seems sometimes that things have become strange and make-believe. You see with your eyes the same mountains and lakes, the same herds, but you know there is something dangerous, something invisible, that can harm your children, that you can't see or touch or smell. Your hands keep doing the work, but your head worries about the future.
Nora-Marie Bransfjell, a teacher at the South Sami school in Snasa, wonders how the inner lives of children are fragmented by fears of contamination in the environment and worries about an uncertain future.
When the children returned to school in September, they spoke only of "bequerels". They asked each other, "Did you eat fish from the lakes before you knew? Did you walk in the rain last spring?" They would open their lunchboxes and say, "I can eat this meat. My father bought it in the north, so it has only 300 bequerels." But by December I noticed that hardly anyone spoke anymore of Chernobyl. "Do you think about it?" I asked. A nine-year-old girl replied. "No it's like war. You know it's real, but far away. You can't see it, and you try not to think of it coming to you and your family."
Gerd Persson, mother of a South Sami herding family in Valsjöyn, Sweden, describes the importance of connections between people and their deer in terms that are foreign to Westerners:
This is not just a matter of economic, but of who we are, how we live, how we are connected to our deer and each other. Now we must buy everything. Thread, material, food, shoes are now all different things, when they used to be parts of one thing.
She speaks of the central importance to South Sami culture of traditions surrounding niestti, the taking of provisions from one's own herd. Our men care for the deer and know them. When deer are slaughtered, it is done with respect. We women know how to care for the meat, to use every bit, the blood, the head, even the feet in soup. We know how to make thread from sinew and how to prepare the skin and furs for clothing and shoes. The work of our hands puts food on our tables and clothing on our backs. We give our food to our guests and send dried meat to our children when they are away in school. Even if there comes a time when we can eat the deer again, it may be too late to pass the knowledge of how to take and use niestti on to our children.
Political Tensions
Only about ten percent of Scandinavia's approximately 70,000 Sami presently herd the land's 500,000 reindeer. In Sweden and Norway, official government census figures designate as Sami only those whose families live by full-time reindeer herding, an occupation legislatively prohibited to others. Nevertheless, threats to the reindeer economy culture, at both herders and nonherders alike.
Reindeer have been important since prehistoric times, when Sami hunters stalked wild northern deer. In the 16th century some groups of mountain Sami in the northwestern mountainous tundra regions developed extensive pastoral nomadic lifestyles, migrating over hundreds of miles with domesticated reindeer herds somethings numbering in the thousands. While pastoralism spread throughout most of the Sami region in the following centuries, groups of South Sami in central Norwegian and Swedish regions and Eastern Sami in what is now Finland and the Soviet Union developed a more intensive form of pastoralism, with smaller herds, more limited migrations and greater reliance on auxiliary occupations, such as fishing and berry-picking. These historical divisions between North and South/Eastern Sami have persisted into the present day period of more sedentary "reindeer ranching" in which the sale of deer on a Western European market has become increasingly important, in some areas even overshadowing the importance of production for domestic consumption.
Tensions between North and South Sami have been exacerbated and ones created in the wake of disparate regional experiences of Chernobyl contamination. Various scientific proposals for reducing deer contamination levels - from rounding up deer and feeding them with uncontaminated fodder brought from outside to relocating herds in relatively uncontaminated pasture areas - have been implemented on a fairly small scale, but they are limited by cost, availability of land and the biology of reindeer, which do not tolerate long confinement in corrals. Radioactivity reduction programs are most feasible for northern herders with deer only slightly above government limits, but they promise little change for southern Sami in the most heavily contaminated areas.
Many northern Sami tend to play down the seriousness of Chernobyl contamination, suggesting that the dramatic story of radioactivity threats to Sami culture has been irresponsibly overplayed by the media. Leif Halonen, director of the Sami Research Institute in Kautokeino, Norway, also notes that the wrong sort of media attention may do more harm than good to Sami people, struggling to allay consumer fears and rebuild a solid European market for reindeer meat that falls within legal limits.
In contrast, many southern Sami express anger at what they see as neglect of the plight of Sami in very contaminated areas. South Sami in the worst contaminated central regions represent a minority within a Sami minority. Their small numbers (approximately 2,000) and distinctive Sami dialect placed them in a vulnerable position even before the Chernobyl disaster. Over 50 percent of South Sami are directly involved in reindeer herding, practiced on a much smaller scale and in less mechanized ways than the more extensive and commercialized "reindeer ranching" of the north. Some express fears that their distinctive South Sami way of life may be seen by others as expendable.
Most Sami politicians - those who represent "the Sami people" at the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and who deal officially with Scandinavian authorities through the pan-Scandinavian Nordic Sami Council or though the various national Sami organizations - are North Sami, with their own experience and understanding of problems caused by Chernobyl fallout. As one politician noted, "It's simply pragmatic political sense to rebuild the reindeer economy as best we can, not just for the narrow economic good of any one group, but for the good of Sami culture as a whole."
Herding has provided many Sami with both a powerful focus for ethnic identity and a secure livelihood, allowing young people to stay in northern areas where there is little alternative year-round cash employment. Without a strong local economy, young people will be forced to leave the villages for work or remain in Sami areas dependent on welfare supplemented by short-term or seasonal employment. Economically, reindeer are important not only to their owners, but also to those Sami involved in the production of bone, antler and hide handicrafts and those deriving a livelihood from a growing northern Scandinavian tourist industry.
Because reindeer herding figures so prominently in state visions of northern economic development and expanded tourism, a strong market for reindeer products has given Sami an economic base from which to gain political leverage in national governments. This Sami political influence has been aimed at establishing some measure of local self-government in Sami areas, at resisting the incursions of development interests (hydroelectric power, mining, the timber industry tourism) and at promoting Sami cultural programs such as bilingual Sami national language education in the schools, instruction in Sami handicrafts and pan-Scandinavian Sami political and cultural meetings. All this may be threatened, some suggest, by an overemphasis on the very serious contamination problems of a relatively small number of Sami in central Scandinavian areas.
Chernobyl contamination thus has created and exacerbated tensions within Sami society - between North and South, between politicians and "ordinary people," between herders and nonherders (frequently dependent on the reindeer economy for their own economic well-being, but now finding it difficult or impossible to get state compensation for Chernobyl-related losses). Moreover, present Sami dependence on state compensation from quite different Swedish and Norwegian government bureaucracies has intensified divisions between Sami in Norway, Sweden and Findland, despite a Nordic Sami Council political program celebrating Sami as one people, whose social bonds shall not be broken by national boundaries.
Dangers of Welfare State Dependency
Many Sami worry about long-term dependence on state compensation. "We have only promises of continuing support now," one Swedish Sami herder observed in December. "But what happens if, five or ten years from now, people in the government start to think that it's too expensive to hold up an economy with no market for its products?" In January, Bajane Ornstedt from the Swedish Ministry of Agriculture, a member of the Swedish government's Reindeer Radioactivity Commission, affirmed the commitment of the Swedish state to compensate Sami for Chernobyl-related losses. "The government will continue to fund research aimed at ameliorating contamination problems and to pay herders the going market price for any deer above the contamination limit, for as long as such measures are needed." In April government officials announced that the previous legal limit of 300 bq/kilo for all foodstuffs on the market would be lifted altogether, except in the case of reindeer meat, which may now be sold if contamination levels are under 1,500 bq/kilo. This change is a response, officials note, to current scientific reassessments of safe radioactive consumption levels and to Sami requests to reevaluate the very low 300 bq limit. (During the 1960s, as previous noted, Sami in many areas regularly sold deer in the 4,00-5,000 bq/kilo range.)
The complex debates surrounding the new legal limit have not yet been studied adequately, but there are justifiable fears that the higher limits will result in greater consumer unwillingness to buy reindeer meat at questionably high contamination levels and will ultimately put many Sami out of work - particularly those practicing "unrationalized" small-scale herding. For decades before Chernobyl, Scandinavian states attempted to make the reindeer industry more profitable through reorganization of herding according to Western scientific and economically rational guidelines on selective breeding, slaughter decisions, pasture use and labor allocation. This process was widely seen as requiring significant reductions (according to some economic analysts up to one third) in the existing number of herders, particularly among the more tradition-bound, less commercially oriented groups. In light of such pre-Chernobyl policies, present shifts in government regulation or radiation levels and in state compensation commitments may be questioned. Are state officials using a tragic accident to their own advantage to hasten rationalization programs and phase out unprofitable sectors of the reindeer economy?
Perhaps even more troubling are speculations that phase-out programs may be linked intentionally to the weakening of both local Sami self-government and pan-Scandinavian political solidarity. (Recall that in Norway and Sweden, only those who live by full-time reindeer herding are legally designated as Sami.) Concerted Sami political strength has proved troublesome to state planning in the past, particularly in demonstrations against northern hydroelectric developments that would destroy important pasture areas. Ironically, it is likely that the near future will require stronger resistance, as Sweden - in response to a public outcry against nuclear power following the Chernobyl accident - promises to phase out its 12 nuclear reactors by the year 2010. Unfortunately for Sami, the most likely energy alternative for Sweden will be massive hydroelectric development in Sami herding regions.
Early last fall there was talk of organized Sami demands for compensation directly form the Soviet Union - a strategy that, even if unsuccessful, would have helped to establish the Sami right to compensation. Pal Doj, a South Sami journalist from Ostersund, Sweden, maintains, "The Sami organizations should have started a real political fight with the Soviets and taken advantage of every bit of media attention focused on us, Instead, the Scandinavian governments said, Don't worry, well take care or everything for you! "Swedish and Norwegian governments may thus have weakened international Sami solidarity, increased dependency on nationally bounded bureaucracies and posed threats to Sami culture.
"We Are Still Here"
It is importance to stress that its is simply too early to lay out the consequences of the Chernobyl accident for Sami people in any definitive way. Oversimplified stories of the Sami as members of an ancient culture, continuing virtually unchanged for thousands of years until falling victim overnight to the nuclear age, obscure the real concerns of Sami people today, struggling maintain a living culture rather than an ossified museum piece. Sami, especially in the most contaminated southern areas, who hear over and over again about the possible "death of Sami culture" as a result of Chernobyl, may lose morale as they face the difficult problems of moving into a future whose form is still undetermined.
Threats to the stability of external economic and political structures, particularly in the most contaminated central Scandinavian regions, have brought a number of impassioned South Sami women outside the domestic sphere and into politics, as women form informal networks to discuss the effects of Chernobyl not only on the Sami reindeer economy and political situation, but also on men's morale, the roles of women in family life and the physical and psychological health of their children.
Gerd Persson, a South Sami mother and reindeer man's wife, had never been involved in politics until last fall, when she campaigned for and received a position on the "Reindeer Radioactivity Commission," an influential advisory organ to the Swedish government.
I know where I stand...I am not a politician, and I am not afraid to say what I think. Chernobyl is not the only difficulty Sami people have had to face. We have had colonization, forced Christianity, the taking of our lands by development interests and the taking of our children by boarding schools. But we are still here because we know where we can draw our strength to fight - from our grounding in our place, to our deer, in our families and our connections to one another. Anything that breaks these apart is what we have to fight against.
Even in the light of the resiliency and creative strength of Sami people throughout a long history of environmental and social threats from outside, it is clear that Chernobyl radioactive fallout poses serious threats to health, economic well-being, social community and cultural identity. The Sami case makes painfully clear the international dimensions and dangers of nuclear technology and the impossibility of predicting the complex global consequences of nuclear accidents as they transform the substance of people's bodies and environments and the meaningful orders of their lives.
Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc.
CULTURAL SURVIVAL QUARTERLY
By Stephens, Sharon
Issue 11.2
June 30, 1987
At the end of April 1986, Swedish nuclear power authorities noted unusually high rates of radiation in routine measurements at a plant north of Sweden. They initially feared that a nuclear accident had occurred in one of Sweden's own 12 nuclear power stations. It was several days later when they learned that they had actually measured fallout from the nuclear fire and explosion at Chernobyl that for more than a week spewed streams of radioactive material into the atmosphere above the Soviet Union, across eastern Europe and into western and northern Europe.
Scandinavia's indigenous minority, the Sami (also known as Lapps), has been particularly hard hit by Chernobyl fallout, resulting in the long-term radioactive contamination of large areas of Sami reindeer-herding pastureland. This contamination poses serious threats not only to the health and economic well-being of Sami people, but to their political strength and to a Sami cultural identity bound by material and symbolic connections between humans and reindeer.
The Sami case makes painfully clear that in trying to assess the effects of a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl, we are confronted not only with technical problems of measuring radioactivity levels, charting fallout patterns, and assessing risk factors, but also with the need to understand the interrelated global, national, regional and local community contexts - much too briefly suggested here. Even those Sami least affected by the fallout itself are affected by changing relations between a Sami minority and Scandinavian welfare state bureaucracies, by tensions and misunderstandings between Sami groups with very different experiences of radioactivity, by long-term threats to a Sami reindeer economy increasingly dependent on an outside market. It is only on the basis of a many-leveled understanding of complex threats to Sami people in the aftermath of Chernobyl that we can begin to consider practical attempts to counter both immediate and long-term dangers.
The Radioactive Fallout Situation
While direct contact with contaminated air last spring was not seen as posing immediate dangers to human health, the concentration of radioactivity in plants and animals that feed on them posed serious problems of widespread contamination of food - milk, sheep and cows, fish, wild game, berries and especially reindeer. Lichen, the main reindeer grazing food, is a biologically remarkable "radioactive sponge." With no underground root system, it must take all its nutrients from the air and thus incorporates airborne contamination to a much greater degree than other vegetation. The absorption of the major Chernobyl pollutant, cesium 137 (with a half-life of 30 years), by the slow-growing northern lichen has meant serious long-term contamination of many northern Scandinavian pasturelands and of the deer grazing them. In some areas, deer are many times more radioactive than is considered safe for domestic consumption or is legally allowable for market sale. Scientists express a cautious hope that in the most contaminated areas of central Sweden and Norway radioactivity levels will drop to "safe" levels in 20 to 30 years.
A bequerel is a new unit of radioactive measurement, representing one nuclear disintegration per second. In November, the Swedish government radioactivity level for salable foodstuffs was 300 bequerels/kilo, while the Norwegian limit was set at a much higher 6,000 bqs/kilo. These differences are important, but they appear less striking in comparison to contamination levels in the hardest hit areas of central Sweden and Norway. In November, deer radioactivity north of Snasa, Norway, averaged about 70,000 bq/kilo, with a few deer as high as 137,000 bq/kilo. Contamination levels gradually decrease to the north. Deer from the Vilhelmina area in northern Sweden averaged 12,000 bq/kilo after November slaughters. During the same period over two-thirds of deer slaughtered in Kautokeino, Norway, were under the 6,000 bq/kilo limit and could be sold. Reindeer pastures in Finland were affected only very slightly by Chernobyl fallout and there are no restrictions on the sale of Finnish deer.
There is little scientific agreement about potential long-term dangers to Sami health drinking contaminated water and eating contaminated foods. There is already some - much debated - evidence of increased incidence of leukemia and stomach cancer among Sami as a result of eating radioactive deer meat, contaminated in the 1960s from atmospheric nuclear testing in the Soviet Union. Reindeer radio-activity levels from this period were at the low end of the current radiation spectrum - about 4,000-5,000 bq/kilo. Analysts stress, however, the extreme difficulty of isolating dietary risk factors from other "lifestyle risks," especially in a population as small as the Sami's (generally estimated to be between 70,000 and 100,000).
The crucial point here is that there is neither any agreed-upon "safe" level of radioactive exposure nor any consensus on potential health dangers. The uncertainty of "risk assessments" on the basis of partial and conflicting information has beset Sami from the first harrowing weeks last summer when news of extensive Chernobyl contamination first appeared. Sami homes were inundated with a flood of contamination of pastures and reindeer, and various scientific and government guidelines for responding to the disaster. There were newspaper articles, television and radio programs with widely varying information about "safe" levels of radioactive consumption, usually scaled down for pregnant women and children.
Some families kept three separate food compartments in their freezer sheds - relatively uncontaminated reindeer meat bought from outside for the children, moderately contaminated meat for the middle-aged, and the most radioactive deer for the old people.
Bequerel became a household word, though there was much misinformation about what radioactivity is and how it spreads. People feared seeing radioactive surveillance helicopters landing near their homes, in places where children may have just been playing. Rumors spread about unimaginably high bequerel levels requiring the immediate slaughter of whole herds; others predicted the birth of genetic monstrosities during the coming spring's calving period. Some pregnant women sought abortions; others agonized over the future of their children.
A mother of two children, Britt-Inger Gustaffson-Blind of Sansa, Norway, recalled the initial confusion and fear. "I remember lying in bed, unable to get any kind of clear picture of what was happening. I began to think of our deer and who would be affected by their loss - not just my man and my children, but our old parents and other relatives dependent on people in the reindeer work. Then the Sami doing handicrafts and those in the reindeer administration and the teachers at the Sami school and the people at the Sami cultural center. The webs of people I knew just got wider and more tangled, and my heart grew heavier and heavier."
Herders' immediate, most easily articulated fears centered on simple economic survival in a business with no market for its products. In early August, the Swedish and Norwegian governments promised to compensate herders for deer they could not sell legally. At this time there were a few mass slaughters of deer which were piled in mounds and pushed by tractors into large pits by those who feared that state compensation would be only a temporary measure. However, both Swedish and Norwegian governments continued to promise that compensation programs would be maintained for as long as it took for herding to return to "normal" and counseled herders to go back to work and continue to slaughter deer "as usual."
In practice, this meant that slaughtered deer, normally staple food on the tables of Sami families or luxury food on northern European tables, now were bought by the state. Meat was dyed blue to mark it unfit for human consumption and sold as fodder for fox and mink in northern fur-breeding farms, or simply buried in large pits - essentially nuclear waste disposal sites - in uninhabited areas. Sami herders began to face the everyday difficulties of going about "work as usual" in a transformed world, in order to maintain their herds for an uncertain future.
A Sense of Dislocation
The situation of Scandinavia's native Sami minority is in certain important respects very different from that of many indigenous peoples, whose physical survival is threatened by the neglect or outright hostility of national governments. No Sami family in the modern Scandinavian welfare state fear starvation as a result of Chernobyl contamination of its herds. But present threats to Sami culture are serious and far-reaching, even if sometimes difficult to apprehend and untangle.
People in the most contaminated areas express feelings of profound dislocation, a sense that "things have split apart" in the aftermath of Chernobyl in ways that go far beyond the immediate sense of economic threats. "One of the worst things is the pretending," said Ivar Toven, a South Sami herder from Snasa, Norway.
We know that the work of our hands just ends in animals being thrown into the ground. But the only ways we know how to handle the deer are the careful ways our fathers taught us and that we hope to teach our children. So we pretend and we hope. What else can we do 7 This is the life I know. His wife, Sig-Britt Toven, went on.
It seems sometimes that things have become strange and make-believe. You see with your eyes the same mountains and lakes, the same herds, but you know there is something dangerous, something invisible, that can harm your children, that you can't see or touch or smell. Your hands keep doing the work, but your head worries about the future.
Nora-Marie Bransfjell, a teacher at the South Sami school in Snasa, wonders how the inner lives of children are fragmented by fears of contamination in the environment and worries about an uncertain future.
When the children returned to school in September, they spoke only of "bequerels". They asked each other, "Did you eat fish from the lakes before you knew? Did you walk in the rain last spring?" They would open their lunchboxes and say, "I can eat this meat. My father bought it in the north, so it has only 300 bequerels." But by December I noticed that hardly anyone spoke anymore of Chernobyl. "Do you think about it?" I asked. A nine-year-old girl replied. "No it's like war. You know it's real, but far away. You can't see it, and you try not to think of it coming to you and your family."
Gerd Persson, mother of a South Sami herding family in Valsjöyn, Sweden, describes the importance of connections between people and their deer in terms that are foreign to Westerners:
This is not just a matter of economic, but of who we are, how we live, how we are connected to our deer and each other. Now we must buy everything. Thread, material, food, shoes are now all different things, when they used to be parts of one thing.
She speaks of the central importance to South Sami culture of traditions surrounding niestti, the taking of provisions from one's own herd. Our men care for the deer and know them. When deer are slaughtered, it is done with respect. We women know how to care for the meat, to use every bit, the blood, the head, even the feet in soup. We know how to make thread from sinew and how to prepare the skin and furs for clothing and shoes. The work of our hands puts food on our tables and clothing on our backs. We give our food to our guests and send dried meat to our children when they are away in school. Even if there comes a time when we can eat the deer again, it may be too late to pass the knowledge of how to take and use niestti on to our children.
Political Tensions
Only about ten percent of Scandinavia's approximately 70,000 Sami presently herd the land's 500,000 reindeer. In Sweden and Norway, official government census figures designate as Sami only those whose families live by full-time reindeer herding, an occupation legislatively prohibited to others. Nevertheless, threats to the reindeer economy culture, at both herders and nonherders alike.
Reindeer have been important since prehistoric times, when Sami hunters stalked wild northern deer. In the 16th century some groups of mountain Sami in the northwestern mountainous tundra regions developed extensive pastoral nomadic lifestyles, migrating over hundreds of miles with domesticated reindeer herds somethings numbering in the thousands. While pastoralism spread throughout most of the Sami region in the following centuries, groups of South Sami in central Norwegian and Swedish regions and Eastern Sami in what is now Finland and the Soviet Union developed a more intensive form of pastoralism, with smaller herds, more limited migrations and greater reliance on auxiliary occupations, such as fishing and berry-picking. These historical divisions between North and South/Eastern Sami have persisted into the present day period of more sedentary "reindeer ranching" in which the sale of deer on a Western European market has become increasingly important, in some areas even overshadowing the importance of production for domestic consumption.
Tensions between North and South Sami have been exacerbated and ones created in the wake of disparate regional experiences of Chernobyl contamination. Various scientific proposals for reducing deer contamination levels - from rounding up deer and feeding them with uncontaminated fodder brought from outside to relocating herds in relatively uncontaminated pasture areas - have been implemented on a fairly small scale, but they are limited by cost, availability of land and the biology of reindeer, which do not tolerate long confinement in corrals. Radioactivity reduction programs are most feasible for northern herders with deer only slightly above government limits, but they promise little change for southern Sami in the most heavily contaminated areas.
Many northern Sami tend to play down the seriousness of Chernobyl contamination, suggesting that the dramatic story of radioactivity threats to Sami culture has been irresponsibly overplayed by the media. Leif Halonen, director of the Sami Research Institute in Kautokeino, Norway, also notes that the wrong sort of media attention may do more harm than good to Sami people, struggling to allay consumer fears and rebuild a solid European market for reindeer meat that falls within legal limits.
In contrast, many southern Sami express anger at what they see as neglect of the plight of Sami in very contaminated areas. South Sami in the worst contaminated central regions represent a minority within a Sami minority. Their small numbers (approximately 2,000) and distinctive Sami dialect placed them in a vulnerable position even before the Chernobyl disaster. Over 50 percent of South Sami are directly involved in reindeer herding, practiced on a much smaller scale and in less mechanized ways than the more extensive and commercialized "reindeer ranching" of the north. Some express fears that their distinctive South Sami way of life may be seen by others as expendable.
Most Sami politicians - those who represent "the Sami people" at the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and who deal officially with Scandinavian authorities through the pan-Scandinavian Nordic Sami Council or though the various national Sami organizations - are North Sami, with their own experience and understanding of problems caused by Chernobyl fallout. As one politician noted, "It's simply pragmatic political sense to rebuild the reindeer economy as best we can, not just for the narrow economic good of any one group, but for the good of Sami culture as a whole."
Herding has provided many Sami with both a powerful focus for ethnic identity and a secure livelihood, allowing young people to stay in northern areas where there is little alternative year-round cash employment. Without a strong local economy, young people will be forced to leave the villages for work or remain in Sami areas dependent on welfare supplemented by short-term or seasonal employment. Economically, reindeer are important not only to their owners, but also to those Sami involved in the production of bone, antler and hide handicrafts and those deriving a livelihood from a growing northern Scandinavian tourist industry.
Because reindeer herding figures so prominently in state visions of northern economic development and expanded tourism, a strong market for reindeer products has given Sami an economic base from which to gain political leverage in national governments. This Sami political influence has been aimed at establishing some measure of local self-government in Sami areas, at resisting the incursions of development interests (hydroelectric power, mining, the timber industry tourism) and at promoting Sami cultural programs such as bilingual Sami national language education in the schools, instruction in Sami handicrafts and pan-Scandinavian Sami political and cultural meetings. All this may be threatened, some suggest, by an overemphasis on the very serious contamination problems of a relatively small number of Sami in central Scandinavian areas.
Chernobyl contamination thus has created and exacerbated tensions within Sami society - between North and South, between politicians and "ordinary people," between herders and nonherders (frequently dependent on the reindeer economy for their own economic well-being, but now finding it difficult or impossible to get state compensation for Chernobyl-related losses). Moreover, present Sami dependence on state compensation from quite different Swedish and Norwegian government bureaucracies has intensified divisions between Sami in Norway, Sweden and Findland, despite a Nordic Sami Council political program celebrating Sami as one people, whose social bonds shall not be broken by national boundaries.
Dangers of Welfare State Dependency
Many Sami worry about long-term dependence on state compensation. "We have only promises of continuing support now," one Swedish Sami herder observed in December. "But what happens if, five or ten years from now, people in the government start to think that it's too expensive to hold up an economy with no market for its products?" In January, Bajane Ornstedt from the Swedish Ministry of Agriculture, a member of the Swedish government's Reindeer Radioactivity Commission, affirmed the commitment of the Swedish state to compensate Sami for Chernobyl-related losses. "The government will continue to fund research aimed at ameliorating contamination problems and to pay herders the going market price for any deer above the contamination limit, for as long as such measures are needed." In April government officials announced that the previous legal limit of 300 bq/kilo for all foodstuffs on the market would be lifted altogether, except in the case of reindeer meat, which may now be sold if contamination levels are under 1,500 bq/kilo. This change is a response, officials note, to current scientific reassessments of safe radioactive consumption levels and to Sami requests to reevaluate the very low 300 bq limit. (During the 1960s, as previous noted, Sami in many areas regularly sold deer in the 4,00-5,000 bq/kilo range.)
The complex debates surrounding the new legal limit have not yet been studied adequately, but there are justifiable fears that the higher limits will result in greater consumer unwillingness to buy reindeer meat at questionably high contamination levels and will ultimately put many Sami out of work - particularly those practicing "unrationalized" small-scale herding. For decades before Chernobyl, Scandinavian states attempted to make the reindeer industry more profitable through reorganization of herding according to Western scientific and economically rational guidelines on selective breeding, slaughter decisions, pasture use and labor allocation. This process was widely seen as requiring significant reductions (according to some economic analysts up to one third) in the existing number of herders, particularly among the more tradition-bound, less commercially oriented groups. In light of such pre-Chernobyl policies, present shifts in government regulation or radiation levels and in state compensation commitments may be questioned. Are state officials using a tragic accident to their own advantage to hasten rationalization programs and phase out unprofitable sectors of the reindeer economy?
Perhaps even more troubling are speculations that phase-out programs may be linked intentionally to the weakening of both local Sami self-government and pan-Scandinavian political solidarity. (Recall that in Norway and Sweden, only those who live by full-time reindeer herding are legally designated as Sami.) Concerted Sami political strength has proved troublesome to state planning in the past, particularly in demonstrations against northern hydroelectric developments that would destroy important pasture areas. Ironically, it is likely that the near future will require stronger resistance, as Sweden - in response to a public outcry against nuclear power following the Chernobyl accident - promises to phase out its 12 nuclear reactors by the year 2010. Unfortunately for Sami, the most likely energy alternative for Sweden will be massive hydroelectric development in Sami herding regions.
Early last fall there was talk of organized Sami demands for compensation directly form the Soviet Union - a strategy that, even if unsuccessful, would have helped to establish the Sami right to compensation. Pal Doj, a South Sami journalist from Ostersund, Sweden, maintains, "The Sami organizations should have started a real political fight with the Soviets and taken advantage of every bit of media attention focused on us, Instead, the Scandinavian governments said, Don't worry, well take care or everything for you! "Swedish and Norwegian governments may thus have weakened international Sami solidarity, increased dependency on nationally bounded bureaucracies and posed threats to Sami culture.
"We Are Still Here"
It is importance to stress that its is simply too early to lay out the consequences of the Chernobyl accident for Sami people in any definitive way. Oversimplified stories of the Sami as members of an ancient culture, continuing virtually unchanged for thousands of years until falling victim overnight to the nuclear age, obscure the real concerns of Sami people today, struggling maintain a living culture rather than an ossified museum piece. Sami, especially in the most contaminated southern areas, who hear over and over again about the possible "death of Sami culture" as a result of Chernobyl, may lose morale as they face the difficult problems of moving into a future whose form is still undetermined.
Threats to the stability of external economic and political structures, particularly in the most contaminated central Scandinavian regions, have brought a number of impassioned South Sami women outside the domestic sphere and into politics, as women form informal networks to discuss the effects of Chernobyl not only on the Sami reindeer economy and political situation, but also on men's morale, the roles of women in family life and the physical and psychological health of their children.
Gerd Persson, a South Sami mother and reindeer man's wife, had never been involved in politics until last fall, when she campaigned for and received a position on the "Reindeer Radioactivity Commission," an influential advisory organ to the Swedish government.
I know where I stand...I am not a politician, and I am not afraid to say what I think. Chernobyl is not the only difficulty Sami people have had to face. We have had colonization, forced Christianity, the taking of our lands by development interests and the taking of our children by boarding schools. But we are still here because we know where we can draw our strength to fight - from our grounding in our place, to our deer, in our families and our connections to one another. Anything that breaks these apart is what we have to fight against.
Even in the light of the resiliency and creative strength of Sami people throughout a long history of environmental and social threats from outside, it is clear that Chernobyl radioactive fallout poses serious threats to health, economic well-being, social community and cultural identity. The Sami case makes painfully clear the international dimensions and dangers of nuclear technology and the impossibility of predicting the complex global consequences of nuclear accidents as they transform the substance of people's bodies and environments and the meaningful orders of their lives.
Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc.
CULTURAL SURVIVAL QUARTERLY
The transcendental object at the end of time
by Terence McKenna
It is almost as though what the psychedelics are attempting to do for sociology and psychology is what was achieved by quantum physics for matter in the 1920s and '30s. Matter, during that period, was re-analyzed and found to be not tiny hard billiard ball-like particles whizzing through space carrying spin and electric charge. there was another level, a lower layer, and that other level, that other description, revealed an interactive wave system where individual points of concrescence are statistical rather than real. In that domain everything dissolves into a soup of multi-leveled, multi-dimensional connectedness, and this is what the psychedelic experience is.
I believe that one way of thinking about biology is to conceive of it as a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminism to such a degree that freedom, true freedom, shimmers into existence at the macrophysical level, the level that we as thinking, suffering, striving, dreaming organisms, actually occupy. The amplification of quantum mechanical indeterminacy that allows for freedom then allows evolutionary processes to reflect the forces which are impinging upon them. Orthodox science hands us a universe in which each event is somehow dependent for its existential completeness upon the moment, which came immediately before it. I believe that we can extract from the psychedelic experience an entirely different notion of time, space and causality. Probably most of us are familiar with the idea that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone. Mathematicians can build up a picture of a cone by examining thousands and thousands of elliptical sections of that cone and then reasoning backward to the higher dimensional object which that cone represents.
I believe that every psychedelic journey is a sectioning of a higher dimensional object of some sort and that we ourselves, in our individual lives, also represent a sectioning of this higher dimensional object. So, then the intellectual quest, the spiritual quest, becomes one of empowering the felt presence of experience, both psychedelic experience and the normal day-to-day experience of living, and noticing that that is the primary stuff of which reality is made. Reality is not made of quarks and mu-mesons and z-particles. Reality is made of language. Reality is an entirely private matter until we describe it - either linguistically, mathematically, through painting, through dance, through innuendo; whatever it is, reality undergoes the formality of actually occurring when it is languaged. What I've noticed about the psychedelics is that they are catalysts for language, they are enzymes operating in the human body politic propelling us to "stretch the envelope", to stretch the design parameters of the human experience.
I believe that what shamans, including modern cyber-shamans, see when they ascend to the psychedelic heights is the viewpoint that we would have if we could penetrate into another dimension - and I use the word in the mathematically formal sense. Plato said "Time is the moving image of eternity"; what the shaman sees is the end of time, and this gives the shaman a tremendous self-confidence, a tremendous existential validity, so that he or she can then return and take their place among the rest of us and be a source of inspiration. What is the nature of this end which is seen? This is where we part company with orthodoxy. I suggest that we have entirely misunderstood the character of time. We are not being pushed by the force of causal necessity; we human beings, like the rest of nature, are reacting to the siren song of the transcendental object at the end of time. We are on a collision course with an event for which there is barely language. We are on a collision course with a temporal vortex of some sort. It has become a cliché of modern journalism that time is speeding up, that history is moving faster and faster. I take this perception very seriously, because I take all perception seriously. I would always prefer a direct perception to a theoretical construct, and so I would like to suggest that what is happening on this planet is that time is actually being speeded up. Our species is under the influence of a kind of strange attractor which is moving us through the temporal medium at an ever-accelerating rate.
This is a law of the universe, though not one recognized by science. The early universe immediately after the hypothesized "Big Bang” was an incredibly simple place. There were no organisms, there were no molecules, there were not even atoms, there was only a pure plasma of electrons. As the universe cooled, levels of complexity crystallized out successively, each one building on the previous level of complexity. Eventually the temperature in the universe dropped low enough that electrons could settle into stable orbits around atomic nuclei. Then you get atomic physics. Those atoms condensed into stars and eventually the temperature and pressure in the center of stars was sufficient to trigger fusion, and heavier elements like iron, sulphur and carbon, were cooked up in the cores of the stars. Once you have carbon, with its four-valent bonding, you have the possibility of molecular complexity; an entirely new domain of complexification. Not to belabor the point, but quickly out of molecules come highly complex polymers, out of highly complex polymers come early replicating molecules, from them come prokaryotes, the earliest living cells, non-nucleated, then the nucleated cells, the eukaryotes, then clusters of colonies of cells, the earliest organisms, then more complex organisms, eventually higher animals. Out of them, binocular, bipedal primates with an opposable thumb. Out of them, language-using, mushrooms-using, orgiastic humans. Out of them, history, cities, warfare, hierarchies, writing, mathematics, music, and in the twentieth century this all knits together into some kind of global organism. Now, the disgrace of science is that it denies the importance of this phenomenon. For science, the most important phenomenon in the universe is the move toward heat death and entropy. Physicists barely notice that life represents an amazing and persistent exception to the rule that all thermodynamic systems run down. Life has achieved the miracle of stability far from entropy through the miracle of metabolism. Notice that when complexity emerges out of simpler states, each ascent to the next order occurs more quickly than the process before it. The effect is that of being in a kind of tightening spiral, one of William Butler Yeats's gyres. We are wrapping ourselves around a cosmic end point of some sort, and this is what I call the transcendental object at the end of time. It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history. This is what drives the guru to make his statement, this is what kindles the messiah to his mission, this is what inspires the painter and the dreamer and the musician.
There is an enormous source of affection and concern for humanity which is calling us toward it, across the plains of lower dimensional time and space, and the miracle is that through perturbing our neurochemistry in ways which shamans have always done we can turn to the last page, as it were, and can see there that the entire process was actually toward a good cause. We are moving toward the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter. We are about to witness the freeing of life from the chrysalis of matter. This is what our privilege and our destiny is; to be the final generation of people with one foot in the material realm of the battered primate and one foot on the ladder to godhead.
Do I still believe in the apex of novelty in the year 2012? When I talked about the spiral of involution of novelty and the way in which each advance into novelty happens more rapidly, I was not just whistling Dixie. I have a created a mathematical formalism which I chose not to bore you with tonight - and you should be thankful I assure you - which leads me to the conclusion that rather than a big bang at the beginning, 10, 12, 19 billion years ago, a more pleasing cosmology would be what I call "the big surprise", and the big surprise comes not out of a pure vacuum for no reason; the big surprise emerges out of the integration of complexity into one final holographic spin-down of all dimensions into a single point. I crib from Alfred North Whitehead in forming these ideas; Whitehead had the idea of what he called "concrescence". He said that the universe has an appetition for novelty, an appetite for novelty that moved toward a nexus of concrescence. I suggest that, yes, we are so close to the transcendental object at the end of time that it is going to manifest late in 2012. The reasons for being so specific are too complex to go into here, but a sort of throw-away explanation is that it's the end date of the Mayan calendar. That's not why I chose it but later after choosing this date I discovered it was the end date of the Mayan calendar. The only thing I have in common with the Maya is that they took mushrooms and I take mushrooms. It's almost as though there is a bar code stamped on the psilocybin experience, when you get it all pieced together, no matter where in time and space you are, there is a vector pointing at the early years of the 21st century as the place where it becomes explicit that we are in a collective process of exponential transformation. To me it's explicit already. I cannot deal with a city like London or Manhattan without noticing that measured against the background of organic nature, this represents some fantastic mutational phenomenon. Whether it's good, whether it's bad, who knows, but it certainly is peculiar and it certainly is happening very very quickly. That is why it is nonsense to think that you are suspended in a universe which will endure into some unimaginable future.
Each one of us is going to die, rather soon, so why not assume that whatever that transformation is, it will be general, and then prepare to meet it as a collectivity, not the death of the rationalist and the reductionists where we return to worms, but the death of Blake and of Revelations and of the Tao Te Ching and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the death that is victory and the transcendence of matter, that's what death is. What we need now for the good of the planet and for ourselves is somehow to find a doorway into the imagination, that's where the future lies. Our powers have grown too great to be unleashed on the surface of a fragile planet.
In the '60s the spread of LSD was viewed with such alarm by the establishment because it appeared that the machinery of right-thinking, Christian capitalist society was simply being dissolved before the startled eyes of its purveyors by virtue of the fact that so many people were calling into question the assumptions of the culture that they were inheriting. Now we see something similar coming into being. Thirty years after the '60s we appear to be poised on the edge of another youth decade, another decade in which youth will set the social agenda for society at large and attempt to lead us away from some of the more lethal and self-destructive patterns that we seem so addicted to. Why is this happening right at this moment? I prefer to suppose, rather than arguing rationally about it, that the reason the 20th century has been so repeatedly disrupted or enlivened, depending on your point of view, by these eruptions of the avant garde, the Bohemians, the beatniks, the hippies, the youth culture of today, is because unconsciously we are actually responding to the presence ahead of us in the future of what I call "the transcendental object at the end of time", a kind of strange attractor, a kind of sociological black hole that reaches out to social processes in the act of evolving and puts a certain spin on them and calls them toward itself. The history of the 20th century is not a random walk or a trendless fluctuation, as we are taught in the academy; rather this century is a triumphal march toward the revelation of a transcendental object that lies just beyond its end. Every time we take a psychedelic compound, every time we slip into reverie, trance or dream, we form a relationship with it; in mental hyperspace we encounter the long shadow of this transcendental object. It's as though we've been moving along a surface for a long time now, many centuries, and now we are about to undergo a phase transition or fall off the cusp of the phase space, and this falling off the cusp of the phase space is, for those who experience it, a dizzying sense of freedom, a dizzying sense of penetration into a dimension that was previously sensed and dreamed of but which only very briefly and occasionally comes forward to be realized. It's a golden age, similar to the golden age of Greece or the Renaissance, but for us it has a different character because the transcendental object ahead of us in time seems a kind of concrescence of all our hopes, fears and intuitions about what the future and the evolution of our species could become. This is, I believe, why the UFO has been such a persistent motif in 20th century popular culture. We actually sense on the unconscious level a kind of approach of the end of time, a kind of closing distance between historical societies and some kind of truly mysterious, truly transcendental object that lies ahead of us in the near future. Returning to the subject of the psychedelics, their role in all of this is that they seem to pick up and amplify the signal coming off this mysterious object hidden in the future so that the contents of psychedelic experiences when laid end to end in a composite give a picture of what this final global integration is going to be like. An integration that is going to emerge as a phenomenon of culture, not out of our cultural artifacts or our technology but out of human organization itself.
We may have imagined many different scenarios, a future of technological and social innovation, but very few of us have imagined the possibility that the real agenda of shamanism would have to be taken seriously. Shamans are people who have learned to penetrate another dimension, a dimension where, for want of a better word, we would have to say the souls of the ancestors are somehow present. It isn't simply that we enter into the realm of the dead, it's more as though we discover that our world is the realm of the dead and that there is a higher dimensional world with greater degrees of freedom, with a greater sense of spontaneity and lesser dependency on the entropic world of matter, and that other universe is attempting to impinge into our own, perhaps to rescue us from our historical dilemma, we don't know. Perhaps shamans have always had commerce with these magical and invisible worlds and it's only the sad fate of Western human beings to have lost touch with this domain to the point where it comes to us as a kind of a revelation. You see, I believe that the whole fall into history, the whole rise of male dominance and patriarchy can be traced to a broken connection with the living world of the Gaian mind. The living world of the Gaian mind is what shamans access through psychoactive plants, and without psychoactive plants that access comes as no more than an unconfirmable rumor.
The human adventure has always been a flirtation with these gigantic forces in an unseen dimension. This is what sets our religions going, this is what creates gurus and messiahs and scientific breakthroughs, somehow we are in resonance with something much larger than ourselves, something which one could call the great attractor, the transcendental object at the end of time, the Gaian mind. Whatever it is, we, out of all of Nature, seem to have a special relationship to it and seem to be somehow both under its care and involved in its manifestation in 3-dimensional space. As we make our way across the historical landscape toward the sensed presence of this transcendental other, so it is making its way toward us through the content of dreams, psychedelic experiences and the careers of spiritually advanced people. History, which is a state of extreme instability and disequilibrium, lasts only fifteen or twenty thousand years. That history is about to be transformed or ended, that the factors that shaped history - phonetic alphabets, male dominance, materialism, scientific method, empiricism - these factors are about to be made obsolete by discoveries in the human and natural realm. We, the people of the high-tech civilizations, are like the prodigal son. We made a descent into matter. We have wandered many years in the wilderness.
Now, in a time of great planetary crisis, we must return to the tribal fold. We must take what we learned from our peregrination into history and return to the tribal model with it. Only in that way, then, can we reclaim our sexuality, our identities and reclaim the planet for itself. The styles that have evolved within history, the styles of male dominance, concern for tracing male lines of paternity, private property, control of females and so on, all this has arisen as a result of the establishing and maintaining of the ego. The ego is the function of the personality that is most at home and at ease within the context of history, but really the ego is like a calcareous tumor that arises within the dynamics of the psyche and lodges like a cancer or a tumor in the structures of the psyche. The only cure or treatment that I am aware of for the calcareous tumor of ego is frequently repeated exposure to psychedelic plants. This is the essence of their boundary-dissolving function, and twelve to twenty thousand years ago the ordinary style of human society was nomadic pastoralism and psychedelic intoxication on a schedule that was very probably lunar. Reclaiming that orgiastic boundaryless style of sexual relating is part of what the archaic revival is about.
I'm the purveyor of a bizarre notion, which was told to me by an elf troop. It's a formal mathematical notion that argues very strongly that we are headed toward a planetary transformation within our lifetimes, specifically around 2012, and this is not a political transformation, or a biological transformation, it's a transformation of the laws of physics themselves. The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of what I call the transcendental object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape into which we have fallen. The fury of 20th century culture is indicative of our nearness to this globally transformative moment. We are going to shed the monkey; the linguistic being that is symbiotic with these monkeys is about to disentangle itself from matter and realize some kind of angelic transformation very difficult for us to anticipate or understand.
It is almost as though what the psychedelics are attempting to do for sociology and psychology is what was achieved by quantum physics for matter in the 1920s and '30s. Matter, during that period, was re-analyzed and found to be not tiny hard billiard ball-like particles whizzing through space carrying spin and electric charge. there was another level, a lower layer, and that other level, that other description, revealed an interactive wave system where individual points of concrescence are statistical rather than real. In that domain everything dissolves into a soup of multi-leveled, multi-dimensional connectedness, and this is what the psychedelic experience is.
I believe that one way of thinking about biology is to conceive of it as a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminism to such a degree that freedom, true freedom, shimmers into existence at the macrophysical level, the level that we as thinking, suffering, striving, dreaming organisms, actually occupy. The amplification of quantum mechanical indeterminacy that allows for freedom then allows evolutionary processes to reflect the forces which are impinging upon them. Orthodox science hands us a universe in which each event is somehow dependent for its existential completeness upon the moment, which came immediately before it. I believe that we can extract from the psychedelic experience an entirely different notion of time, space and causality. Probably most of us are familiar with the idea that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone. Mathematicians can build up a picture of a cone by examining thousands and thousands of elliptical sections of that cone and then reasoning backward to the higher dimensional object which that cone represents.
I believe that every psychedelic journey is a sectioning of a higher dimensional object of some sort and that we ourselves, in our individual lives, also represent a sectioning of this higher dimensional object. So, then the intellectual quest, the spiritual quest, becomes one of empowering the felt presence of experience, both psychedelic experience and the normal day-to-day experience of living, and noticing that that is the primary stuff of which reality is made. Reality is not made of quarks and mu-mesons and z-particles. Reality is made of language. Reality is an entirely private matter until we describe it - either linguistically, mathematically, through painting, through dance, through innuendo; whatever it is, reality undergoes the formality of actually occurring when it is languaged. What I've noticed about the psychedelics is that they are catalysts for language, they are enzymes operating in the human body politic propelling us to "stretch the envelope", to stretch the design parameters of the human experience.
I believe that what shamans, including modern cyber-shamans, see when they ascend to the psychedelic heights is the viewpoint that we would have if we could penetrate into another dimension - and I use the word in the mathematically formal sense. Plato said "Time is the moving image of eternity"; what the shaman sees is the end of time, and this gives the shaman a tremendous self-confidence, a tremendous existential validity, so that he or she can then return and take their place among the rest of us and be a source of inspiration. What is the nature of this end which is seen? This is where we part company with orthodoxy. I suggest that we have entirely misunderstood the character of time. We are not being pushed by the force of causal necessity; we human beings, like the rest of nature, are reacting to the siren song of the transcendental object at the end of time. We are on a collision course with an event for which there is barely language. We are on a collision course with a temporal vortex of some sort. It has become a cliché of modern journalism that time is speeding up, that history is moving faster and faster. I take this perception very seriously, because I take all perception seriously. I would always prefer a direct perception to a theoretical construct, and so I would like to suggest that what is happening on this planet is that time is actually being speeded up. Our species is under the influence of a kind of strange attractor which is moving us through the temporal medium at an ever-accelerating rate.
This is a law of the universe, though not one recognized by science. The early universe immediately after the hypothesized "Big Bang” was an incredibly simple place. There were no organisms, there were no molecules, there were not even atoms, there was only a pure plasma of electrons. As the universe cooled, levels of complexity crystallized out successively, each one building on the previous level of complexity. Eventually the temperature in the universe dropped low enough that electrons could settle into stable orbits around atomic nuclei. Then you get atomic physics. Those atoms condensed into stars and eventually the temperature and pressure in the center of stars was sufficient to trigger fusion, and heavier elements like iron, sulphur and carbon, were cooked up in the cores of the stars. Once you have carbon, with its four-valent bonding, you have the possibility of molecular complexity; an entirely new domain of complexification. Not to belabor the point, but quickly out of molecules come highly complex polymers, out of highly complex polymers come early replicating molecules, from them come prokaryotes, the earliest living cells, non-nucleated, then the nucleated cells, the eukaryotes, then clusters of colonies of cells, the earliest organisms, then more complex organisms, eventually higher animals. Out of them, binocular, bipedal primates with an opposable thumb. Out of them, language-using, mushrooms-using, orgiastic humans. Out of them, history, cities, warfare, hierarchies, writing, mathematics, music, and in the twentieth century this all knits together into some kind of global organism. Now, the disgrace of science is that it denies the importance of this phenomenon. For science, the most important phenomenon in the universe is the move toward heat death and entropy. Physicists barely notice that life represents an amazing and persistent exception to the rule that all thermodynamic systems run down. Life has achieved the miracle of stability far from entropy through the miracle of metabolism. Notice that when complexity emerges out of simpler states, each ascent to the next order occurs more quickly than the process before it. The effect is that of being in a kind of tightening spiral, one of William Butler Yeats's gyres. We are wrapping ourselves around a cosmic end point of some sort, and this is what I call the transcendental object at the end of time. It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history. This is what drives the guru to make his statement, this is what kindles the messiah to his mission, this is what inspires the painter and the dreamer and the musician.
There is an enormous source of affection and concern for humanity which is calling us toward it, across the plains of lower dimensional time and space, and the miracle is that through perturbing our neurochemistry in ways which shamans have always done we can turn to the last page, as it were, and can see there that the entire process was actually toward a good cause. We are moving toward the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter. We are about to witness the freeing of life from the chrysalis of matter. This is what our privilege and our destiny is; to be the final generation of people with one foot in the material realm of the battered primate and one foot on the ladder to godhead.
Do I still believe in the apex of novelty in the year 2012? When I talked about the spiral of involution of novelty and the way in which each advance into novelty happens more rapidly, I was not just whistling Dixie. I have a created a mathematical formalism which I chose not to bore you with tonight - and you should be thankful I assure you - which leads me to the conclusion that rather than a big bang at the beginning, 10, 12, 19 billion years ago, a more pleasing cosmology would be what I call "the big surprise", and the big surprise comes not out of a pure vacuum for no reason; the big surprise emerges out of the integration of complexity into one final holographic spin-down of all dimensions into a single point. I crib from Alfred North Whitehead in forming these ideas; Whitehead had the idea of what he called "concrescence". He said that the universe has an appetition for novelty, an appetite for novelty that moved toward a nexus of concrescence. I suggest that, yes, we are so close to the transcendental object at the end of time that it is going to manifest late in 2012. The reasons for being so specific are too complex to go into here, but a sort of throw-away explanation is that it's the end date of the Mayan calendar. That's not why I chose it but later after choosing this date I discovered it was the end date of the Mayan calendar. The only thing I have in common with the Maya is that they took mushrooms and I take mushrooms. It's almost as though there is a bar code stamped on the psilocybin experience, when you get it all pieced together, no matter where in time and space you are, there is a vector pointing at the early years of the 21st century as the place where it becomes explicit that we are in a collective process of exponential transformation. To me it's explicit already. I cannot deal with a city like London or Manhattan without noticing that measured against the background of organic nature, this represents some fantastic mutational phenomenon. Whether it's good, whether it's bad, who knows, but it certainly is peculiar and it certainly is happening very very quickly. That is why it is nonsense to think that you are suspended in a universe which will endure into some unimaginable future.
Each one of us is going to die, rather soon, so why not assume that whatever that transformation is, it will be general, and then prepare to meet it as a collectivity, not the death of the rationalist and the reductionists where we return to worms, but the death of Blake and of Revelations and of the Tao Te Ching and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the death that is victory and the transcendence of matter, that's what death is. What we need now for the good of the planet and for ourselves is somehow to find a doorway into the imagination, that's where the future lies. Our powers have grown too great to be unleashed on the surface of a fragile planet.
In the '60s the spread of LSD was viewed with such alarm by the establishment because it appeared that the machinery of right-thinking, Christian capitalist society was simply being dissolved before the startled eyes of its purveyors by virtue of the fact that so many people were calling into question the assumptions of the culture that they were inheriting. Now we see something similar coming into being. Thirty years after the '60s we appear to be poised on the edge of another youth decade, another decade in which youth will set the social agenda for society at large and attempt to lead us away from some of the more lethal and self-destructive patterns that we seem so addicted to. Why is this happening right at this moment? I prefer to suppose, rather than arguing rationally about it, that the reason the 20th century has been so repeatedly disrupted or enlivened, depending on your point of view, by these eruptions of the avant garde, the Bohemians, the beatniks, the hippies, the youth culture of today, is because unconsciously we are actually responding to the presence ahead of us in the future of what I call "the transcendental object at the end of time", a kind of strange attractor, a kind of sociological black hole that reaches out to social processes in the act of evolving and puts a certain spin on them and calls them toward itself. The history of the 20th century is not a random walk or a trendless fluctuation, as we are taught in the academy; rather this century is a triumphal march toward the revelation of a transcendental object that lies just beyond its end. Every time we take a psychedelic compound, every time we slip into reverie, trance or dream, we form a relationship with it; in mental hyperspace we encounter the long shadow of this transcendental object. It's as though we've been moving along a surface for a long time now, many centuries, and now we are about to undergo a phase transition or fall off the cusp of the phase space, and this falling off the cusp of the phase space is, for those who experience it, a dizzying sense of freedom, a dizzying sense of penetration into a dimension that was previously sensed and dreamed of but which only very briefly and occasionally comes forward to be realized. It's a golden age, similar to the golden age of Greece or the Renaissance, but for us it has a different character because the transcendental object ahead of us in time seems a kind of concrescence of all our hopes, fears and intuitions about what the future and the evolution of our species could become. This is, I believe, why the UFO has been such a persistent motif in 20th century popular culture. We actually sense on the unconscious level a kind of approach of the end of time, a kind of closing distance between historical societies and some kind of truly mysterious, truly transcendental object that lies ahead of us in the near future. Returning to the subject of the psychedelics, their role in all of this is that they seem to pick up and amplify the signal coming off this mysterious object hidden in the future so that the contents of psychedelic experiences when laid end to end in a composite give a picture of what this final global integration is going to be like. An integration that is going to emerge as a phenomenon of culture, not out of our cultural artifacts or our technology but out of human organization itself.
We may have imagined many different scenarios, a future of technological and social innovation, but very few of us have imagined the possibility that the real agenda of shamanism would have to be taken seriously. Shamans are people who have learned to penetrate another dimension, a dimension where, for want of a better word, we would have to say the souls of the ancestors are somehow present. It isn't simply that we enter into the realm of the dead, it's more as though we discover that our world is the realm of the dead and that there is a higher dimensional world with greater degrees of freedom, with a greater sense of spontaneity and lesser dependency on the entropic world of matter, and that other universe is attempting to impinge into our own, perhaps to rescue us from our historical dilemma, we don't know. Perhaps shamans have always had commerce with these magical and invisible worlds and it's only the sad fate of Western human beings to have lost touch with this domain to the point where it comes to us as a kind of a revelation. You see, I believe that the whole fall into history, the whole rise of male dominance and patriarchy can be traced to a broken connection with the living world of the Gaian mind. The living world of the Gaian mind is what shamans access through psychoactive plants, and without psychoactive plants that access comes as no more than an unconfirmable rumor.
The human adventure has always been a flirtation with these gigantic forces in an unseen dimension. This is what sets our religions going, this is what creates gurus and messiahs and scientific breakthroughs, somehow we are in resonance with something much larger than ourselves, something which one could call the great attractor, the transcendental object at the end of time, the Gaian mind. Whatever it is, we, out of all of Nature, seem to have a special relationship to it and seem to be somehow both under its care and involved in its manifestation in 3-dimensional space. As we make our way across the historical landscape toward the sensed presence of this transcendental other, so it is making its way toward us through the content of dreams, psychedelic experiences and the careers of spiritually advanced people. History, which is a state of extreme instability and disequilibrium, lasts only fifteen or twenty thousand years. That history is about to be transformed or ended, that the factors that shaped history - phonetic alphabets, male dominance, materialism, scientific method, empiricism - these factors are about to be made obsolete by discoveries in the human and natural realm. We, the people of the high-tech civilizations, are like the prodigal son. We made a descent into matter. We have wandered many years in the wilderness.
Now, in a time of great planetary crisis, we must return to the tribal fold. We must take what we learned from our peregrination into history and return to the tribal model with it. Only in that way, then, can we reclaim our sexuality, our identities and reclaim the planet for itself. The styles that have evolved within history, the styles of male dominance, concern for tracing male lines of paternity, private property, control of females and so on, all this has arisen as a result of the establishing and maintaining of the ego. The ego is the function of the personality that is most at home and at ease within the context of history, but really the ego is like a calcareous tumor that arises within the dynamics of the psyche and lodges like a cancer or a tumor in the structures of the psyche. The only cure or treatment that I am aware of for the calcareous tumor of ego is frequently repeated exposure to psychedelic plants. This is the essence of their boundary-dissolving function, and twelve to twenty thousand years ago the ordinary style of human society was nomadic pastoralism and psychedelic intoxication on a schedule that was very probably lunar. Reclaiming that orgiastic boundaryless style of sexual relating is part of what the archaic revival is about.
I'm the purveyor of a bizarre notion, which was told to me by an elf troop. It's a formal mathematical notion that argues very strongly that we are headed toward a planetary transformation within our lifetimes, specifically around 2012, and this is not a political transformation, or a biological transformation, it's a transformation of the laws of physics themselves. The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of what I call the transcendental object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape into which we have fallen. The fury of 20th century culture is indicative of our nearness to this globally transformative moment. We are going to shed the monkey; the linguistic being that is symbiotic with these monkeys is about to disentangle itself from matter and realize some kind of angelic transformation very difficult for us to anticipate or understand.
...with Gottlieb's death, America has lost its prime poisoner
CIA's Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp
US Official Poisoner Dies
Sidney Gottlieb, who for more than two decades managed the CIA's Technical Services Division, died on March 10. His obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post tended to focus on Gottlieb's testing of LSD on himself and other CIA officers, portraying him as a kind of Merry Prankster, the CIA's very own Ken Kesey.
In fact, with Gottlieb's death, America has lost its prime poisoner. For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Gottlieb presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects. Gottlieb's passing came at a convenient time for the CIA, just as several new trials involving victims of its experiments were being brought. Those who had talked to Gottlieb in the past few years say that the chemist believed that the Agency was trying to make him the fall guy for the entire program. Some speculate that Gottlieb may have been ready to spill the goods on a wide range of CIA programs.
Incredibly, neither the Times nor the Post obituaries mention Gottlieb's crucial role in the death of Dr. Frank Olson, who worked for the US Army's biological weapons center at Fort Detrick. At a CIA sponsored retreat in rural Maryland on November 18, 1953, Gottlieb gave the unwitting Olson a glass of Cointreau liberally spiked with LSD. Olson developed psychotic symptoms soon thereafter and within a few days had plunged to his death from an upper floor room at the New York Statler-Hilton. Olson was sharing the room with Gottlieb's number two, a CIA man called Robert Lashbrook, who had taken the deranged man to see a CIA-sponsored medic called Harold Abramson who ran an allergy clinic at Mount Sinai, funded by Gottlieb to research LSD.
The night Olson made his terminally abrupt descent from the hotel window the New York police asked Lashbrook to turn out his pockets. On a piece of paper were initials GW and MH, identified later as George White and Morgan Hall, White's alias. White was retained by Gottlieb to run a CIA safehouse at 81 Bedford St in Greenwich Village, in cooperation with Harry Anslinger's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, for which White had previously worked. Gottlieb's men fixed up the house with one-way mirrors listening devices and secret cameras. From the fall of 1953 to the spring of the following year White threw parties on Bedford St, dosing his guests with sodium pentothal, Nembutal and of course LSD. Later White moved the CIA operation to San Francisco, with the same sort of set-up. He hired prostitutes to dose the guests, in an exercise known as Operation Midnight Climax. The encounter was filmed, on the walls White, put photos of women being tortured and whipped. Gottlieb flew out to visit the safe house at 225 Chestnut Street several times a year. Another senior CIA man, John Gittinger would interview the hookers about their drugs and sex habits.
Gottlieb was a man of darkness. He sponsored research by the infamous Dr Ewen Cameron, a world famous shrink who had clinic in Montreal at McGill where he dosed unwitting subjects (who had entered voluntarily for psychiatric treatment) with huge jolts of electricity through their brains, plus drugs plus lobotomies. Many people had their lives thus destroyed in Cameron's research, financed by Gottlieb and also by the Rockefeller Foundation. Cameron invented a particularly ghastly process called "psychic driving" whereby drugged and shocked patients, whom Cameron believed he had wiped clean of their previous personalities, would have tapes played sixteen hours a day, dictating their new personalities.
From time to time the patients, given Thorazine, Nebutal and Seconal, would be hauled off, administered amphetamines as a wake-up call, then get ECT at voltages forty times greater than was considered safe at the time. Cameron died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967. Gottlieb had finessed Cameron $60,000 in the late Fifties for his experiments. Eventually the CIA settled with some of Cameron's victims.
Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell's center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell's patients.
Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell's research notes indicate that he gave the men "quadruple" the "normal" dosages. The doctor marveled at the men's apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that "this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type."
In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin, inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions.
Gottlieb's research was never a case of pure science. He was a practical man. From the beginning, Gottlieb saw himself as part of the operational wing of the CIA. Even the forays into LSD research, Gottlieb saw a testing for a potential chemical warfare weapon. He arranged a contract with Eli Lily to produce synthetic LSD "in tonnage quantities." The aim was to have enough acid to incapacitate large populations and armies.
By the early 1960s Gottlieb's techniques and potions were being fully deployed in the field. Well-known is Gottlieb's journey to the Congo, where his little black bag held an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumba's toothbrush. He also tried to manage Iraq's general Kassim with a handkerchief doctored with botulinum and there were the endless poisons directed at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela on November 22, 1963.
Even less well remembered is one mission in the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam in July of 1968. A team of CIA psychologists set up shop at Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon, where NLF suspects were being held after Phoenix Program round-ups. The psychologists performed a variety of experiments on the prisoners. In one, three prisoners were anaesthetized; their skulls were opened and electrodes implanted by CIA doctors into different parts of their brains. The prisoners were revived, placed in a room with knives and the electrodes in the brains activated by the psychiatrists, who were covertly observing them. The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other. The experiments failed. The electrodes were removed, the patients were shot and their bodies burned.
US Official Poisoner Dies
Sidney Gottlieb, who for more than two decades managed the CIA's Technical Services Division, died on March 10. His obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post tended to focus on Gottlieb's testing of LSD on himself and other CIA officers, portraying him as a kind of Merry Prankster, the CIA's very own Ken Kesey.
In fact, with Gottlieb's death, America has lost its prime poisoner. For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Gottlieb presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects. Gottlieb's passing came at a convenient time for the CIA, just as several new trials involving victims of its experiments were being brought. Those who had talked to Gottlieb in the past few years say that the chemist believed that the Agency was trying to make him the fall guy for the entire program. Some speculate that Gottlieb may have been ready to spill the goods on a wide range of CIA programs.
Incredibly, neither the Times nor the Post obituaries mention Gottlieb's crucial role in the death of Dr. Frank Olson, who worked for the US Army's biological weapons center at Fort Detrick. At a CIA sponsored retreat in rural Maryland on November 18, 1953, Gottlieb gave the unwitting Olson a glass of Cointreau liberally spiked with LSD. Olson developed psychotic symptoms soon thereafter and within a few days had plunged to his death from an upper floor room at the New York Statler-Hilton. Olson was sharing the room with Gottlieb's number two, a CIA man called Robert Lashbrook, who had taken the deranged man to see a CIA-sponsored medic called Harold Abramson who ran an allergy clinic at Mount Sinai, funded by Gottlieb to research LSD.
The night Olson made his terminally abrupt descent from the hotel window the New York police asked Lashbrook to turn out his pockets. On a piece of paper were initials GW and MH, identified later as George White and Morgan Hall, White's alias. White was retained by Gottlieb to run a CIA safehouse at 81 Bedford St in Greenwich Village, in cooperation with Harry Anslinger's Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, for which White had previously worked. Gottlieb's men fixed up the house with one-way mirrors listening devices and secret cameras. From the fall of 1953 to the spring of the following year White threw parties on Bedford St, dosing his guests with sodium pentothal, Nembutal and of course LSD. Later White moved the CIA operation to San Francisco, with the same sort of set-up. He hired prostitutes to dose the guests, in an exercise known as Operation Midnight Climax. The encounter was filmed, on the walls White, put photos of women being tortured and whipped. Gottlieb flew out to visit the safe house at 225 Chestnut Street several times a year. Another senior CIA man, John Gittinger would interview the hookers about their drugs and sex habits.
Gottlieb was a man of darkness. He sponsored research by the infamous Dr Ewen Cameron, a world famous shrink who had clinic in Montreal at McGill where he dosed unwitting subjects (who had entered voluntarily for psychiatric treatment) with huge jolts of electricity through their brains, plus drugs plus lobotomies. Many people had their lives thus destroyed in Cameron's research, financed by Gottlieb and also by the Rockefeller Foundation. Cameron invented a particularly ghastly process called "psychic driving" whereby drugged and shocked patients, whom Cameron believed he had wiped clean of their previous personalities, would have tapes played sixteen hours a day, dictating their new personalities.
From time to time the patients, given Thorazine, Nebutal and Seconal, would be hauled off, administered amphetamines as a wake-up call, then get ECT at voltages forty times greater than was considered safe at the time. Cameron died of a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967. Gottlieb had finessed Cameron $60,000 in the late Fifties for his experiments. Eventually the CIA settled with some of Cameron's victims.
Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell's center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell's patients.
Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell's research notes indicate that he gave the men "quadruple" the "normal" dosages. The doctor marveled at the men's apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that "this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type."
In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin, inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions.
Gottlieb's research was never a case of pure science. He was a practical man. From the beginning, Gottlieb saw himself as part of the operational wing of the CIA. Even the forays into LSD research, Gottlieb saw a testing for a potential chemical warfare weapon. He arranged a contract with Eli Lily to produce synthetic LSD "in tonnage quantities." The aim was to have enough acid to incapacitate large populations and armies.
By the early 1960s Gottlieb's techniques and potions were being fully deployed in the field. Well-known is Gottlieb's journey to the Congo, where his little black bag held an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumba's toothbrush. He also tried to manage Iraq's general Kassim with a handkerchief doctored with botulinum and there were the endless poisons directed at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela on November 22, 1963.
Even less well remembered is one mission in the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam in July of 1968. A team of CIA psychologists set up shop at Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon, where NLF suspects were being held after Phoenix Program round-ups. The psychologists performed a variety of experiments on the prisoners. In one, three prisoners were anaesthetized; their skulls were opened and electrodes implanted by CIA doctors into different parts of their brains. The prisoners were revived, placed in a room with knives and the electrodes in the brains activated by the psychiatrists, who were covertly observing them. The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other. The experiments failed. The electrodes were removed, the patients were shot and their bodies burned.
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