Happy To Announce: Mike Crowley’s wonderful book,“Psychedelic Buddhism” has been published!
Mike gave me the distinct honour of writing one of the Forewords (and featuring some of my art) along with Dr. Ben Sessa from the UK.
Truly an amazing book, worth your time.
Congratulations Mike!
Folks, Buy This Book!
Love, Gwyllm
Here is more info, and a link where to purchase below!
About The Book
A guide to psychedelics and Buddhist practice
• Presents guidance and techniques for Buddhists who wish to incorporate psychedelics into their practice as well as for psychonauts who are interested in the maps of inner space provided by Buddhism
• Explores the use of psychedelics in Buddhist practice, sharing the kind of spiritual experiences that can be gained with each
• Describes meditation techniques, with special attention being given to the generation of the Four Positive Attitudes
In this user’s guide to psychedelic Buddhism, Lama Mike Crowley presents techniques for Buddhists who wish to incorporate psychedelics into their practice as well as for psychonauts who are interested in the maps of inner space provided by Buddhism. The author details how psychedelics have led to spontaneous awakening experiences, such as “Indra’s net” and universal voidness, that were once thought to be available only to advanced meditators. He explores the use of psychedelics, such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, in a Buddhist context, sharing the kind of spiritual experiences and benefits that can be gained with each. The author also looks at the use of psychedelics encoded in Vedic and Buddhist scriptures, particularly in the Vajrayāna tradition, from the Middle Ages until the present day.
Presenting an informed summary of Buddhism for psychonauts, the author explores the key beliefs of Buddhism, the life of the Buddha, and the practices followed in various yānas, or paths. He describes meditation techniques, with special attention being given to the generation of the Four Positive Attitudes: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, each being taken from their personal to their universal forms. He looks at Buddhist symbols, ceremonies, deities, and initiations, as well as psychic powers in Buddhist tradition, and how these ideas and practices can be used in the exploration of the inner realms of consciousness.
Providing a complete guide to integrating psychedelics into Buddhist practice, this book reveals how the ancient Buddhist teachers discovered their universal maps of consciousness and how you can use their wisdom to guide your journey.
“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, ’cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people — white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on — good honest hard-working people continue — these are people of modest means — continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all — at all — at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” – ― George Carlin
Capitalism Keeps On Going Until It Needs Socialism To Bail Out The Wealthy.
My Long Running Blog: The Hare’s Tale! Into The New Year! On The Menu: Alan Stivell/Music The Trooping Fairies – Changelings Whit Griffin Poems Martyn Bennett & Sorley MacLean/Poetry-Music https://gwyllm.com/2023/01/04/into-the-new-year/
Before he wrote The Lord of the Rings, the author JRR Tolkien coined a word – “eucatastrophe” – that scholars would still be writing about 70 years later. What did he mean, and why could it relate to the very real story of humanity?
In the early 1940s, JRR Tolkien wrote an essay about fairy stories – and why they matter. Based on a lecture he had delivered in Scotland, it not only defined and shaped his views as a fantasy writer, but would prove influential for years to come.
Fairy stories, Tolkien argued, are not only meant for children. Immersing oneself in fantastical worlds with wizards, talking trees and dragons is a “natural human activity”. Such tales have a purpose that nourishes the heart and mind, he continued. They can help us to remember and recover what may have been lost or taken for granted; they offer escape from one world to another, and ultimately, they bring consolation, and the reassurance that there can be happy endings.
At the time, Tolkien had only recently published The Hobbit, and was just beginning to work on The Lord of the Rings. It was a pivotal moment. As a writer, he was shifting into a more serious, authentic voice and tone. The literary scholar Verlyn Flieger describes the essay as “Tolkien’s definitive statement about his art” – but also much more.
In particular, Tolkien wrote about what makes a happy ending so powerful in stories. And to do so, he came up with an intriguing coinage: fairy stories, he suggested, often feature a “eucatastrophe” – this was, he suggested, a “good” catastrophe. So, what exactly did he mean? And could such events happen in real life too?
In the present day, Tolkien’s idea of the “good catastrophe” has attracted the attention of scholars who study existential risk and humanity’s future prospects. It turns out that eucatastrophes may matter beyond fairy stories – and identifying the conditions that lead to them could be necessary if we want to thrive as a species.
According to Tolkien, a eucatastrophe in a story often happens at the darkest moment. When all seems lost – when the enemy seems to have won – a sudden “joyous turn” for the better can emerge. It delivers a deep emotional reaction in readers: “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart”, he wrote.
In The Hobbit, it’d be the sudden arrival of the eagles in the Battle of the Five Armies, while in The Lord of the Rings, it’s the moment Gollum unexpectedly falls into the cracks of Mount Doom, destroying the One Ring. But many other stories feature such turning points, whether it is the kiss that revives Snow White, or the destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars.
JRR Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” helps to illuminate the themes and narrative turns of The Lord of the Rings (Credit: Getty Images)
s Tolkien wrote: “The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairytale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’… is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well… it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.”
Literary scholars have deployed Tolkien’s framing to describe such turns within narratives ever since. But in recent years, the word has drawn attention in other academic fields too – specifically among those who think about the deep future of humanity.
A few years ago, the philosophers Owen Cotton-Barratt and Toby Ord at the University of Oxford were writing a paper about how best to define existential catastrophes – those events that could threaten our species’ long-term potential: supervolcanoes, nuclear winter, pandemics, or the advent of a global totalitarian regime.
The pair realised, though, that their field lacked a word for brighter abrupt changes: moments when humanity’s prospects suddenly improve. So, they reached for Tolkien.
“Tolkien talks about the eucatastrophe as the sudden and surprising turn for the better. This is the concept that we were trying to name,” Cotton-Barratt explains. These would be “moments when things, in expectation at least, suddenly get a lot better”, he says. “And the world looks like it’s in a much better position.”
Eucatastrophes have already happened on Earth. The origin of life might be one example. “When life first arose, the expected value of the planet’s future may have become much bigger,” write Cotton-Barratt and Ord. Against all odds, after billions of years of barren sterility, fire and fury, living creatures finally emerged.
Others have suggested that eucatastrophes for one group can follow catastrophes for another. For example, an asteroid may have killed off the dinosaurs, but it also enabled mammals – and eventually, us – to diversify and thrive.
In The Rings of Power, a light from above (Credit: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video)
Examples within human history are a little harder to come by, but Cotton-Barratt (tentatively) suggests that the intellectual flourishing of the Enlightenment might be another case of a sudden, positive trajectory change. Some might say that the ends of World War One or Two could also count. For Tolkien himself, a Christian, the ultimate human example was the life of Jesus: his birth, and eventual resurrection: “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true,” he wrote.
Existential hope
But why bother labelling such events at all? For those who want the future to go well, the reason it matters to talk about possible eucatastrophes is that we could, in principle, prepare the ground for them to happen. “It doesn’t have to be totally unanticipated,” explains Cotton-Barratt. “We don’t need to be blindsided.”
So, for instance, a possible eucatastrophe might be a specific discovery enabled by investment in science, such as the emergence of a miraculous form of clean energy, like nuclear fusion, just as the world teeters on the precipice of total climate catastrophe. Or it could be a moral revolution: where humanity navigates through dark moments to come to a whole new realisation about how to live peacefully and harmoniously on this planet.
Amid a time of crisis and conflict, preparing for such turns for the better might be difficult to imagine. But Cotton-Barratt, Ord and others suggest that we owe it to future generations to ensure that we don’t neglect or ignore opportunities that could help them to encounter these moments of potential flourishing. There’s no doubt that we urgently need to reduce existential risk, they say, but we ought to also seek ways to increase what they call existential hope.
“The world is radically different now than it was in centuries past – particularly if you go back many centuries,” says Cotton-Barratt. “I do think it’s very possible that the world could be radically different again.” Building a world where “we are robustly well-prepared to face whatever obstacles come” is therefore not just prudent – it is also necessary if we want our great-grandchildren to live in a better world than we can currently imagine, he argues.
Unlike the Sun rising, a eucatastrophe has an element of surprise – but that doesn’t mean we can’t lay the ground for one (Credit: Getty Images)
So, could Tolkien’s eucatastrophe word soon enter the vernacular? Cotton-Barratt isn’t so sure. “It’s not a term I ever can really imagine going mainstream,” he acknowledges. “It just sounds confusing to people. I think it’s easy for people to hear it and think it’s a type of catastrophe.”
Benepeteia – based on the Greek word peripeteia, another suggestion, which means a sudden reversal of fortune.
Euflection Point – also drawing on the eu- prefix, meaning “good” or “well”.
Anastrophe – if “catastrophe” is a turn down (kata-), its opposite (ana-) would be an upturn.
Delajoy – a feeling of transcending joy.
Plethoration – the realisation of abundance.
Gleðitár – an Icelandic word for “tears of joy”
Existential Windfall
Lighter suggestions like Fantastrophe, a Hyper-gooding, or simply: Big Happy Surprise.
The winning entry? Efflorescence – a process of unfolding and blossoming.
Would Tolkien have approved? Perhaps: he once said that language invention was his “secret vice“. And his interest in philology – the study of linguistic evolution – means he might expect his influential term to eventually fade away.
For the time being though, the term eucatastrophe has stuck – and maybe one day, you and your descendants might actually be fortunate enough to see one happen.
“THE ANCIENT ROOTS OF LORD OF THE RINGS
It’s sometimes assumed that Tolkien was inspired by the most famous ring in opera, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs. Both Tolkien and Wagner drew inspiration from the same sources, chiefly Nordic sagas. For Tolkien, the obsession began in childhood, when he fell in love with the story of Sigurd the dragon-slayer.
But we also know that Tolkien was familiar with the site of a Romano-Celtic temple to Nodens, a Celtic healing god. Tolkien worked on the excavation of the site, named Dwarf’s Hill, and became fascinated by its folklore. In particular, he investigated Latin inscriptions, one of which brought down a curse on the thief of a ring.”
*Richard Fisher is a senior journalist for BBC Future and tweets @rifish
Hans Paul Oster (9 August 1887 – 9 April 1945) was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany and a leading figure of the German resistance from 1938 to 1943. As deputy head of the counter-espionage bureau in the Abwehr (German military intelligence), Oster was in a good position to conduct resistance operations under the guise of intelligence work; he was dismissed for helping Jews avoid arrest.
He was involved in the Oster Conspiracy of September 1938 and was arrested in 1943 on suspicion of helping Abwehr officers caught helping Jews escape Germany. After the failed 1944 July Plot on Hitler‘s life, the Gestapo seized the diaries of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of Abwehr, in which Oster‘s anti-Nazi activities were revealed. In April 1945, he was hanged with Canaris and Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Flossenbürg concentration camp.
