Red Ice Creations - Consciousness, OBE, RV, NDE, Entheogens and Altered States

Consciousness, OBE, RV, NDE, Entheogens and Altered States

Full Spectral Dominance (Part One)
2006 01 14
As I said in an earlier post, I'm finding the correspondences between boundary experiences a fascinating and instructive study. And an aspect which almost always appears present, whichever boundary is breached, is the electrical. Perhaps not surprisingly so, since the electric is also a irreducible aspect of physical life. It's not only out there, but it's in us. (In other words I suppose, wherever you go, there you are.)

Full Spectral Dominance (Part Two)
2006 01 27
Dr Albert Hoffman, the "father of LSD," but perhaps better described as its midwife, turned 100 a few days ago. Like so many other things we trip over this fraught century, lysergic acid diethylamide first appeared in Nazi-dominated Europe, and first through dreams and intuition. Hoffman was looking for compounds that induced muscle contraction. After synthesizing LSD and testing it on animals to no useful effect Hoffman's research moved on.

Many Scientists are Convinced that Man Can See the Future
2007 05 07
Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the background. He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button. In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner. If it wasn't for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman's face, ...

Down the Scole Hole
2005 12 27
The phenomena recorded in the Scole sittings was unusually rich and obtained under protocols anticipating the objections of skeptics. There was channelling of course, as well as spirit voices, noises, dancing lights, levitations and physical manifestations of alleged spirits. Also "apports" - the inexplicable materialization of dozens objects onto the session table, including an original pristine copy of the Daily Mail from January 4, 1944 and a tiny gold disc with hieroglyphics, "the source of which has not yet been identified." And remarkable captures on audio tape, photographic film and video.

"No man sees my face and lives"
2006 01 31
Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico in 1936 in order to become Europe's first "shamanic tourist" among the Tarahumara Indians. "Peyote, I knew, was not made for whites," the surrealist wrote in The Peyote Dance. "And a White, for these Red Men, is one whom the spirits have abandoned." The Tarahumara tried to fob off on Artaud "old men who would suddenly get the bends and jiggle their amulets in a queer way," but he held out for the genuine shamans. Finally he was permitted to join an all-night peyote ceremony, and partook of the "dangerous dissociations it seems Peyote provokes, and which I had for 20 years sought by other means"

Grave Mysteries (Part One & Two)
2006 03 04
In 1904 Crowley and his first wife, Rose, traveled to Egypt for their honeymoon. While visiting the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, Crowley recited the "preliminary invocation" of the Goetia: the occult ritual of "low magic" to bind demons to a sorcerer's will. When the two returned to their hotel room in Cairo, Rose entered a trance state and began murmuring "They are waiting for you," along with "similar urgent but unintelligible phrases" according to Robert Anton Wilson in Cosmic Triggers vol. I. Wilson continues: Crowley did not like this at all, since it is typical of the uncontrolled, quasi-hysterical trances of spiritualist mediums.

The Body Eclectic (Part One)
2006 03 30
Some fascinating glimpses there of a kind of orphaned rationalism running scared. My current favourite comment is this one: I rue the day that the woo-woos discovered the term "quantum physics." It's become their catch-all phrase that they can apply to anything in order to imbue whatever idiocy they're on about with a veneer of scientific validity. Naturally, skeptics who pride themselves on their scientific method would like to keep the "woo-woos" in Newtonian blinders, because the science has turned uncomfortably weird for those who mean to interpret the world by it.

The Body Eclectic (Part Two)
2006 04 10
Do you remember The Spirit of the Beehive? Here's yet another example of the "buzzing of bees" common to boundary experiences, this one mentioned in a 1996 interview by cereologist Colin Andrews when asked, "What was your most memorable crop circle experience and why?": While visiting a circle in a remote field at Kimpton, Hampshire, England during July 1987, I heard a very strange buzzing sound which was close to me and appeared to interact with me. I was overwhelmed by the experience and it left me very touched because it began after I had stood near the ring alone and prayed for a clue as to what the crop circles were about.

Space cadets
2006 01 10
An article last week in The Scotsman claimed an "extrordinary 'hyperspace' engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government." The theory is to create an intense magnetic field that would provide gravitational thrust: Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached.

The Way In is the Way Out: An Interview With Daniel Pinchbeck
2005 11 17
Struck by an existential crisis in the late 1990s, Daniel Pinchbeck - co-founder of the Open City literary and art journal as well as editor and journalist for a variety of publications - decided not to sooth his affliction with culturally approved balms such as antidepressants or the therapy du jour, but instead choose to reacquaint himself with the psychedelic substances.

Astronomers find the gate into parallel worlds
2005 09 17
Only housewives believe in three-dimensional space. None of the serious scientists would dare support such a stupid idea. However, the number of extra dimensions is still the object of heated discussions. Nature published an article by the Oxford professor Joseph Silk, where he makes a conclusion that there are six dimensions in the universe, i.e. three dimensions which we can sense and another three that we do not notice.

A New Interpretation of Psi Phenomena
2006 03 24
It has been argued that in animals psi seems to be a function of the "form and behaviour design" of each species, interacting with that group mind which builds "itself up from the unconsciously shared experience of all" its members and is operative in each of them. It appears as inherited instinct, impelling the spider to make its web, the bee its octagonal cell, in accordance with a given, unchanging norm. It appears as telepathy, synchronizing and co-ordinating the specialized activities of the different workers in the termitary.