Program Notes
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Guest speakers:
Kat Lakey, Alexa Lakey, Julie Holland, Julian Vayne, and Ralf Jeutter
Today we continue our reading of Leonard Pickard’s novel, The Rose of Paracelsus. Chapter 4 is read by author and occultist Julian Vayne who was also featured in our introduction to this series. The reading of Chapter 4 is followed by commentary by Ralf Jeutter. Before the reading and commentary, Dr. Julie Holland tells about her recent conversation with Leonard Pickard.
Archive of Previous Podcasts FeaturingThe Rose of Paracelsus
Indigo’s Delivery: An Excerpt from The Rose of Paracelsus from The Oak Tree Review
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And today we’re going to continue our reading of Leonard Picard’s novel, The Rose of Paracelsus.
00:00:31 ►
Chapter 4 is going to be read by author and occultist, Julian Vane.
00:00:36 ►
As you may recall, Julian was also featured in our introduction to this series.
00:00:41 ►
And the reading of Chapter 4 will be followed by commentary from Dr. Ralph Judder.
00:00:48 ►
Before the reading and commentary, however, Dr. Julie Holland tells us about a recent
00:00:53 ►
conversation that she had with Leonard Picard. Now in the program notes for today’s podcast,
00:00:59 ►
which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com, I’ve posted a link to the archive of our other podcasts
00:01:06 ►
that feature The Rose of Paracelsus.
00:01:09 ►
In addition to these first four chapters,
00:01:11 ►
there are also two supplementary podcasts,
00:01:13 ►
and one of those provides an overview of this entire series.
00:01:18 ►
Now, here are Kat and Alexa Lakey,
00:01:21 ►
who will introduce their podcast of Chapter 4
00:01:24 ►
of Leonard Picard’s The Rose of Paracelsus.
00:01:34 ►
Hello, and welcome to the next episode of the Rose of Paracelsus podcast. I’m your host, Kat.
00:01:40 ►
And my name’s Alexa. Chapter 4, titled Edelweiss, will be read by author and occultist Julian Vane.
00:01:48 ►
You may remember Julian from the introductory episode to this podcast series,
00:01:52 ►
where he and Nikki Weird discussed the various excerpts we aired from the book.
00:01:56 ►
After the chapter concludes, we’ll play some commentary on the reading by Homeric scholar Ralph Juder.
00:02:02 ►
Ralph also recorded the commentary to Chapter 1 of the series alongside Neche Devanel. But first, we’re going to play a short recording
00:02:09 ►
from Dr. Julie Holland. Dr. Holland was also featured in the introductory episode, where
00:02:14 ►
she provided a beautiful personal story of an encounter she had with Leonard in Amsterdam
00:02:18 ►
years ago. Here, in a notably lighter tone, Dr. Holland discusses her ongoing friendship
00:02:24 ►
with Leonard after his remarkable release from prison last July and how he’s been adjusting to life in 2021.
00:02:31 ►
Hey there, all you psychedelic pandemic cats and kittens.
00:02:37 ►
This is Dr. Julie Holland, psychiatrist and author, here to welcome you to the continued
00:02:44 ►
readings of The Rose of Paracelsus.
00:02:49 ►
I was very fortunate to speak to Leonard last week, and it was lovely.
00:02:54 ►
Although I’ve spoken to him several times over the past two decades or so, it was a
00:03:01 ►
really magical experience to be able to talk to him when he is finally on the outside and he is full of gratitude and wonder at the mystery and mysticism, um, that imbues our everyday life that we carry with us
00:03:25 ►
and the ability to be connected with so many people simultaneously.
00:03:29 ►
He is really marveling at the technology and the magic
00:03:33 ►
and the connections that the technology enables.
00:03:37 ►
So I wanted to pass that along to you all.
00:03:40 ►
I know that we are living in crazy times.
00:03:45 ►
I mean, can you imagine being egested from prison into COVID and Trump and attempted coups?
00:03:56 ►
Things are pretty crazy here.
00:03:58 ►
And luckily, like myself, Leonard is very comfortable with insanity and chaos and things not always making sense. So
00:04:08 ►
with that, I bid you peace and resilience. And I know that Leonard bids you love. And we both
00:04:19 ►
encourage you to find the wonder and mystery and mysticism in our everyday existence.
00:04:25 ►
Enjoy, please, the next few chapters of The Rose of Paracelsus.
00:04:32 ►
Chapter four is one of our personal favorites in The Rose of Paracelsus.
00:04:37 ►
Henrik Dahl featured a section from it in his wonderful written piece called Indigo’s Delivery.
00:04:42 ►
We’ll link to this article in the Oak Tree Review in the description of the episode. For those of you following along at home,
00:04:49 ►
this chapter starts on page 100. So, without further ado, here’s Julian Vane.
00:04:58 ►
- Into the Mystic. I come now to the ineffable centre of my tale.
00:05:05 ►
It is here a writer’s hopelessness begins.
00:05:09 ►
J. L. B. The Aleph.
00:05:12 ►
She said it was like a fog coming over her face,
00:05:15 ►
and light was everywhere, and a soft voice saying,
00:05:19 ►
You can stop crying now.
00:05:22 ►
Kenneth Patchen, Do the Dead Know What Time It Is, in Collected Poems
00:05:27 ►
We were born before the wind, ah, so much warmer than the sun,
00:05:33 ►
and we shall sail as one into the mystic.
00:05:37 ►
Apologies, Van Morrison, into the mystic.
00:05:42 ►
Chapter 4. Edelweiss. The company, with godlike modesty, shuns all publicity.
00:05:51 ►
Its agents, of course, are secret. Yet another declares that the company affects only small
00:05:56 ►
things, the crying of a bird, the half-dreams that come at morning. And others whispered,
00:06:06 ►
dreams that come at morning, and others whispered, the company has never existed and never will.
00:06:19 ►
J.L.B. Lottery in Babylon. His eyes trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world.
00:06:27 ►
Joyce, a portrait of the artist as a young man.
00:06:33 ►
Above my head, various sopranos floating in spasms of miraculous sunlight.
00:06:40 ►
There are fires on the sea and wandering tongues in the meadow.
00:07:14 ►
The telephones whisper together george hitchcock messages we have removed thy veil and thy sight is piercing quran Salzburg’s baroque churches and towers flowed past the Mercedes on this few days’ exploration after interviews in Vienna at the United Nations Drug Control Programme.
00:07:24 ►
My driver and I slowed at the Mirabelle Platz, passing a few ruddy, fair and beaming Austrians in lederhosen and tyrolean caps. Already out to the early morning,
00:07:27 ►
their knee-length stockings had sheaths with hunting knives. Departing my room at the
00:07:33 ►
Goldene Hirsch, I walked over the Stasbrücke on the River Salzach. The sunrise now lighting
00:07:40 ►
homes on the great hill of the Fester Hohenzalzburg and far beyond the snows
00:07:46 ►
on the looming Munchberg, the Monk’s Mountain. Wandering before inexpensive cafes, crowded with
00:07:53 ►
Salzburgers consuming schnitzel with coffee and steinhager at thirty shillings, I noticed near
00:08:00 ►
the bridge a striking young woman in bright blonde braids.
00:08:06 ►
She was not unlike the lissom student from Maastricht on the Folsom bus with Crimson.
00:08:12 ►
Glancing my way, the girl darted down the Linzergasse and back over the bridge.
00:08:19 ►
I assessed improbabilities and dismissed the coincidental.
00:08:23 ►
I assessed improbabilities and dismissed the coincidental.
00:08:28 ►
I rested at a café where locals were eating cakes and drinking doppelespressos or glasses of pink Himbersaft.
00:08:33 ►
An elongated, bespectacled man with a professional air appeared outside,
00:08:38 ►
then approached a string quartet that had settled near the café window.
00:08:43 ►
In his late fifties, but emanating the wiry
00:08:46 ►
strength of a marathon runner, he made a silent request to a woman with a viola.
00:08:52 ►
Entering, he looked about absently, then, as commonly done in Europe, asked if he might
00:08:57 ►
share my table. I nodded. He possessed a fine bearing. Wearing a perfectly cut but frayed herringbone jacket he was meticulous in unfolding a freshly ironed copy of the morning newspaper sansberger nachrichten visiting faculty down from the Universitat, or his lodgings at a thrifty pension.
00:09:26 ►
Sitting erect, he applied a certain focused thought to his reading.
00:09:31 ►
His watch was forgettable, some cheap plastic Timex.
00:09:35 ►
By contrast, his barely perceptible scent was that of an expensive French cologne,
00:09:42 ►
with a base of ambergris and roses,
00:09:46 ►
perhaps from a recent and heated assignation.
00:09:50 ►
In flawless Oesterreich dialect, he ordered only peppermint tea, no sugar.
00:09:57 ►
Folding the Nachrichten, he withdrew from his pocket
00:10:00 ►
a well-thumbed and annotated copy of Herodotus’ The Histories. He began to read,
00:10:07 ►
occasionally murmuring Greek phrases, and once audibly mentioning Lycurgus, the lawgiver of
00:10:14 ►
Sparta, in his training of young warriors. I listened to Donizetti’s Les Elise d’Amour being played by the itinerant quartet.
00:10:26 ►
After some time at our ease, and my second cup of tea,
00:10:30 ►
he reached into his other pocket, and in an almost surreptitious move,
00:10:35 ►
laid upon the scarred wooden table a well-used, studio-sized,
00:10:41 ►
crinkled metal tube of Windsor and Newton oil colour, a finely ground pigment in linseed oil.
00:10:50 ►
At this inexplicable gesture he kept reading. As the music and the moment coalesced in wild
00:10:56 ►
comprehension, I thrilled to realise the Donizetti was the elixir of love, and the oil paint was indigo. Fearing an overture to one of the six
00:11:09 ►
might be a foolish mistake, I said nothing. He placed his teacup upon the saucer and turned a
00:11:17 ►
page of the Herodotus, fixing on the Windsor and Newton. I then looked hopefully up at him,
00:11:27 ►
my senses alive with the conundrum of casual encounter in Europe
00:11:29 ►
being a carefully wrought surveillance coup.
00:11:34 ►
As amicably as an old and dear friend
00:11:37 ►
on a summer’s afternoon,
00:11:39 ►
he paid both our bills
00:11:40 ►
and made a quiet invitation.
00:11:43 ►
Shall we?
00:11:50 ►
I could only stumble beside him into the Salzburg light. Only hours before, Indigo and the others of the six were nameless, numbered files lost
00:11:59 ►
in the massive database of the UN Precursor Control Programme, an intelligence clearinghouse for
00:12:06 ►
heavily armed worldwide police agencies that enforce entombment or death for the actors of
00:12:14 ►
violent drug cartels. Yet this tranquil scholar seemed vulnerable and alone. Le leading me carefully through the narrow seventeenth-century alleys, crowded with Salzburgers,
00:12:28 ►
past the pushcarts of fruits and vegetables, onto the Sigmunderplatz, then at leisure down
00:12:37 ►
the Getreidestraße to stand in homage before the house of Mozart’s birth. He finally arrived at the Gestalten Tor,
00:12:47 ►
one of the old gates of the city,
00:12:49 ►
where we were confined to a single lane.
00:12:54 ►
To my delight, he proved to be an eager walker,
00:12:57 ►
so we began following the river,
00:13:00 ►
ranging beyond the rural villas and farms
00:13:03 ►
to a considerable altitude above the Munchberg,
00:13:06 ►
we rested against an outcrop of stones inscribed with lichens,
00:13:11 ►
a derelict wall from the reign of the learned Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich II.
00:13:18 ►
Before us, a very young farm girl in a dirtled skirt appeared.
00:13:26 ►
With a long, thin stick, she gently guided her flock of waddling imperial geese and goslings slowly across our path, all in a single row.
00:13:38 ►
Ach, Oesterreich, Indigo whispered.
00:13:43 ►
Hailing an Austrian, the smiling girl, he fell in behind the geese.
00:13:48 ►
I followed as well, for the day had unravelled into illimitable possibilities.
00:13:54 ►
And at this lovely encounter, the razor wire of the UN fortress was forgotten.
00:14:01 ►
He motioned for me to sit at a rude, hand-hewn picnic table under a spreading black oak,
00:14:10 ►
then disappeared into a nearby farmhouse,
00:14:13 ►
returning with a pitcher of homemade kia and bowls of blueberries.
00:14:19 ►
We sat for a while.
00:14:20 ►
I was dumbfounded and unprotected by my notes or questions
00:14:25 ►
in the unheralded informal presence of one of the most hunted people in the hemisphere,
00:14:31 ►
a primary Interpol target, and one of the six.
00:14:36 ►
In this pleasant setting, we nibbled on our blueberries,
00:14:41 ►
teetering between opposing and highly trained teams of operatives, those
00:14:47 ►
elusive acolytes of his singular colleagues and the world’s law enforcement agencies.
00:14:54 ►
All the while we exchange thoughts on the pleasures of the opera and the staging of
00:14:59 ►
Salzburg of the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Dissalbeflut.
00:15:07 ►
Salzburg of the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Dissalboflot. In this no-man’s-land of beautiful afternoon, we were protected, it seemed, only by the light and grace of a little girl,
00:15:13 ►
with her harmless armada of pet geese. Possibly I was very fatigued at this altitude,
00:15:22 ►
or disarmed by the bucolic scene, but the moment magnified intensely,
00:15:27 ►
as when tongues of silver waves broke into permutations under Crimson’s hypnotic fireside voice.
00:15:35 ►
Partaking of the kia, I gazed past Indigo, at the verdant hills, cascading down into Salzburgburg as they infused with radiant beams with shifting rainbows over softly grazing sheep and pastoral huts and crystalline streams as if one were as a cone of silence descended. Yet I could hear simultaneously
00:16:07 ►
a brook flowing kilometres away, and a pine cone dropping through tiers of branches in the
00:16:14 ►
descending forest, and indigoes, many and distant voices, and the sound of a far cowbell ringing like a vicar’s summons. The wind in great sussurans moved over terraced lands,
00:16:30 ►
and patches of thistles and Queen Anne’s lace, as if all were the comforting wish of a restful deity.
00:16:39 ►
The brilliant azure sky was ablaze with heaven’s light, a transparent canopy of portentous colours.
00:16:47 ►
It was not ominous, but inescapable and absolute, like a state of grace.
00:16:54 ►
Breathing deeply, I at last could only submit to the glory.
00:16:59 ►
Through the tunnel of my introspection, indigoes murmur separated from the streams and birds and thunderous quiet of the alpine valleys.
00:17:10 ►
He had a companionable and easy mirth, as though resting on a hike with friends,
00:17:14 ►
but his words were of a different order entirely, and not for the common ear.
00:17:20 ►
I leaned into his delivery physically, to manage somehow the startling rate of information, but also to not panic.
00:17:29 ►
I comprehended his words only in mid-sentence.
00:17:34 ►
And we are one organism, that small community of makers, as you know.
00:17:47 ►
as you know. So I’m aware that Crimson discerned your mind can now, after the initial disclosures,
00:17:53 ►
increasingly received transmission of data at the light speed of cognition. I’m crossing dimensions within and subconsciously beyond the limits of human speech. You remember that,
00:17:59 ►
other than syntheses common to all, I consider ritual preparation of Eucharists and secure transfer of labsites, but can speak to the concerns of crimson, vermilion, magenta and cobalt.
00:18:43 ►
His voices ranged from an indefinable Eastern European accent, to that of the Nebraskan plains, to the flat vowels of the Georgian Piedmont, to a spectrum of British class dialects, Cockney, to Augsburgian, to a Dorset Burr, to vernaculars from sooty mining villages in the iron and coal fields of Derbyshire. He was either a tour de force of mimicry,
00:18:47 ►
or from immersion in widely different linguistic habitats,
00:18:51 ►
like a traveller who was never in repose sufficiently for a single identity to form.
00:18:58 ►
Sensing my discomfort, he settled upon the precise pronunciation of British public schools.
00:19:04 ►
settled upon the precise pronunciation of British public schools.
00:19:11 ►
Old Harovian, with a periodic twang of educated 19th century Midlands English.
00:19:17 ►
He mused so very quickly, in a soliloquy of images,
00:19:21 ►
casting visions and experiences in a kaleidoscopic manner.
00:19:28 ►
His spinning globe of discrete realities, unwound with such rapidity it seemed as though I were a child only beginning to read or think or grasp words
00:19:35 ►
from a distant future civilization towards which one inexorably was being swept.
00:19:49 ►
one inexorably was being swept. Indigo’s delivery at first seemed dialectic, frenzied, then a harmonious subliminal transfer of data and dreams, and effectively unknown esoterica involving the
00:19:56 ►
discovery of LSD’s subjective effects on April 16th 1943 by Dr Albert Hoffman at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel. Through the second
00:20:07 ►
human exposure of Dr Waterstol, then its secret proliferation among the pharmaceutical heads at
00:20:14 ►
Sandoz, and thereafter spreading from person to person like a sea of radiance. I glanced about.
00:20:28 ►
of radiance. I glanced about. There were dream trees breathing, and the drifting of dark owls.
00:20:37 ►
The ground rotated with intersecting mandalas. Above us was translucent divine machinery.
00:20:47 ►
There were great wheels in the sky. I listened again to him. He described their sacrament being given reverentially,
00:20:53 ►
a magical gift, throughout the community of Jungian analysts from Berlin to Zurich.
00:21:02 ►
Then its adoption by CIA in Operation MK Ultra, and the human subjects exposed to the substance at 80 universities. He reflected on the first clandestine labs,
00:21:08 ►
and the great public distributions of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love,
00:21:12 ►
of Augustus Owsley Stanley, and Nick Sand, and Tim Scully.
00:21:18 ►
He finally alluded to the rise of the Six, he among them,
00:21:21 ►
and how their identities and movements remained mythopoetic,
00:21:26 ►
and as yet undisturbed. I could only receive his words. Everything he said seemed finely crafted
00:21:35 ►
as diamond sutras, then structured into Alexandrians, his perfect poetic forms almost Homeric in their profundity.
00:21:47 ►
I felt like the barbarian Drokoth when he first witnessed the temples, statues, arches and marble amphora of Ravenna,
00:21:57 ►
and who deserted his raging and primitive hordes to defend the pristine city.
00:22:08 ►
raging and primitive hordes to defend the pristine city. I felt, as Borges described the rude warrior,
00:22:15 ►
stunned before the magnificence of stonework and fountains and art, the very devices of advanced thought, as we would be struck today by a complex machine whose purpose we know not,
00:22:21 ►
but in whose design we sense an immortal intelligence at work.
00:22:26 ►
He ceased speaking. There remained only the water music of invisible brooks.
00:22:32 ►
The last silken threads of insight receded from my understanding. Mere fragments and tendrils
00:22:38 ►
of mind could be recalled from the light storm of data that had passed through me.
00:22:44 ►
From such blessed forgetting,
00:22:46 ►
one might hope to retain a certain normalcy. But throughout our encounter this day and night,
00:22:52 ►
the phenomena reoccurred in the form of waves, with some magic frequency, quintessent, then raging,
00:23:00 ►
then archaic silence, then the roar of creation, then an unutterable and calm abiding.
00:23:09 ►
As I raised my eyes, a host of cheerful finches blossomed overhead, while in the distant valleys
00:23:18 ►
sunlight glistened matchlessly. Shifting masses of air moved like the breath of slumbering transparent dragons.
00:23:28 ►
Perfumed Arabian oases gathered in the painted pastoral landscapes,
00:23:34 ►
appearing and disappearing in the fecund ground of being. For an instant, it suddenly all passed, becoming simply a still, sublime afternoon of gratitude and relief.
00:23:50 ►
Above us, a bluebird was singing, attending its young.
00:23:57 ►
There was a tug at my shirt sleeves.
00:24:00 ►
The young shepherdess, now angelic in the sky-blue shift, curtsied brightly and placed a plate of cheese and fresh black bread on the oaken table.
00:24:10 ►
Dankeschön, meine Fräulein, bitte, I managed, but Indigo offered her a present in return, a simple and delicate being.
00:24:18 ►
She stood transfixed as he lifted his voice and softly sang Edelweiss to her.
00:24:24 ►
as he lifted his voice and softly sang Edelweiss to her.
00:24:28 ►
Small and white, clean and bright,
00:24:30 ►
you look happy to meet me.
00:24:33 ►
Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow,
00:24:35 ►
bloom and grow forever.
00:24:40 ►
And it was surprising to hear the Austrian lass ask in Dutch if he would sing it once more.
00:24:43 ►
Remarkably, he did.
00:24:45 ►
This transnational cypipher, this wanted man,
00:24:48 ►
became for the little girl a fluent Hollander,
00:24:51 ►
a gentle kindergarten teacher from Utrecht. in dust to tear them. Blossom from snow,
00:25:07 ►
did a storm to start,
00:25:10 ►
lard the wind my loom.
00:25:12 ►
As he sang, she danced,
00:25:16 ►
twirling her pretty skirt in great circles,
00:25:18 ►
arms out and barefoot with her white golden ringlets loosing,
00:25:21 ►
eyes closed and face lifted to the sun.
00:25:28 ►
At the end, she hovered motionless before us until there was only the sound of the alpine breeze. In an endearing, childlike gesture
00:25:35 ►
of delight, she smiled and clapped her hands and curtsied again, then skipped gaily to the thatched
00:25:41 ►
roof farmhouse through the garden of herbs, with its rows of rosemary, sage and hyssop.
00:25:48 ►
At this benign vision, Indigo suggested that our peak experience hardly could be surpassed,
00:25:54 ►
so that after sharing the bread and cheese, we might wander downward along the many trails,
00:25:59 ►
through copses of pine and birch, to Salzburg, to listen to the Vesper bells.
00:26:05 ►
through copses of pine and birch, to Salzburg to listen to the Vesper bells.
00:26:11 ►
He withdrew from his jacket a small German edition of The Secret Garden,
00:26:18 ►
carefully inscribing it on the flyleaf and leaving it as a present for the child shepherdess.
00:26:26 ►
As though he knew her, he dedicated it with affection, Blumey, Swiss-German for little flower. I stood, collecting our things as the sky and earth turned into blissful motion.
00:26:33 ►
Yolked again only lightly to our bodies, we descended under the firmament’s still billowing spectacle.
00:26:40 ►
Alpine cows with hooves of ivory load on far ridges resonant like tibetan prayer-horns guiding pilgrims to the transcendent our very core was perfused with the countless thoughts and rivers of light restorative, and the lower altitude settling, so that my charter to question indigo again seemed
00:27:07 ►
urgent, yet now impertinent. How does it feel to make millions of doses? Hundreds of millions,
00:27:17 ►
he returned. For each of us, the average batch is now over 800 grams, twice the lifetime output of Owsley, some 16 million doses every month or so.
00:27:31 ►
But how do you bear it?
00:27:33 ►
After the changes, all that is left is humility, he said, simply and finally, deflecting further inquiry.
00:27:43 ►
We pressed on through the failing light towards the still small town of Salzburg,
00:27:49 ►
our bodies loose and flowing, conversing on the way.
00:27:54 ►
The beckoning night became oddly rosé,
00:27:58 ►
our steps soft as if the very grass were warm fleece.
00:28:03 ►
On a long trail through groves of beaches
00:28:06 ►
he grew ever more genial and our hearts were light.
00:28:10 ►
We glimpsed hares and foxes and ptarmigans
00:28:13 ►
and saw to the far high valleys the Vorarlberg in the Alps.
00:28:20 ►
A million leaves moved in the windless twilight.
00:28:25 ►
Encountering a rocky fall of talus, we began picking our way carefully around the massive
00:28:30 ►
granite boulders. To Indigo, the obstruction appeared as some omen. Without explanation,
00:28:37 ►
he began alluding to my prior interlocutor at the mythic fireside. In this sensitive state,
00:28:46 ►
to Locutor at the mythic fireside. In this sensitive state, his unexpected disclosures were abrupt, jolting, like the buffeting of a cold, sharp wind. And you are aware of Crimson’s
00:28:54 ►
most valiant security measure. I know only of the Washington rules. At this, Indigo disclosed
00:29:01 ►
a highly sophisticated operation of the Six, the reality of which I, at the time, did not fully grasp.
00:29:08 ►
For the first deployments to large populations of a technologically advanced psychoactive such as LSD, ruthlessly creative techniques were required.
00:29:20 ►
Can you tell me of them?
00:29:23 ►
The next wave came upon us.
00:29:26 ►
Forests of holy trees began crystallising from the jewelled earth,
00:29:30 ►
rising like great repositories of molecular information.
00:29:34 ►
Listen carefully, he said.
00:29:37 ►
Crimson conceived of the psychedelic project Ivy Mike.
00:29:41 ►
Does the name have meaning?
00:29:43 ►
It’s a cryptonym, appropriated from the physicists
00:29:46 ►
at Los Alamos. For what, exactly? The first hydrogen bomb detonated over Ainuak Atoll.
00:29:55 ►
Our project had the opposite karma. And the project’s goal? To sustain distribution against
00:30:02 ►
the inroads of law enforcement agencies. By what means inquired trying to find my way across a heavily inclined scree fall of sharp stones but shaken at the import of his revelation below, looking for the slightest movement. By the specialised protocols of I.V. Mike,
00:30:27 ►
the first counter-intelligence operation against the newly formed D.E.A.
00:30:33 ►
I almost slipped at his aside, with its unanticipated brutality, but regained my footing.
00:30:41 ►
Indigo, though, seemed unperturbed. As we walked beyond the scree fall at a good pace i dared
00:30:47 ►
not interfere with his continuity of thought for this day one was only a neophyte confronting an
00:30:55 ►
old priesthood stopping by a stream we drank from it sharing handfuls of sweet watercress. As prisms of light spilled among the still,
00:31:07 ►
slowly turning foliage, we rested under a copse of birch trees. Indigo, in a crystalline moment,
00:31:15 ►
disclosed the dark side. Small clusters of devoted youth from the 60s counterculture
00:31:22 ►
were recruited and instructed on infiltrating federal agencies, he continued,
00:31:27 ►
with the sole directive of identifying personnel and methods.
00:31:31 ►
Their hair was shorn, their dress and manners returned to the conventional.
00:31:36 ►
They became known to agencies as walk-ins.
00:31:40 ►
Those without pending criminal charges who supposedly appeared voluntarily to assist law enforcement as informants, but their true agenda was as double agents, to study those who threatened us.
00:31:53 ►
How did Crimson arrive at this technique?
00:31:57 ►
DEA employees regularly penetrated homes and celebrations camouflaged as turned-on youth, but failed to consider the sophistication,
00:32:05 ►
the dedication of their adversaries. We adopted and greatly refined their own methods.
00:32:12 ►
We didn’t oppose them on violent heroin and cocaine organisations, but were wholly devoted
00:32:18 ►
to protecting the psychedelic community. From Ivy Mike, which ran for decades, we characterised DEA protocols and agents throughout the world, even as they, unwitting of Ivy Mike, watched us.
00:32:33 ►
How did the Six monitor the agencies?
00:32:46 ►
of defiles and grottos, with mountain mist curling upwards as if from burning censers,
00:32:52 ►
and Indigo, a venerable priest unrolling the secret canticles of new religions.
00:32:58 ►
We photographed them, monitored their task forces at clubs and venues, followed their vehicles.
00:33:06 ►
Sometimes our IV mic infiltrators made controlled calls from the San Francisco DEA office to psychedelic targets DEA selected, then later those evenings joined us to share laughter and prayers with the same
00:33:13 ►
targets as we debriefed the IV mic double agents. Does it continue? Our people still attend every
00:33:22 ►
acid trial, photographing agents and informants for our databases, using covert digital devices that elude courtroom security measures.
00:33:31 ►
Even our brave artists do surreptitious sketching.
00:33:35 ►
But now Ivy Mike is highly modified, for most low-level agents and prosecutors have been characterised.
00:33:41 ►
A modified form?
00:33:43 ►
Cobalt studies only the leadership.
00:33:45 ►
Headquarters, officials and analysts primarily.
00:33:50 ►
Of course, no one could ever know the Ivies’ identities, I opined.
00:33:55 ►
Quite so. Or even of the project.
00:33:58 ►
The Ivies, who were among the most honourable,
00:34:01 ►
could never divulge to agencies or most friends such magnificent duplicities.
00:34:07 ►
On the occasions they were arrested in some later years,
00:34:10 ►
some made bail by claiming to be DEA informants for decades,
00:34:13 ►
then fled forever with the diaspora to Goa, Nepal, Southeast Asia, Amsterdam.
00:34:20 ►
Sadly, some were reviled by portions of the psychedelic community, not privileged to the fact.
00:34:27 ►
In my heightened state, I felt the inconceivable bravado of matadors with their deceptive capes of crimson,
00:34:35 ►
felt too close the hot breath of bulls enraged and red-eyed, their scarlet horn tips slashing.
00:34:42 ►
How could one distinguish an iv Ivy from an actual informant? A simple task.
00:34:48 ►
Actual informants send psychedelic people to prison. A matter of public record, Ivies by
00:34:55 ►
contrast claim complex relationships with DEA for their defences at hearings and trials and DEA
00:35:01 ►
thereafter issues denials and confuses juries on the issue. Because of the
00:35:06 ►
Ivy’s action, the community is much safer. The trees have become steel bars imprisoning dying
00:35:13 ►
forgotten men. From the darkening sky, I said, quite nervous, but inspired,
00:35:30 ►
a hallmark of great courage. It makes the agencies transparent, as was the vision.
00:35:38 ►
How do you remember who’s who? Double, even triple, psychedelic agents are the loneliest of numbers their accomplishments are sealed in the recollection of a handful of elders
00:35:50 ►
consider the cia awards medals incognito and retrieves them with the other hand to be hidden in agency safes our safes are but a small circle of hearts and minds, among those with very long memories.
00:36:09 ►
And it runs today a more advanced form of ivy. At this his speech became measured.
00:36:17 ►
Rocks were sliding with the sound of cuffs and chains, and the air smelled of buried decay.
00:36:26 ►
and chains, and the air smelled of buried decay. Boulders were on the stone walls of dungeons, their crevices stuffed with dead flowers and shreds of old love-notes. Evil
00:36:33 ►
trees had hanged men like warning gibbets. Even as he continued, I grew very afraid.
00:36:44 ►
Ivy Mike was the first of Crimson’s devotional exercises in high security.
00:36:49 ►
As the intrusions were detected by agencies, we evolved to more sophisticated measures,
00:36:55 ►
a higher level of government.
00:36:57 ►
To these, Cobalt alone may speak.
00:37:01 ►
Sharp spikes and tussocks of tall, harsh grasses now roughly enclosed us with their edges of barbed wire storms rushed up the valley mad as beasts
00:37:12 ►
he saw i was shivering and quickly let the matter drop indigo stood then in a shamanic ritual slowly raised his arms and open hands to the sky.
00:37:27 ►
Before the unceasing movement of the world,
00:37:32 ►
he in his deep voice offered a Navajo blessing to the four winds.
00:37:35 ►
Peace above us.
00:37:40 ►
Tumultuous clouds were now a flock of white manes.
00:37:42 ►
Peace below us.
00:37:50 ►
The ground of cold swords was warm eiderdown, strewn with living opals.
00:38:01 ►
Peace behind us. The charges of heaven followed, our protectors always. Peace before us. With his prayer, the way again became sweet and soft,
00:38:07 ►
for a sea of bluebells flooded from forest to field,
00:38:11 ►
opening into the evening light,
00:38:14 ►
like the simple trust of a young child’s heart.
00:38:19 ►
He remained internalised as we tramped steadily down towards the village of Salzburg.
00:38:26 ►
Violets came out by the streams, and bright anemones appeared in the verdure.
00:38:31 ►
Thatched roof cottages burgeoned before us, their bulging windows and eaves alive with crocuses and wallflowers.
00:38:39 ►
Their doors unlatching to the possible, to secret bedrooms and immaculate kisses.
00:38:47 ►
Down from the heights, but not yet reintegrated,
00:38:51 ►
we passed among the tiny, glowing Kondotorai shops, each packed with lighted faces.
00:39:00 ►
All had decks and views over the obsidian river Salsach, as it prowled into nothingness,
00:39:07 ►
its surface forming and reforming with shining black facets.
00:39:12 ►
The patterns reticulated like Escher’s tessellations of devils and angels
00:39:19 ►
as the water’s edge dissolved into arcane geometries.
00:39:24 ►
as the water’s edge dissolved into arcane geometries.
00:39:30 ►
Salzburg overwhelmed us, emanating pungent scents of cabbages and versts,
00:39:37 ►
of ripe and hidden bagnois, of fresh potpourri of hyacinths and daffodils, of elderly ladies and schoolgirls training the indefinable fragrance of innocence.
00:39:43 ►
Sounds of subdued traffic evoked hooves and carriages and whips,
00:39:48 ►
while sporadic techno beats and sitar ragas
00:39:51 ►
and measures of Die Meistersinger evolved from the quietude.
00:39:58 ►
Sonorous cathedral bells, marked with solemnity,
00:40:02 ►
our reluctant pace to and from the infinite.
00:40:07 ►
Giddy at the synesthesia of sight and sound and touch and smell
00:40:12 ►
and the moving spectres of ancient edifices.
00:40:16 ►
I stopped for some moments to recover, seizing a wooden railing
00:40:21 ►
until the field of being settled and became motionless. Down the old
00:40:28 ►
residence plots we wandered with caution into the phantasmagorical dusk of eventide.
00:40:36 ►
Agape at the density of objects and people and the translucency of twilight lanterns,
00:40:48 ►
of twilight lanterns. Women’s faces glowed like benevolent wraiths. Seeking unfrequented places where a few might be alone drinking cold Junghüriger or consuming bowls of savoury
00:40:58 ►
Galluschuppe, we passed along before empty and forlorn shops, down to the Svartstrasse.
00:41:07 ►
Indigo brought me with a kind of tenderness to a booth in the Café Tomaselli.
00:41:13 ►
Bereft of customers in these early hours, the café’s warmth provided refuge from our
00:41:19 ►
dazzling trek.
00:41:21 ►
I was blown away.
00:41:23 ►
My every cell was alight. I clung to my impossible ethnography, for Harvard
00:41:28 ►
now rendered utterly trivial. Although nothing could be said, I hoped to confirm Crimson’s
00:41:35 ►
portrayal of the Six, and began to grasp at linear thinking. After a synthesis, when each of you re-enters society what then ah conventional mind regathers itself he said. When we return from a clandestine site, every place at first
00:42:08 ►
seems a projection, a mise-en-scene of our calling, our expertise and duties. The café was empty,
00:42:16 ►
the walls rippling with every thought, every feeling. A priest, he tried to explain, sees good
00:42:23 ►
and evil and the intervention of grace.
00:42:25 ►
A prosecutor sees victims everywhere. A physician sees maladies.
00:42:31 ►
What do the six see?
00:42:34 ►
The exaltation of thought, cortical evolution, surveillance and secrets, sensuality.
00:42:44 ►
Through the cafe window, two alluring women, models artistes, pressed
00:42:48 ►
against a Peugeot, coupling rather intimately in the fading light. By the kitchen, a retarded
00:42:55 ►
working man, in a hand-me-down shooting jacket, slowly swept the premises, his slack face lowered to his broom, vacant and bemused.
00:43:07 ►
A foreign consular car moved with tentative stops down the cobbled street,
00:43:13 ►
the sturdy crew-cut passenger in his mid-fifties glancing at the women.
00:43:21 ►
But of our respective roles, he said, I consider the rituals rituals the liturgies during a fine synthesis and the covert transfer of a metric ton of custom laboratory glassware exotic reagents and analytical instruments striking at two metres each, with matching blonde and black coiffures cut in a high French curl.
00:43:47 ►
Dressed in tight black leotards,
00:43:50 ►
they were head to head,
00:43:51 ►
cœur à cœur, it seemed.
00:43:54 ►
As one intently stroked the other’s elegant neck with her fingertips,
00:43:58 ►
I noticed the fabric of their scarves.
00:44:00 ►
It was that Milgrith tartan.
00:44:08 ►
Lifting her shaded eyes to them, Indigo described the other chemists, murmuring a tantalizing prospect. Vermillion’s summoning of Eros is harness for
00:44:18 ►
counter-surveillance. And his women? I hasten to ask, what are they like? Our white, wild swans, our priestesses.
00:44:29 ►
They have fair breasts and throats.
00:44:32 ►
Their very touch is a soundless explosion.
00:44:35 ►
At first you may think them unbridled with paganism,
00:44:38 ►
or slaves of lust.
00:44:41 ►
They will find you soon, with their inevitable eyes.
00:44:47 ►
A sensuous musk filled the café.
00:44:50 ►
The lapping of warm waves ran up my blood.
00:44:54 ►
The walls floated with amber lotus flowers and orchids.
00:44:58 ►
The floor swam with luminous traces of sacred bronze and silver carp.
00:45:05 ►
luminous traces of sacred bronze and silver carp. The shadows of inviting doors, unfolded like Japanese fans and paper parasols, spread open
00:45:12 ►
like cherry lips beneath lowered eyes and the secret parting of silk kimonos.
00:45:20 ►
Lost and uncomfortable with this impossible synchronicity of people and actions, I try to stop the movement by focusing on the café’s simple night janitor and his muscular arms and silver ring, his rhythmic broom, his vacuous countenance.
00:45:35 ►
And a magenta?
00:45:37 ►
Magenta monitors a biotech revolution in memory and learning drugs and erotogenics.
00:45:43 ►
Our sweeper could have the mind of an archangel
00:45:46 ►
and the loins of a satyr.
00:45:49 ►
The embassy car returned,
00:45:51 ►
crawling with stealth,
00:45:53 ►
looking for an address or for someone.
00:45:56 ►
Cobalt penetrates high-level government offices,
00:46:00 ►
he continued.
00:46:01 ►
Paranoia.
00:46:01 ►
I felt surrounded by some organisation,
00:46:04 ►
as if everyone, everywhere,
00:46:07 ►
were a co-conspirator. At the connectedness of all things, my defenses became porous.
00:46:13 ►
Memories of the police scrutiny at the UN interview in Vienna now agitated me,
00:46:18 ►
bleeding into this grand conspiracy of those administering enlightenment.
00:46:28 ►
conspiracy of those administering enlightenment. Unseen hands replaced the café’s human piece with l’essere d’amour, the measures where the alchemist flees. In a cataclysmic apprehension,
00:46:38 ►
I thought the entire setting from café to street was staged, from the janitor to the ravishing
00:46:43 ►
models to the silver Mercedes,
00:46:46 ►
all were some coordinated underground intelligence test,
00:46:49 ►
a bestiary of surveillance.
00:46:51 ►
Sensing fear, Indigo took my hand
00:46:54 ►
with earnest words of comfort.
00:46:56 ►
Forgive us.
00:46:57 ►
It is not meant to frighten.
00:47:00 ►
Know that we would never harm you.
00:47:03 ►
He lit a taper.
00:47:05 ►
The candlestick was an empty bottle of La Creme Christi.
00:47:09 ►
He followed his hands and bowed to the solitary, peaceful flame.
00:47:15 ►
Then to me.
00:47:17 ►
With his simple kindness, the anxiety subsided,
00:47:21 ►
transformed into echoes of benediction.
00:47:24 ►
There remained only an afterglow, a sublime rapprochement.
00:47:29 ►
We floated downstream in silence, but for the soft Donizetti.
00:47:35 ►
Yet it had been too wild, too chaotic.
00:47:39 ►
In a moment of clarity, I dared ask the obvious,
00:47:42 ►
Did you… did you dose me?
00:47:46 ►
Never, he responded without guile.
00:47:49 ►
The phenomena you experience sometimes occurs in our proximity.
00:47:53 ►
As if you remember our ancient language,
00:47:56 ►
it happens when two or more are gathered together, it has been said.
00:48:01 ►
A contact high from shared subconscious archetypes,
00:48:05 ►
the opening of neurological regions among the experienced.
00:48:10 ►
Certainly he had misjudged my background, overestimated my paltry abilities.
00:48:15 ►
Before the next wave I pressed him, trying to find firm ground.
00:48:19 ►
The visual displays are not a drug effect.
00:48:23 ►
The phenomena are not the teaching,
00:48:27 ►
but seem to reflect constellations of neurons that are learning, a quickening, as when our fetal neural cells began aggregating
00:48:34 ►
towards consciousness. When did it appear among the six? After our initial profound doses,
00:48:43 ►
the classical psychedelic experiences, we each independently observed a fortuitous and persistent cognitive enhancement.
00:48:51 ►
But the neuroscience of it?
00:48:54 ►
Perhaps from the neuroplasticity of random dendritic spines sprouting or pruning in the hippocampus and the cortical association areas, by chance, unrepeatable?
00:49:08 ►
Not altogether. We attribute the enhancement in part to a global neurogenesis arising from microdoses, the daily sub-threshold
00:49:15 ►
exposure in clandestine labs. The neurogenesis occurred during and was guided by our rigorous
00:49:22 ►
physical and spiritual practices over years. Magenta’s
00:49:26 ►
experimental compounds may have contributed. We first notice a super functionality,
00:49:32 ►
then a hypersensitivity to all things, but even more so to each other.
00:49:39 ►
So the acute single psychedelic rendered awareness of the possible,
00:49:49 ►
then by practices and low-level doses you retain special traits and develop them.
00:49:55 ►
You may prefer to think the paranormal phenomena are only drug-induced,
00:49:57 ►
an artifact of intoxication.
00:50:03 ►
But you now know that brain regions can be unlocked by sequences of phrases,
00:50:07 ►
by these very words, like notes in the adagio of the Pathétique, may access the heart of those who have never heard music. Only words?
00:50:16 ►
We have observed almost extrasensory emotional fields below conscious awareness.
00:50:23 ►
Consider the herd reflex at a predator’s approach,
00:50:26 ►
or old lovers’ awareness of each other at a distance.
00:50:30 ►
You are proposing a new human sense.
00:50:34 ►
It would be naive to conclude that there are no unknown
00:50:37 ►
extra-dimensional fields.
00:50:40 ►
Writing his equations by a whale oil lamp,
00:50:43 ►
Maxwell characterized electromagnetism.
00:50:46 ►
Newton’s gravity was discarded by Leibniz as occult.
00:50:50 ►
And you understand this? You assert it is reproducible?
00:50:55 ►
Neither. We, the six, fail to comprehend even this vanishing glimpse we have had,
00:51:03 ►
but only know it triggers a most uncommon form of learning.
00:51:08 ►
But always dependent on the substance?
00:51:10 ►
No.
00:51:12 ►
Remember, new human forms are always evolving.
00:51:16 ►
Some of them become a heritable species.
00:51:20 ►
Universities have been breeding intelligence genotypes
00:51:23 ►
since the Age of enlightenment and the reformation
00:51:25 ►
does it happen often?
00:51:28 ►
so very rarely
00:51:29 ►
and it differs with each of us
00:51:31 ►
it seems to manifest only as a compassionate act in safety
00:51:36 ►
in the absence of the inexperienced
00:51:39 ►
those who cannot understand
00:51:41 ►
we were no longer talking about a drug
00:51:44 ►
I was chasing him to get at the truth can it happen now? who cannot understand. We were no longer talking about a drug.
00:51:46 ►
I was chasing him to get at the truth.
00:51:47 ►
Can it happen now?
00:51:51 ►
To this, Indigo only smiled patiently,
00:51:54 ►
so that I thought he would never speak.
00:51:57 ►
He placed his hands together in supplication,
00:52:00 ►
then brought his forehead to mine.
00:52:03 ►
Listen, he said.
00:52:09 ►
Twenty point two kilometres above the Serengeti, floating as though a geospatial satellite, low clouds and landmass rotating beneath. From the edge of the Nogongoro
00:52:18 ►
crater, the high desert wind, over Congo, at Mayanad Lak, 10,000 snowy egrets rising as one, over Laos,
00:52:29 ►
a bamboo flute played by a naked child and the clapping of an old man in loincloth.
00:52:36 ►
The children of all the earth jubilant, shrieking. Laplanders, Yakut, Arctic Inuits,
00:52:49 ►
speaking. Laplanders, Yakut, Arctic Inuits. Viennese crowds sobbing, trying to touch Beethoven’s casket. Howling dark wreckage of a dying planet. The silence of this precious island earth,
00:52:57 ►
moving through unfeeling space, so very alone. A single soprano singing.
00:53:04 ►
so very alone, a single soprano singing,
00:53:06 ►
Mise a Solemnis.
00:53:15 ►
Look, he said, 15.1 kilometres above Vincent Massive, Antarctica,
00:53:19 ►
last carvings of the Larson ice shelf,
00:53:23 ►
sunrise over jungles of the Pantanal,
00:53:26 ►
moon gate light upon Gobi dunes,
00:53:29 ►
Sunrise over the last hunter-gatherers,
00:53:32 ►
The Malaysian Bajau,
00:53:34 ►
The Tanzanian Hadza,
00:53:37 ►
The Tismane of Bolivian Amazon,
00:53:39 ►
Sunrise over Yemen,
00:53:43 ►
The slums of Madinat al-Shaba,
00:53:47 ►
Moonrise over orphanages of Battambang.
00:53:53 ►
Through rough camel skins of Bedouin tents, the divine brilliance of the Pleiades.
00:54:00 ►
Sunrise over Kertski Boy, milking yak in the Afghan Pamir Mountains.
00:54:04 ►
Volcanic furnaces of Iceland. Auroraora dancing reflected in the eyes of a newborn
00:54:09 ►
Eilat girl. Stars gathering for the hosts, the far dawns of once and future centuries. Think,
00:54:19 ►
he said. All thought a sphere of 10 to the minus twenty four centimeters expanding to the distance of an atom to the sch on a Rio hillside, dreaming of the day her equations
00:54:46 ►
will revise the standard model. The ultimate intelligence of humble prayer, the fields of mind,
00:54:53 ►
all knowledge, all cognition, all senses, all understanding, everything all at once, and dear God the light. Feel, he said. Sorrow, desire, joy, anger, hatred, eight-year-old lepers
00:55:11 ►
without faces in Bombay alleys, the endless tears of Christ, the irresistible hot river of a billion
00:55:18 ►
climaxes, the birth of angels, a two-year-old girl in El Paso being beaten to death for soiling her diaper.
00:55:28 ►
I have not the capacity to record further here this unspoken exchange,
00:55:33 ►
at once so familiar and fantastic, almost as an act of mercy he lifted his head.
00:55:41 ►
Our separation was like a mother’s warm kiss on one’s sleeping eyes the last sound her unknown
00:55:49 ►
language the last thought her perfect love the last look her face filling the sky and i helpless
00:55:57 ►
in her arms naked crying reaching for her the last feeling sadness, such unspeakable sadness, at leaving our species
00:56:08 ►
behind. Nearby in the crepuscular majesty of old Salzburg, the four stately bells of Vespers
00:56:18 ►
sounded. Then, from fourteenth-century towers were ringing the medieval monks’ awakening bells,
00:56:26 ►
the Horologica Exitoria.
00:56:29 ►
At this simultaneous event, our thoughts externalised for the last time,
00:56:34 ►
like the fields of bluebells that soften the path before us,
00:56:37 ►
we remembered only unlimited grace.
00:56:40 ►
It is finished, for now, he said.
00:56:44 ►
It is finished, for now, he said.
00:56:50 ►
His words were gentle, barely a whisper, like a night whisper.
00:56:59 ►
They were the caress of innocent clouds, like a blessing from a benevolent sorcerer, a bearer of light.
00:57:03 ►
New recognitions arose with each of my heartbeats. I felt like a child hearing their first poem,
00:57:06 ►
as if it were the springtime of our mind.
00:57:10 ►
A waitress passed, trailing scents of roses,
00:57:14 ►
moist, syncopated hips, complicit smile, infinite eyes,
00:57:18 ►
indigo said nothing, but soon a hearty vegetable broth appeared,
00:57:23 ►
with thick slices of pumpernickel, fresh butter and cups of hot cider.
00:57:27 ►
Ravenous, we ate with wordless pleasure, placing to rest all vestiges of other worlds.
00:57:34 ►
Reveling in the solidity of our bodies, we seemed down from our resplendent journey.
00:57:41 ►
With the food, normal consciousness returned with its ponderous, irreverent viscosity.
00:57:48 ►
I recalled that hard data was required, not the unrecordable preternatural intelligence of the day.
00:57:54 ►
My interviews were of six underground chemists, not an investigation of a cult proposing conscious control of evolution. As a writer fears madness, but seeks the edge of things, an ethnographer
00:58:06 ►
fears the seduction of belief systems, and seeks testable hypotheses through controlled, random,
00:58:13 ►
double-blind clinical studies. Stronger now, I ventured a question hoping his answer would be
00:58:19 ►
suitable for Cambridge, at least among adepts of the Divinity School. And within a clandestine laboratory,
00:58:27 ►
what occurs that so few have witnessed? We say our prayers during every synthesis,
00:58:34 ►
each chemist, then lay monk or priest in his own tradition, Christianity, Judaism,
00:58:40 ►
agnosticism, hedonism, Vedanta, Buddhism. But of the extremes, the phenomena during synthesis.
00:58:49 ►
The night has been long, friend.
00:58:51 ►
Perhaps a discussion tomorrow.
00:58:53 ►
In Vienna, before your flight, I’ll find you.
00:58:56 ►
My rational mind sees control.
00:58:59 ►
My itinerary had been known only to the UN.
00:59:02 ►
Standing too quickly, I staggered,
00:59:03 ►
but Indigo collected me with a kind and forgiving solicitude.
00:59:08 ►
The night was over for us.
00:59:11 ►
From the Café of Synchronicity,
00:59:13 ►
we strolled towards the Goldener Hirsch.
00:59:16 ►
I unsteadily at first,
00:59:18 ►
then with more confidence over the Stasbrücke.
00:59:22 ►
The River Salzach again was only a river,
00:59:27 ►
its powerful fluidity glass-like, with indefinable colours and unseen faces, and the last of evening lights, scattered like forgotten
00:59:34 ►
dreams. Parting from Indigo, with a warm grasp, I watched as he blended into the night, walking in
00:59:43 ►
his threadbare herringbone jacket to his modest pension in a depressed neighbourhood of Salzburg.
00:59:50 ►
I fought a desire to rejoin him, then followed instead from a distance.
00:59:54 ►
In perhaps a foolish effort to observe one so accomplished a surveillance, and at a risk to my study, I discovered the secret character of this most isolated of beings. In the empty hours,
01:00:09 ►
Indigo wandered among the lost and dispossessed, those huddled in doorways, the destitute,
01:00:14 ►
the harlots, the aged drunks. To each he gave a few shillings, to the men a handshake and an encouraging word, to the women a handkiss,
01:00:26 ►
a bow to the hand,
01:00:28 ►
as if they were elegant ladies of a bygone age.
01:00:32 ►
He continued until his pockets were empty.
01:00:36 ►
Spying an impecunious young Turk student
01:00:38 ►
labouring over a tattered book at a falafel stand,
01:00:41 ►
he gave away the Herodotus.
01:00:48 ►
Admitted by a grudging rumpled night porter to a coarse rooming house for indigent transience, he went up the stairs
01:00:54 ►
and never looked back. Down the street, at the edge of vision, was the embassy Mercedes,
01:01:01 ►
facing my way. My room, hot bath, long naked yoga, candlelit meditation, worlds upon
01:01:10 ►
worlds falling in upon themselves, realisation upon realisation, aeons of night becoming sunlit,
01:01:18 ►
stillness, sky-swirling doves, an hour’s rest before morning croissant and fruit.
01:01:27 ►
doves, an hour’s rest before morning croissant and fruit. The phone call, like a heaven’s clock with the first human voice after my last rebirth, my driver’s muted voice. Good morning, my hair.
01:01:36 ►
Vienna appeared, like a mirage of the Baroque, its centuries of Habsburg rule overlaid by the frosts of Cold War deceits.
01:01:47 ►
At the noon hour, the Ringstrasse was crowded with prosperous bourgeois Viennese.
01:01:54 ►
My driver suggested tearing at the Hotel Sacha to enjoy its renowned tourte.
01:02:00 ►
Staff in morning coats and grey-striped pants acquired my valets, then conducted me into a small, barely-lit cave, lush with dark rose draperies and green silk chairs, and gilt ormelou.
01:02:14 ►
Encased clocks with engraved pendula ticked under azure ceilings graced by cherubs, the very air, scented with dowagersager’s perfumes suggested even more discreet pleasures.
01:02:27 ►
Alone at the banquet, before a long-stemmed champagne flute of pomegranate juice, sat an
01:02:34 ►
extraordinary young woman. Clearly just awakened, she wore an effervescent chansam, and a high
01:02:41 ►
collar beaded with seed-pearls, its bodice silken and slit to the waist,
01:02:47 ►
and illustrated with streams and finches and lilacs.
01:02:52 ►
Her complexion was identical to the child-shepherdess,
01:02:55 ►
her eyes were atmospheric blue.
01:02:58 ►
I never knew how the six found me.
01:03:01 ►
Transformed into bespoke Armani, Indigo soon arrived.
01:03:07 ►
Upon his entry, the girl arose,
01:03:13 ►
her changsam clinging tightly to her lean movements and small, pert breasts.
01:03:20 ►
She glided through the chamber with refined deportment, moving from the dark lair as a pantheress escaping the night. In the atrium, she glanced back over her bare shoulder
01:03:27 ►
at Indigo, then stepped into the Ringstrasse in the direction of the Starzopar. Ravishing and
01:03:36 ►
spectral, she dissipated in the sunlight. At the passing of this apparition, we sat together in the emptiness very quietly.
01:03:52 ►
Vermillion will see you next, Indigo casually remarked, never again mentioning our illuminated night. As an afterthought he considered the girl. Spies and diplomats have entertained
01:04:00 ►
here since the Great War. For the first time, I felt the delicacy of his life,
01:04:06 ►
its true complexity, but I felt even more his exceptional vulnerability. The formidable
01:04:13 ►
adversary of the UN drug program was nearby, implacably tracking the pulse of the six.
01:04:20 ►
They, in turn, with sophisticated gentleness, both vetting me and monitoring agencies watching the interplay of both opposing realms i likely was identified in the soundless cross-fire mannered confidences try to put me at ease, ordering to my amusement a small lunch of
01:04:46 ►
blueberries and kia, and Austrian water and cake. I struggle to set aside the soft music playing,
01:04:54 ►
the Zauberflut, as merely a coincidence of Vienna’s heritage rather than a reminder of our afternoon
01:05:01 ►
with a little girl and her pet geese.
01:05:12 ►
Wolfgang Amadeus took long evening walks down these streets, he said, clutching ink-blotted parchments of his libretto. Forever reading me, he requested instead the Jupiter Symphony,
01:05:19 ►
to which we listened over our kia. Mozart did the contrapuntal invention of the finale upside down and in canon, Indigo said.
01:05:28 ►
All five themes played at once, showing off in rapture, just because he could.
01:05:34 ►
Imagine his singular neocortex, his inspired joy.
01:05:40 ►
Imagine his loneliness.
01:05:41 ►
Imagine his loneliness.
01:05:51 ►
The room was barren, except for a somewhat removed but attentive waitress and an elderly man in a white jacket who was bussing tables.
01:05:58 ►
His frail, blue-veined forearm bore a faded tattoo of crude, hastily scrawled numbers.
01:06:03 ►
I detached my gaze, only with some difficulty, which Indigo noted. I tried collecting my thoughts, for the night was still with me.
01:06:08 ►
There were no phenomena this day.
01:06:11 ►
Perhaps this was my last opportunity with Indigo.
01:06:14 ►
Having survived thus far our spectacular encounter and their microscope,
01:06:18 ►
I returned to my simple study of how it began, how it was distributed.
01:06:24 ►
I braved a request for everything.
01:06:27 ►
Can you describe the approach to a clandestine laboratory, the first days?
01:06:33 ►
I can say for now that for security one detaches from the world as a monk to a hermitage,
01:06:39 ►
painfully forsaking all society and family. The social fabric which comforts us is torn.
01:06:47 ►
With elaborate counter-surveillance techniques
01:06:49 ►
we go alone through alpine forests or deserts
01:06:52 ►
to the remote site,
01:06:54 ►
to the place of many voices and visions.
01:06:57 ►
Returning from the synthesis,
01:06:59 ►
we are open like children,
01:07:01 ►
but so very shy
01:07:02 ►
and only gradually engaged with others.
01:07:05 ►
It is tentative at first, this finding our way back to normalcy and relief,
01:07:12 ►
and long before the smiles return.
01:07:15 ►
And when one arrives at the secret site, the house?
01:07:19 ►
As the horizon’s distant light fade with the fear,
01:07:24 ►
we come at night in reverence, beneath starlight, to remember the holy.
01:07:29 ►
We stand outside and scan for hours.
01:07:32 ►
The magdalanic clouds, and watch for the meteor’s trace, and listen to droplets of melting snow and the trickle of streams.
01:07:39 ►
Or to the winds down the mountainsides, or to the far coyote’s bark there are no sounds of civilization this tranquility is a membrane sensitive to the slightest threat
01:07:53 ►
and beyond the threshold before entry and commencement we place a hand upon the door and offer a prayer for peace for survival and for the medicine to be benign. Within, we light a votive
01:08:07 ►
as a type of protector. I prefer a votive with an image of Mary, Mother of Christ, standing in her
01:08:13 ►
purple robe of stars upon Satan’s horns, our Mother of Gadloop, I believe, common among Mexican
01:08:21 ►
Catholics. Some also burn smudge sticks of sage and open the windows,
01:08:26 ►
as the Navajo do, to let the dark things leave.
01:08:31 ►
Beyond varied, extreme spiritual practices,
01:08:34 ►
there remain overall the rigours of pure science,
01:08:37 ►
the absolute molecular domain,
01:08:38 ►
the chemistry of which must be flawless.
01:08:43 ►
What occurs next?
01:08:48 ►
By the votive’s pale light we check the counter-surveillance devices, conceal motion detectors and recorders, and a web of fail-safe chits and threats.
01:08:54 ►
Past a wooden door, actually a veneer over a metal plate with steel door frames and magnetic locks,
01:08:59 ►
we behold sheer walls of glass apparati, custom-made 22-litre reaction kettles, and massive teardrop-shaped separatory funnels and vacuum ovens and thickets of fine labware, all perfectly arranged to produce the polar opposite of a nuclear weapon.
01:09:30 ►
In blackness, we scan the room with ultraviolet light so that the LSD fluoresces brightly and can be visualised like ephemeral blue spirits.
01:09:40 ►
Then we activate a range of deep red overhead lamps, the only illumination under which syntheses are conducted, to prevent damage to fragile molecules.
01:09:47 ►
Bathed in scarlet light, we don a protective moon suit with faceplate and breathing device.
01:09:54 ►
The scene is extraterrestrial, as if one were an interstellar astronaut on a planet of advanced technology, a world turning under the red giant Betelgeuse. In those moments, I play Gregorian chant and pray. And then, and then it hits. What does?
01:10:09 ►
The first wave of a psychic tide, the herald of an ocean of mind ever transmuting.
01:10:15 ►
Even with protective garments, the first exposure to the substance can be ten or a hundred or a
01:10:21 ►
thousand doses. This profound neuronal cascade,
01:10:26 ►
the initial detonation,
01:10:28 ►
consumes the earth.
01:10:30 ►
I can speak of it only allegorically.
01:10:33 ►
The first night, if you will.
01:10:36 ►
The Droit de Seigneur.
01:10:38 ►
To God,
01:10:40 ►
we that night are wed.
01:10:43 ►
Cognition flashing across the galaxy,
01:10:46 ►
changing every subatomic particle, Shiva, the destroyer, rampant, leaving all minutiae intact and without blemish. This, the fabric
01:10:54 ►
of dark matter reweaving, strong and weak nuclear forces interchanging the unified field
01:11:00 ►
and divine mystery permeated by grace. He often was reminiscent of Crimson with his
01:11:08 ►
cosmic allusions, as if they were religious devotees, returning from repeated ordinations.
01:11:17 ►
I tried a difficult question. How does exposure to the actual substance in the laboratory differ from the phenomena we shared in Salzburg?
01:11:27 ►
One is a sacrament. The other is received knowledge. First one, then the other?
01:11:34 ►
With the sacrament we lay gasping, naked before eternal love.
01:11:40 ►
With the other we hear, for the first time, the cry of a heron at dawn, the wind’s laughter, the singing in children’s hearts.
01:11:49 ►
But with either we must return to the mundane world, always,
01:11:54 ►
to rest for all of our life in the great gift.
01:11:59 ►
And what is that?
01:12:01 ►
Our natural mind.
01:12:05 ►
Mein Herr, bitte, the waitress said, approaching too quickly.
01:12:09 ►
With disturbing haste, she whispered,
01:12:10 ►
A phone call for you at the desk.
01:12:13 ►
With his hand on the rose damask linen, Indigo nodded to her, looked at me,
01:12:17 ►
then glanced at his watch for a long beat.
01:12:20 ►
His cheap plastic timepiece was gone,
01:12:23 ►
replaced by a museum-quality Breguet grand
01:12:27 ►
complication, or convincing replica, sapphire crystal in platinum bezel. Its face had astronomical
01:12:35 ►
events displaying equinoxes and eclipses, and tracked the motions of the sun, moon and planets.
01:12:42 ►
It was symbolic of this careful, meticulous organisation,
01:12:47 ►
wheels turned within wheels, as in revolutions or Blake’s light. The brigades, flying,
01:12:54 ►
torbillion escapements and spiral cone fusées, balances and mainsprings all eluded gravity as it mimicked the planetary cosmology of Copernicus’s De
01:13:07 ►
Revolutionibus. Like Crimson, Indigo changed his look and manner with each setting,
01:13:15 ►
so that his elegant chronometer and bespoke black suit blended perfectly, like a rare chameleon indeed, against the antiquarian clockwork and tapestries of this
01:13:27 ►
velvet hideaway. To elude capture, the practice of his peers was not to be different, not to be
01:13:35 ►
noticed. I saw it was the full moon, and Jupiter was aligned with Mars, a portent from the night
01:13:42 ►
rekindled, and the Breguet became an omen.
01:13:45 ►
The sweep of the seconds seemed to traverse our lives, its discrete movements, irrevocably and
01:13:52 ►
harshly indifferent, pointing to some instant when, without warning, time and the world of the
01:13:59 ►
six would end. I sensed Indigo was nearing an invisible precipice into which he or we together might fall.
01:14:09 ►
Therein lay an infinitude not of ecstasies but of abysmal miseries.
01:14:15 ►
He stood with reluctance.
01:14:18 ►
The augury vanished.
01:14:20 ►
I had so many questions, now unrequited.
01:14:24 ►
With an adept formalism he concluded our interview do forgive me with the greatest regret i must now depart but wish you god-speed if it pleases you then again one day he placed his hand over his heart, held it there and bowed. Turning, he crossed the salon,
01:14:46 ►
with the waitress while engaged in some intent unheard exchange. He hesitated, only before the
01:14:52 ►
aged busman with the tattoo of scrawled numbers, and clasping the reggae, he provided it to him
01:14:57 ►
with a kind word, as if it were a mere gratuity. His image merged into the Ringstrasse in the direction of the illustrated
01:15:06 ►
woman in her silks of finches and lilacs and waterfalls. I saw him no more. He never used the
01:15:13 ►
phone. After some protracted moments, quite alone with my notes and fond memories of Indigo,
01:15:20 ►
I spoke to his absence in the blessed stillness of the room.
01:15:26 ►
memories of Indigo, I spoke to his absence in the blessed stillness of the room. Thank you.
01:15:28 ►
Thank you for everything. Next up, we have some commentary on the chapter by the Merrick scholar Ralph Tudor, Ph.D.
01:15:50 ►
This is a comment on Chapter 4 of The Rose of Paracelsus.
01:15:58 ►
Chapter 4 of The Rose is a light-filled chapter,
01:16:03 ►
a neo-platonic dream
01:16:06 ►
of the incessant pouring of light from above.
01:16:10 ►
An internal tension in this chapter
01:16:13 ►
is a race in time
01:16:14 ►
as to which way humankind develops.
01:16:18 ►
Externally destructive
01:16:19 ►
and finally dominated by its own technology,
01:16:22 ►
the development of the atom bomb
01:16:24 ►
stands for
01:16:25 ►
this development, or does it become a self-realized being merging the little
01:16:29 ►
man individual consciousness with a big man cosmic consciousness for good? The
01:16:36 ►
conspiracy of the chemists and the Rose is of course an attempt to make the
01:16:41 ►
latter a reality. As psychonauts we are on familiar territory
01:16:46 ►
since we have been rehearsing the dance between individual and spiritual freedom since the
01:16:52 ►
days of the Eleusinian Mysteries and before. The sacrament is a rehearsal not only for
01:17:00 ►
death but also to experience and celebrate an inner freedom which cannot be taken away,
01:17:08 ►
whatever the external circumstances. We have therefore ground for optimism and can enjoy
01:17:15 ►
the current events as a kind of extreme collective purification ceremony with many aspects of a high
01:17:21 ►
dose trip. Reality appears to go into a slightly sickening, slanting mode,
01:17:28 ►
the beginning of a collapse unheard of
01:17:30 ►
in its far-reaching consequences in human history.
01:17:34 ►
And we are part of this, Kali Yurga,
01:17:38 ►
in its own element, the forces of destruction and light
01:17:41 ►
in open, joyful collision.
01:17:47 ►
Heraclitus would have a field day.
01:17:56 ►
We are now getting a glimpse of the specter to come. We are facing the nightmare Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, independently of Nietzsche, anticipated in a statement, God is dead.
01:18:02 ►
This was not a triumphant cry by a victorious atheist,
01:18:07 ►
but a warning of what is to come when the forces of nihilism, disguised under the banner of
01:18:13 ►
liberalism, get into power and purchase of anything and everything which gives life meaning.
01:18:21 ►
Personal identity and memory, tradition, collective and one’s own, culture as an expression
01:18:27 ►
of the movements of the human soul, not as a weapon to level all differences between individuals,
01:18:34 ►
races, gender, beliefs. It is a truly nihilistic movement in that it wants to reduce human life to materialistic dimensions,
01:18:47 ►
a preparatory step to incarcerate us all in the big black prison, as Philip K. Dick foresaw.
01:18:56 ►
The sacrament, by its very nature, is an antidote to nihilism in that it furnishes us with endless and sublime vistas of meaningfulness
01:19:06 ►
and interconnectedness. Let the battle begin. This is the underlying tension in chapter four,
01:19:16 ►
which describes the meeting between Indigo and our narrator, who is being initiated in a step-by-step
01:19:22 ►
process. As one once said of Vladimir Nabokov and that he invented America in his book Lolita,
01:19:29 ►
so we could argue that Picard reinvented Salzburg in these pages.
01:19:34 ►
The city, for a day or two, is paradise on earth,
01:19:39 ►
bucolic, innocent, and light-filled as any sacramental vision can provide.
01:19:45 ►
But, of course, in this case we are not talking about a vision due to the sacrament,
01:19:52 ►
but a manifestation of the merging of the consciousness between the chemist and the narrator.
01:19:59 ►
Underlying the paradisiacal vision is the very real threat of detection and the consequences of manifesting hell, which gives the chapter its subversive urgency.
01:20:12 ►
This is a chapter full of sublime and luminous detail, bridges into sacred states of consciousness.
01:20:19 ►
One luminous detail is the young country girl, a very young farm girl in a dirndl, guiding gently a flock of geese, as it’s said in the book,
01:20:28 ►
all grace and innocence and symbol for a world of transcendence.
01:20:34 ►
A luminous detail which can be traced from Homer onwards.
01:20:37 ►
In chapter 20 of the Odyssey, the day of the big revenge against the suitors,
01:20:43 ►
the climax of poetic justice as never seen before in Western literature, and maybe never after.
01:20:50 ►
There is the unnamed maiden, still working away at the time of the rose-fingered dawn, when Odysseus awakes, ready to implement his lethal plan.
01:21:06 ►
implement his lethal plan with his few helpers, his son Telemachus, swineherd Eumaius, the cowherd Philoetius, his maid Eurycleia, and a few other loyal manservants in his house, and of course
01:21:13 ►
with the indispensable help of the goddess Athena. Here she is, Udysseus’ maidservant, working away,
01:21:22 ►
wishing from all her heart for a return of her desires, while her
01:21:27 ►
co-workers are still asleep in their beds after nights reveling with the suitors. As Rapound saw
01:21:34 ►
another incarnation of this innocent girl while he sat in a steel cage in Pisa, an alleged traitor
01:21:39 ►
against America, where in actual fact he just blew the whistle on the same forces which are now
01:21:45 ►
gathering for a final showdown. La Pastorella di Sweeney, the swine shepherdess, giving him hope
01:21:52 ►
for what is to come, making him still have faith in innocence and honesty in a world of utter
01:21:57 ►
degradation and spiritual corruption. In dark times like these, the luminous detail through the ages becomes more important than ever for comfort and guidance.
01:22:09 ►
These are our small islands of light, spreading from person to person like a sea of radiance.
01:22:19 ►
A key symbol to the successful future of mankind’s illumination and final awakening is Lycurgus, the Spartan,
01:22:27 ►
articulated audibly by Indigo in the presence of the narrator while he is reading in his thumped copy of Herodotus.
01:22:36 ►
Lycurgus, he whispers, the lawgiver, a philosophy of aristocratic egalitarianism, the best among each other are
01:22:46 ►
equal, military fitness and austerity. The six, as a counter-culture and counter-surveillance team,
01:22:54 ►
are a military-style task force, highly organized and effective in order to switch on lights across
01:23:00 ►
the globe, ideally faster than the dark incarcerating forces. Of course, there is
01:23:07 ►
also another mythical Lycurgus who dared to oppose the Dionysian bacchanals with the inevitable
01:23:13 ►
consequence of being torn apart, literally by the forces of ecstasy. A warning to all those who
01:23:20 ►
think they can destroy our capacity for ecstasy. This is Indigo sitting
01:23:25 ►
with his copy of Herodotus at the same table in the cafe in Salzburg with a narrator, signalling
01:23:30 ►
to him what is to come and what is to do. Ecstasy and self-discipline. Ecstasy through
01:23:37 ►
self-discipline. Ecstasy because of self-discipline. No ecstasy without self-discipline. Be as cunning as snakes and as peaceful as doves.
01:23:50 ►
And know, le paradis n’est pas artificiel.
01:23:55 ►
It is concrete and only in the present,
01:23:59 ►
in the light, tensile, immaculate.
01:24:04 ►
Quote, partaking of the kia,
01:24:07 ►
I gazed past Indigo at the verdant hills
01:24:10 ►
cascading down into Salzburg
01:24:12 ►
as they infused with radiant beams,
01:24:15 ►
with shifting rainbows over softly grazing sheep
01:24:18 ►
and pastoral hats and crystalline streams.
01:24:24 ►
End quote.
01:24:26 ►
Everything in this chapter is sublime,
01:24:28 ►
subtle and sophisticated,
01:24:30 ►
albeit with a dark undercurrent,
01:24:31 ►
just as the edifice symbol itself.
01:24:35 ►
The voices of ecstasy are intermixed
01:24:38 ►
with visions of decay and destruction,
01:24:41 ►
howling dark wreckage of a dying planet.
01:24:44 ►
The last feeling was sadness,
01:24:48 ►
such unspeakable sadness, that leaving our species behind, it reads. Transhumanism, it seems,
01:24:56 ►
is raising its head, and the meaning of the Edelweiss flower, the title of this chapter,
01:25:03 ►
echoes through the chapter and the whole book. It is, of course,
01:25:06 ►
noble and white. It represents innocence. It is a symbol of enduring love and devotion. Devotion to
01:25:12 ►
what? Also to one’s own fatherland. The SS had Edelweiss as a symbol. Sacrifice and to adventure, among other things, and of course, devoted to individual love.
01:25:30 ►
If we are looking at innocence here, we are looking at a fierce, combative innocence,
01:25:34 ►
an innocence ready to pitch itself self-consciously and confidently against the corrupting forces of
01:25:40 ►
this world, an innocence hard to find and only visible to those deeply devoted
01:25:46 ►
to finding it. Edelweiss is a pregnant symbol, taking us down corridors of slanting shadows
01:25:57 ►
and bright lights. Structurally, the chapter is set out as an initiation, with the going through of the old city gates onto the mountain, clearly a pilgrimage to higher states of consciousness.
01:26:12 ►
The usual landmarks of verifiable reality are being left behind and deliberately left open and ambiguous.
01:26:20 ►
With Borges, the author states before the beginning of the chapter that the company never existed and never will, but clearly something exists with real-world consequences.
01:26:30 ►
But what is it? Are we encouraged to search for the six chemists while all the while we are being taken through a sacred mental landscape of ciphers, riddles and symbols?
01:26:47 ►
symbols. We are in a porous, diamond-liquid-filled world of the mind, with part real location Salzburg,
01:26:55 ►
part mental ecstasy of a contact high. This paradise is real. Quote, in this no-man’s land of a beautiful afternoon, we were protected, it seemed, only by the light and grace of a little girl with her harmless armada of keys.
01:27:12 ►
And this world of innocence is as real as the Mönchberg, which Indigo and the narrator climb.
01:27:17 ►
And even the singing of the song Edelweiss by Indigo to the innocent girl is not kitsch,
01:27:27 ►
for the same reason that Gnostic teachings can appear vastly fantastic to the modern mind, as G. R. S. Mead said, but are,
01:27:33 ►
of course, completely credible to those who had the inner Godhead experience. And this innocence is as real for the same reason. Those familiar with the sacrament are also familiar with this
01:27:39 ►
degree of innocence being a real force in the universe, just as justice and love and beauty are real forces
01:27:48 ►
affecting real change, even if our everyday consciousness of ponderous irreverent viscosity,
01:27:56 ►
as the author says, likes to doubt it and slow the process of neurological evolution down.
01:28:10 ►
of neurological evolution down. But deep down we know, ubi amor ibi oculus est, just as the thinking of good thoughts will lead to abundant healing, as in the book The Secret Garden,
01:28:15 ►
which Indigo gives to the shepherdess. Does she really need that? Doesn’t she live it already?
01:28:21 ►
So let’s keep our eyes on the price collectively. Ubi amor ibi oculus est.
01:28:27 ►
Where there is love, there is our I.
01:28:30 ►
Let our I be there where the love is.
01:28:32 ►
Let the love be there where our I is.
01:28:36 ►
Let there be love.
01:28:39 ►
This is a chapter which builds light, as Okelos so felicitously puts it, and it builds an altar, just like a pound builds his altar in the Cantos, preparing for the paradisiacal vistas to come.
01:29:04 ►
or crystal waves weaving together toward the great healing.
01:29:10 ►
On a river of crystal we ride on rainbows, we walk over into the promised land.
01:29:12 ►
Yes, all that.
01:29:18 ►
Quote, gliding flights of doves passed dreamlike over the valley beneath as a cone of silence descended.
01:29:21 ►
Yet I could hear simultaneously a brook flowing kilometers away, and a pine cone
01:29:27 ►
dropping through tiers of branches in the descending forests, and indigo’s many and distant
01:29:33 ►
voices, and the sound of a far cowbell ringing like a vicar’s summons. The wind in a great
01:29:39 ►
susurros moved over terraced lands and patches of thistles and queen Anne’s lace as if all were the comforting wish of a restful deity.
01:29:51 ►
End quote.
01:29:53 ►
Yes, the wind is part of the process.
01:29:58 ►
The water is part of the process.
01:30:01 ►
The earth is part of the process.
01:30:04 ►
The fire is part of the process. The earth is part of the process. The fire is part of the process.
01:30:10 ►
I glanced about. There were dream trees breathing and the drifting of dark owls. Above us was
01:30:19 ►
translucent divine machinery. There were great wheels in the sky, it reads in the book. This is the machinery
01:30:28 ►
which our viscous mind keeps away from us, but which is the cause, by no means ultimate,
01:30:35 ►
of so much which happens here in the space-time continuum we can fathom with our senses.
01:30:48 ►
them with our senses. Like through the whole book, so in this chapter in particular, the narrator walks on a razor’s edge of bliss and destruction, ecstasy and calamity, as if one cannot be without
01:30:55 ►
the other. And when calamity strikes, you remain Spartan, accepting, enduring,
01:31:04 ►
You remain Spartan, accepting, enduring,
01:31:08 ►
tedly me, just like Odysseus,
01:31:11 ►
lying on a simple sleeping arrangement outside under the portico of his own house,
01:31:14 ►
a simplicity Indigo himself advocates.
01:31:16 ►
It is the perennial philosophy,
01:31:19 ►
the diagamous type of simplicity.
01:31:23 ►
Just like Odysseus,
01:31:28 ►
enduring the tension of injustice and helplessness,
01:31:35 ►
the narrator knows full well that he may have to dig deep to endure years of incarceration,
01:31:46 ►
entombment, for a crime which in another, juster world, is a gift deserving prices and honors.
01:31:51 ►
This is a chapter which deals with initiatic knowledge.
01:31:53 ►
And as Julia Evola points out,
01:31:57 ►
initiatic knowledge, which is based on direct experience and not a gathering of diverse knowledges strewn across books,
01:32:02 ►
initiatic knowledge is lived knowledge,
01:32:04 ►
not dealing in abstract concepts,
01:32:07 ►
active identification, namely by the degree according to which the self is implicated and
01:32:14 ►
unified in its experience. It is the kind of knowledge which leads to the process of metanoemon,
01:32:22 ►
to turn one’s life around, to generate oneself out of spirit, the second birth.
01:32:30 ►
This is part of the chemist’s task, to come at night in reverence.
01:32:35 ►
In blackness we scan the room, to establish a tranquility as of a membrane sensitive to the slightest threat,
01:32:44 ►
just as the diaphaner of the Neoplatonists.
01:32:47 ►
And then, out of the darkness, the hit,
01:32:53 ►
the microcosmic recreation of the Big Bang,
01:32:58 ►
a birth and renewal of forces with unlimited possibilities
01:33:02 ►
for the neurological development of our species.
01:33:06 ►
The chemist’s task is not technical alone, but part of a gathering of forces which are
01:33:13 ►
ready to be manifested.
01:33:15 ►
The chemist as the demurge, the sacred messenger between worlds, cognition flashing across
01:33:21 ►
the galaxy, as it says in the book, changing every subatomic particle,
01:33:28 ►
sending divine shockwaves through the universe to be picked up by the endless web of weaving entities,
01:33:37 ►
building light and squeezing out the darkness.
01:33:43 ►
It is a process which demands a return
01:33:46 ►
to the mundane world, since it would be otherwise
01:33:48 ►
indeed not more than idle hallucination.
01:33:51 ►
But there, forces garnered and
01:33:54 ►
harnessed are there always, to not
01:33:58 ►
be lost, to rest for all
01:34:01 ►
of our life in the great gift, our
01:34:04 ►
natural mind.
01:34:10 ►
And remember, the phenomena are not the teaching.
01:34:15 ►
They just reflect a constellation of neurons, the author says,
01:34:17 ►
providing a neuronal structure ready to experience deeper levels of consciousness and reality,
01:34:22 ►
which are the same thing.
01:34:26 ►
Our temple is neuronal,
01:34:29 ►
and our temple will be built.
01:34:33 ►
The author of this chapter is generous,
01:34:36 ►
gratuitously generous,
01:34:38 ►
and as the narrator says to the absent indigo
01:34:41 ►
after he has been further initiated,
01:34:52 ►
thank you. Thank you for everything.
01:35:02 ►
This concludes the fourth chapter of the Rosa Paracelsus podcast.
01:35:05 ►
Thank you for listening. I’m Kat. And I’m Alexa.
01:35:07 ►
Until next time, my friends. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:35:47 ►
Namaste, my friends.