The Great Elf Debate

Six hundred fractal thank yous to everyone (yep, 600 folk) who made it along to Canterbury at the beginning of April for the extraordinary Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness extravaganza, Breaking Convention. After a sleepless few days chipping away at the coalface of the new neurochemical renaissance there emerged a number of legendary quotes, cries of an epic and historic weekend, oodles of inspired blog reviews and even the odd manifesto manifesting online - all of which have been assembled here for your delight.

Attempting to bring as many of the departed Breakeros back together again, the ECC salon will now resume this Tuesday 19th April (tomorrow) at the October Gallery, Bloomsbury, London, in an effort to bridge the hyperdimensional divide between Kent's Breaking Convention and Daimonic Imagination with The Great Elf Debate, which will be led, widdershins, by Dr David Luke with help from friends. Elves, induced by DMT or otherwise, are of course a hot topic on Psychopraxis.

The Great Elf Debate

Dr David Luke + friends + you

Tuesday, 19^th April, 2011

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL

Please RSVP on Facebook (afraid so) so that we can anticipate numbers – Please pay on the door.

Entry £7 /£5 Concessions, Arrive 6pm for a 6:30pm Start - Wine available

A few saucy comments and mischievous taunts and counter-taunts to get the ball rolling on the ontology of elves and then over to the good people of the floor to take the debate on a merry dance. We'll throw in some DMT, mushrooms, aliens and preying mantises into the faerie ring for good measure and then probe the audience for some thoughts on imps, piskies, gnomes, self-transforming machine elves and possible pro bono proctologists. Representatives from the Social Constructivist quad and from Tir Na Nog will be on hand to stir the pot.

Dr David Luke directs and curates the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lecture series at the October Gallery, which occasionally zoops off in new and interesting co-creative directions like the Breaking Convention. He has often considered taking McKenna up on his elfin call for creating an embassy for the invisible but is really just too busy being a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich, the President of the Parapsychological Association, a Research Associate of the Beckley Foundation, a guest lecturer on the transpersonal masters at the University of Northampton, and an explorer of lost pirate utopias. He hasn't written a single book but promises to finish editing the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness anthology very soon.

Taking the mush out of mushrooms: Forthcoming Letcher lecture

Attempting to unravel some of the mycelial-like myths and mysteries that pop up in the mush surrounding the magic mushroom, Dr Andy Letcher will be deconstructing the cultural history constructed around fungal cultures this month at the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lecture series. See you all down the rabbit hole on Tuesday, 24^th November at the October Gallery for a reinvigorating mycophilic gathering in true salon style.

Making Sense of Magic Mushrooms

Dr Andy Letcher

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL

(Tel: 44 (0)20 7831 1618). – email: rentals AT octobergallery.co.uk

RSVP so that we can anticipate numbers – Please book in advance by credit card to guarantee a place or pay on the door.

Entry £7 /£5 Concessions, Arrive 6pm for a 6:30pm Start - Wine available

For those who have encountered magic mushrooms, the psilocybin experience is like an ancient codex whose glyphs are at once baffling and clear. To make sense of it, each person must perform an act of translation or interpretation by which the strange is rendered familiar. But how should this be done? In the post-war period alone an original psychological framework has given way to that of mysticism, itself replaced in turn by the language of shamanism.

In this talk, Andy Letcher will encourage us to move away from the mushroom experience itself – the usual province of trip-lit –, to a consideration of how it has been interpreted throughout history. For, contrary to received wisdom, very few cultures have decoded the mushroom as we do. Along the way he will ask whether magic mushrooms bring genuine transcendence, or if the experiences they occasion forever bound by culture.

Andy Letcher is a freelance writer, academic lecturer and folk musician living in Oxford, UK. He lectures at Oxford Brookes University and Bath Spa University on subjects as diverse as neo-Paganism, shamanism, and theory in the Study of Religion. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom and Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms: Discourse and Power in the Study of Psychedelic Consciousness, published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness. Known for his iconoclastic style, and with doctorates in both Ecology and the Study of Religion, he challenges us to question received wisdom about psychedelics and psychedelic history. A prolific song-writer, tunesmith and exponent of English Bagpipes, he fronts psych-folk band, Telling the Bees.

Asking DMT entities to solve maths homework... not as weird as it sounds?

Following on from the trialogue on the ontology of Discarnate Entities by Sheldrake, McKenna and Abrams, I thought it topical to put up a link to a recent paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration that proposes a methodology for studying the reality of DMT entity encounters. For those who don’t know, DMT is an extremely potent psychedelic substance that is found naturally in the human brain and which, if consumed, quite often gives rise to the meeting of extraordinary entities. Although these meetings generally take place in one’s “mind space” (whatever that is) they are of such an ineffable and numinous nature that many people tend to be convinced of the reality of the seemingly sentient beings that they meet, often causing considerable turbulence to one’s sense of what reality really is.

Grossly simplified, the admirable article by Marko Rodriguez proposes obtaining from the entities solutions to complex mathematics puzzles that the DMT experient does not know. Regrettably, this ingenious method for testing the independent existence of entities encountered on DMT is subject to a number of flaws, not least of which are the huge assumptions involved in expecting our supposed hyper-intelligent beings actually having the desire to cooperate and make themselves proven (let alone the DMT experient’s capability to ask them). The most crippling problem for his test, however, is what is known as the "super-psi hypothesis"; an issue long proved difficult to surmount in parapsychological attempts to validate the existence of discarnate entities considered spirits of the dead, e.g. those apparently communicating via trance mediums.

The problem is that, because clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition (collectively called psi) have no theoretical (or even apparent) limits, it always remains a possibility that any information provided by ostensibly discarnate entities may actually be due to the “super” psi of the person (e.g., the medium) receiving the information. One of the most cogent articles on the super-psi hypothesis in relation to survival after death comes from Prof. Stephen Braude and also appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration several years earlier in 1992. Anyway here’s the abstract of the Rodriguez paper and a link to the full pdf.

A Methodology for Studying Various Interpretations of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality

N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, is an endogenous psychoactive chemical that has been shown through repeated human subject experimentation to provide the subject with a perception of an ‘alternate reality’. When administered a sufficient DMT dose, subjects have reported the presence of intelligent beings that do not appear to be the projections of their subconscious in the Freudian sense. Furthermore, and of particular interest to this article, many subjects believe that the percieved alternate reality is persistent in that it exists irrespective of their subjective momentary perception. Past research into the DMT-induced alternate reality comes solely from subject testimonies and to date, no analysis has been conducted to understand the objective aspects of these extraordinary subjective claims. This article provides a methodology for studying the nature of the DMT-induced alternate reality by means of various simple information theory experiments. These experiments can be used to test which of the presented interpretations of the DMT-induced alternate reality appears most plausible.

Trialogue on discarnate entities

Concordant with a talk I gave a couple of weeks ago about DMT and discarnate entities, Rupert Sheldrake (just for a change) has just announced the online release of the ninth in the series of trialogues between Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and, well, Rupert Sheldrake of course. The three heavy weight thinkers conduct one of their classic brain-offs and rap about entities in all their glorious (dis) incarnations, be they angelic or psychedelic. Mckenna's call for an embassy for the invisible has a certain appeal...

Are disincarnate and non-human entities mental projections or non-physical, autonomous entities? What can we learn from them? Their variety and persistence in human history. Early modern science and angelic communication. The shamanic model. The aversion to the irrational in Christianity and science. The need to analyze the entities’ messages. A mathematical model of body, soul and spirit. Entities as inhabitants of the spiritual domain of the logos. The evolution of their multifarious representations. The dogma of purgatory. Contacting these entities through dreams and psychedelics. The deepest layers of the faery tradition. Metaphors of light? Entities as artificers and their use of language. Is the world soul behind these entities?

Part one of two