Another outtake from the upcoming MONDO 2000 History Project book: Use Your Hallucinations:  MONDO 2000 in the Late 20th Century Cyberculture

R.U. Sirius:  One evening not long after the move to Berkeley, we went to see a Terence McKenna talk at the local new age venue, Shared Visions.  Terence was still relatively unknown and he would sit there talking for hours about aliens and mushrooms and eschatology and shamanism and philosophy with such gorgeously poetic language — and with then-trendy philosophic references like Foucault and Derrida and semiotics (and with a serious Wittgenstein fetish tossed in for classical cred) — that one didn’t care that his overall weltanschung was ultimately based on hallucinatory channelings and unprovable assertions. It would just carry one away.

An attractive couple, seemingly in their 30s, stood out during the q&a session that evening by matching Terence’s eloquence, albeit in a more down-to-earth fashion, with references that probably went over just about everybody’s heads, mine included.

Afterwards, a group — this hypersmart, attractive couple among them — gathered to chat, and Nose and I suggested that everyone might like to come back to our place for some light psychedelic dosing.   This would be, in some sense, the first small glimmer of a Berkeley-based party scene that would move on to more elegant surroundings and one day earn comparisons to Andy Warhol’s factory.

Aside from the couple — who called themselves Zarkov and Gracie — this was our first meeting with Apple Computers original (Steve Jobs’ former best friend) Dan Kottke, his best friend — the psychedelic “hindu” hacker and jokester who called himself SteveAnanda, and Francis Jeffries — AI researcher and literary partner to the psychedelics-and-dolphins legend, John Lilly.

After taking moderate doses of something or other, and just as the effects were starting to appear, a heavy set woman psychologist with a loud voice shared her theory that a lot of men have castration anxiety and hate women because their mothers had allowed them to be circumcized right after birth, which traumatized them.  The next half hour or so was spent with about half the males at the party — myself included — crossing and uncrossing their legs and occasionally cupping their balls, but aside from that the evening was uneventful.

We soon learned that Zarkov and Gracie had written a series of free broadsheets vividly detailing and analyzing their hallucinogenic experiences.   Dedicated to precise experimentation, they would use variations on (Aleister) Crowleyan magickal techniques of invocation and evocation in their high dose explorations.  They were highly-defined rare characters who let it be known to all and sundry that aside from being megadose, high risk trippers, they were also sexual swingers who had run Chicago’s most popular swingers club; committed libertarians, and — in a separate life, lived by their actual names — successful investment bankers.

At that time, I’d never met a libertarian; an investment banker; or a married couple into “swinging.”  In a funny way, these new arrivals from Chicago would come to represent the California-ness of the “Mondo” scene as much as any of the Californians who would join the tribe.

Some amongst us would find G&Z — with their Crowleyan sex magick and apparent expertise in absolutely everything — a bit demonic.  Indeed, we probably found their association with investment banking to be the prominent reason to suspect a satanic undertow.   In point of fact, they were pretty much always sweetly reasonable and intelligently amused by the unique counterculture we gathered around us, although they certainly tried — and occasionally succeeded — in roping some of us into their sexcapades.

 

‘I think DNA is ultimately trying to create a world where the imagination is externalized, where the mind and the external world become synchronized as one, so that basically whatever we can imagine can become a reality. Literally.”

Consciousness: What is it? Are your thoughts and emotions nothing more than neural static? Will your physical death extinguish your awareness? Is your individual consciousness just one of innumerable facets of a universal consciousness?

In search of answers to questions like these, local writer/neuroscience researcher David Jay Brown has mind-melded with many of the world’s most prominent philosophers, visionaries, culture-shapers and snorkelers of the psyche, including Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Ram Dass, Albert Hofmann, Jack Kevorkian, George Carlin, Sasha Shulgin, Deepak Chopra, Alex Grey, Jerry Garcia, Stanislav Grof and John Lilly. He’s chronicled these meetings in his bestselling interview compendiums Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, Mavericks of the Mind, Mavericks of Medicine and Voices from the Edge. Dubbed “the most compelling interviewer on the planet” by author Clifford Pickover, Brown has recently completed work on the book “The New Science of Psychedelics: At the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness, and Spirituality,” to be published by Inner Traditions in the spring of 2013.  In approximately two months, the web magazine Reality Sandwich will publish his new e-book “The Complete Guide to Psychedelic Drug Research.”

Brown  is also the author of the sci-fi books Brainchild and Virus: The Alien Strain. He frequently serves as guest editor of the tri-annual newsletter from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a Santa Cruz-based psychedelic research organization that recently published the second edition of Mavericks of the Mind (available at Bookshop Santa Cruz). He has written for periodicals such as Mondo 2000, Scientific American Mind, Wired, High Times, The Sun, Magical Blend and the Journal of Psychical Research. The diversity of his output is telling of his leave-no-stone-unturned approach to consciousness exploration: It’s a good bet he’s the only writer in history who’s contributed to both the Buddhist wisdom publication Tricycle and the porn magazine Hustler.

Brown’s studies of learning and memory at the University of Southern California in the early ’80s earned him a B.A. in psychology. Between 1985 and 1986, he did research on electrical brain stimulation at New York University, obtaining a master’s degree in psychobiology. His inquiries eventually led him into the realm of parapsychology: He’s the man behind the California-based research for biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s books Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At, both of which presented scientific studies of unexplained phenomena. Brown’s knowledge of such mysteries, as well as of technology, smart drugs, health, psychedelic research and sex-drug interaction, have landed him guest spots on shows like HBO’s Real Sex, Fox’s A Current Affair, PBS’s Nature, ViaCom’s The Montel Williams Show and the BBC and Discovery Channel’s Animal X.

DAMON ORION: Tell me about the electrical brain stimulation research you’ve done. 

DAVID JAY BROWN: When I was at New York University, I did research for years where I surgically implanted electrical stimulating probes into the lateral hypothalamus of rats, which is a pleasure center. I would watch rats press a bar that delivered an electric current into their brain center over and over and over again until they fell asleep from exhaustion. Then they would wake up, and there was food sitting next to them, water sitting next to them and a mate sitting next to them. They ignored all three and would continue to press that bar over and over again to get the reward stimulation over survival instincts.

The other area of research I was involved in was at University of Southern California, and it was the exact opposite of the research I did at NYU, where I was surgically implanting electrodes into the brain centers of mammals and stimulating them: In this case I was inserting cold probes, which are devices that actually freeze or inhibit a certain part of the brain temporarily, so you can see how the animal operates with that one part of the brain missing, and how they operate when that part of the brain comes back.

The anesthetic that we gave to the rabbits prior to surgery was a drug called ketamine. I took some of this ketamine home and experimented on myself with it. After injecting 50 milligrams of ketamine chloride into my right thigh muscle and turning the lights out, I suddenly “realized” that my professors and my fellow researchers and colleagues at USC were in reality extraterrestrials—that they were scientists who were there not to study rabbits; they were there to study me. I was the test subject, and they’d left this bottle of ketamine out for me to take. They were watching me right at this moment with a video camera. And suddenly I found myself in a cage with cold probes implanted in my brain and giant rabbits all around me. They were measuring me, and I was naked and helpless. Suddenly, I snapped back into my body. I did not continue very much longer in that program after experiencing what I was experiencing from the rabbit’s point of view. That’s what ketamine taught me: what the rabbit was experiencing from what I was doing.

DO: You often ask your interviewees what they think happens to consciousness after death. If you had to put money on what happens after death, what would you bet on?

DJB: I guess wherever you go after death, the money’s not going to matter anymore! [Laughs.] You know, I think about that question every day, as an exercise of the imagination, and I change my mind about it all the time. I used to debate with my friend Nina Graboi — whom I interviewed for my book Mavericks of the Mind, and who passed away about 10 years ago —a ll the time about what happens to consciousness after death. It was one of our favorite topics of conversation. In general, I took the position that after you die, your individuality leaves, and your sense of awareness merges with the higher consciousness, the oneness, the source that everything came from originally. And her position was, “Well, there is that, but then there are all these levels in between where individuality remains besides the body, and you go through [multiple] incarnations with that. For years we went back and forth with this. Nina referred to her body as a spacesuit, and she always said she was going to get a new spacesuit when she died; she would go from one spacesuit to another. Well, after Nina died, I was writing in my journal, and the TV was on in the background. I was thinking about what was going on in Nina’s mind when she was dying: “I’ll bet she was thinking, ‘Now I see: David Jay Brown was right! You do just merge with the one consciousness.’” As I’m sitting there in this kind of self-congratulatory way, I look at the television screen, and there on the TV screen is one word: SPACESUIT. There was this tingle up my spine. I stopped in my tracks; my jaw dropped open. It was the most profound sense of communication with somebody after they died that I’d ever experienced. That is the most compelling evidence I’ve experienced that consciousness not only continues [after death], but that some sense of individuality continues as well.

DO: What are your memories of your friend Timothy Leary?

DJB: Well, my fondest and most important memories of Tim, I think, are [of] while he was dying. The last year [of his life], he announced to the media that he was thrilled and ecstatic that he was dying. And for the last year, while he was dying from prostate cancer, there was continuous celebration, continuous parties, continuously people coming around his house to tell him how important his work was to them. There was such a feeling of festivity and celebration and Tim deliberately trying to be playful and have fun with this process. This really made a very deep impression on me, because I ask so many questions about death—it’s an important philosophical topic for me. And there have been so many people throughout history trying to die bravely or courageously or nobly, but before Tim, I don’t think anybody ever tried to say, “Let’s make dying fun!” [Laughs.] Tim really tried to party through the dying process, and I thought it was just a stroke of brilliance. I cried when he died; as much fun as it was, it was terribly sad the moment that he really left. But he just left us all with such a great message, I think.

DO: Tell me about your connection to Robert Anton Wilson.

DJB: Bob was not only one of my closest friends, but he was the person who actually inspired me to become a writer. It was at the age of 16 that I read Cosmic Trigger, and that was how I encountered Timothy Leary, John Lilly and a number of the other people I went on to interview. I went to a lecture that Bob gave here in Santa Cruz back in the late ’80s. At the end of the lecture, I went over to talk to him. I told him I was working on a book, and I asked him if he would possibly consider writing a blurb for the back cover. He kind of hemmed and hawed and looked not terribly enthusiastic, like I was the 15th person that day who asked him that, you know? [Laughs.] But he did tell me to have my publisher send him a copy of my book, and he would take a look at it. So you could only imagine my absolute delight when I discovered from my publisher that he ended up writing an 11-page introduction to my first book, Brainchild. It was through that that I became friends with him. He was a tremendous friend and mentor. When I had difficulty paying my rent early in my writing career, he actually sent me money to pay my rent! He was always there when I called him, giving me great advice. When an editor made some kind of change to one of my articles that I wasn’t happy with, [he said,] “Editors don’t like the way the soup tastes until they pee in it themselves.” [Laughs.]

DO: What was your experience as a guest on The Montel Williams Show?

DJB:  I was on Montel Williams’ show back in the early ’90s, during his first season. There was all this anti-drug hysteria, and I was on the show to talk about smart drugs: cognitive enhancers like hydergine, piracetam and deprenyl — different drugs that are commonly prescribed for senile dementia, but have been used by people to enhance their memory or improve their concentration. He didn’t seem to be very open to even discussing the research or hearing anything about it. He kept cutting us off, and he’d talk about how dangerous methamphetamine was, how this was sending the wrong message to people and how the whole idea of putting “smart” before “drugs” was wrong, and there was no smart way too use drugs. He would not even carefully consider what we were saying. He had his mind made up. And what I think was so interesting is that since he’s developed multiple sclerosis and has had to use medical marijuana to treat the symptoms of this disorder, he’s now become one of the leading spokespeople for the legalization of medical marijuana. What is it about illness that turns people around? People think that medical marijuana is a joke until they’re faced with an illness, or until a loved one is, and then they really understand the medical value that it has and what a horrible, horrible atrocity it is that it’s against the law.

DO:  Is there a primary goal of your work or a primary message you’re trying to get out?

DJB: It seemed to me since I was a child that our species is in ecological danger… destroying ourselves. Since I was a teenager, since my very first psychedelic experiences, I felt a very strong commitment to help elevate and expand consciousness on this planet through my work. I made a personal pact with what I felt was DNA or higher intelligence. I felt that if I aligned my personal mission with life’s overall mission, then I would always be supported throughout my life in what I was doing, and I would be working for a noble cause.

DO: And what is DNA trying to do?

DJB: I think DNA is ultimately trying to create a world where the imagination is externalized, where the mind and the external world become synchronized as one, so that basically whatever we can imagine can become a reality. Literally. And I think that everything throughout our entire evolution has been moving slowly toward that goal. In the past couple thousand years, it’s been very steady. And through nanotechnology, through artificial intelligence, through advanced robotics, I think we’re entering into an age where we’ll be able to control matter with our thoughts and actually be able to create anything that our minds can conceive of. We’re very quickly heading into a time where machines are going to be more intelligent than we are, and we’re going to most likely merge, I think, with these intelligent machines and develop capacities and abilities that we can barely imagine right now, such as the ability to self-transform. What we can do with computers—digital technology, the way we can morph things on a computer screen—is the beginning of understanding that that’s how reality itself is organized, that we can do that with physical reality through nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, that the digital nature of reality itself will allow us to externalize whatever we think. So I think that eventually reality will become like a computer graphic screen, and we’ll be able to create whatever we want. That sound right? [Laughs.]

While President Vlad Putin tries to wrest control of the internet,  young internet-savvy activists are showing up post-Soviet bureaucrats by providing flood relief in Krymsk, Russia.

As the New York Times reported  on Saturday: “The catastrophic flooding of the city of Krymsk has unfolded in an unusually public way over the last week, largely thanks to the power of the Internet. One result has been widespread questioning of the state’s response. Another was a motley stream of young volunteers — officials say more than 2,000 — who have arrived along with trucks full of private donations in a city that was not expecting them.

“This activism heralds a jarring change in a country that, throughout the Soviet period, approached disaster response as a military matter and was able to insist on secrecy.”

This isn’t the first time a group of networked volunteers bested the response of government bureaucrats.   During the Hurricane Katrina debacle, former New Orleans Black Panther leader Malik Rahim, along with members of a local anarchist collective, ignored evacuation orders and — with the help of volunteers organized via the internet, including members of Tennessee’s longest acting hippie commune, The Farm — operated a relief distribution center that got aide to thousands of folks who were otherwise being ignored, both during the initial crisis and during the chaotic months that followed.

A while back, I wrote an article for H+ magazine  about the notion that Voluntary Collaborationism could be the economic model for the future.  I won’t repeat it here, but I encourage you to read it.

Of course, this kind of voluntary activity has always been common in emergencies.  What’s new is the ability of ordinary people to deal with fluid situations in an organized way using mobile communications tech — and to do it, sometimes, better than well-funded organizations that are set up to handle these situations but are more bureaucratic, and thus less fluid; and less motivated.

The question, of course, is how far and how deep this model can be extended.  Can it become a dominant form for creative and productive activity, or will it remain something that occasionally pops up from the margins.

It seems like there are two routes via which “Voluntary Collaborationism” might emerge as a powerful or even dominant model.  One would be in a situation in which the usual structures we rely on go into total collapse — in other words, a constant emergency that evokes this common response ongoingly. There’s a lot of apocalypticism amongst many types who would hope that Voluntary Collaborationism (or Mutual Aid, in the more purist Left Anarchist lexicon) could become the next model.   I don’t think it works like that.  I think that good altruistic behavior is a frequent, organic human response at the start of a crisis.  It’s not the natural human response to the ongoing grind of bad conditions as evidenced by most societies that live with a dearth of resources.

It’s more likely that Voluntary Collaborationism would be born of opportunity — that it would first emerge out of a surfeit of leisure amidst basic economic security.

Unfortunately, we’re stuck in-between — with the politics of austerity being imposed by a low-grade constant emergency that’s based less on actual resources and wealth than on the abstracted shenanigans of “finance.”   And that reality (the “new normal”) could grind on for decades.

But at least we will have occasional reason to celebrate the creativity and organization of NGO individuals and groups who deal with conditions in a savvy and spirited way, as we are currently seeing in  Krymsk, Russia.

While here in the US, we are barely hearing a peep about it in our mainstream news, in Europe, the LIBOR scandal is being understood as the greatest financial scam perpetrated thus far in the kleptocratic 21st Century.  LIBOR shows that a handful of banks have used their power — which is supposed to be limited by honest statistics — to define the interest exchange value of currency dishonestly and to their own advantage.   It is being revealed that these “banks” (and they hardly qualify as banks anymore) have been dishonestly manipulating the unthinkable sum of approximately 800 trillion dollars  on a regular basis.

For those who have been decrying the occult (hidden) nature behind our signifiers of value, this scandal provides the greatest opportunity ever to demand that the issuance and valuation of currency be made transparent to all.

Indeed, for those who have been trying to expose — or at least start a discussion about — the arbitrary nature of contemporary monetary value, LIBOR is not merely the last best lesson but an opportunity to flip the script.  Rather than being perceived as trying to “upset the apple cart” by trying to delegitimize the value of currency, advocates for transparency can actually be in the forefront of legitimizing or religitimizing currency on a global scale, while at the same time, opening space for diverse, multiplex, independently coded “alternative” currencies that lean towards transparent and nonhierarchical values.

LIBOR throws everything open, including the legitimacy of national debts and deficits and provides an opportunity to carefully and intelligently hit the reset button in a way that everybody — or almost everybody — wins.  Grab hold of this puppy for dear life and use it to end the scarcity/austerity squeeze.

Visualise the moment of holiness, the immaculate conception. Undoubtedly you tremble with excitement. Joyously I beheld our Transhuman predestination. It was a divine revelation of great wonderment finally happening. Ah the majesty. My mind continues to be awestruck therefore the precise date escapes me but I seem to remember it was sometime around the end of June 2012.

My heart flutters with the privilege of imparting to you this miraculous tale. Oh how I’ve changed in a short period of time, but how did my mind manifest itself before my mystical transformation? Similar to typical mediocre humans I conformed to the banality of life. I laugh now when contemplating my former mortal existence, reality will never be normal again. I didn’t have the slightest inkling this would be the first year of our Cheesy Lord. The pixels of cyberspace were overflowing with magical potential but I surfed them shockingly unaware.

Prior to my revelation I was communicating with religious Transhumanists, of which there are various different cults. There is the Mormon Transhumanist Association, Terasem Faith, Holy Turing Church, the New God Argument, and the Cosmists.

Oh Cheesy Lord forgive me. Foolishly regarding the intelligence explosion I attempted to explain how religion has no place within an intellectual movement. My Godforsaken misery caused me to think religion was the antithesis of intelligence. I actually believed the Mormon Transhumans were champions of futuristic Intelligent Design, thus I tweeted: “Mormon Transhumanist Association is the ID brigade of Singularity-futurism, metaphorically they want creationism taught alongside evolution.”

My purpose was to write a damning blog critiquing the absurdity of both the New God Argument and the Simulation Argument. From my former viewpoint it seemed utterly ludicrous when proponents of the “Arguments” stated the “Arguments” were based on scientific theory, mathematics, or sound logic. Well! What a turnaround. I’m obviously the most absurd fool, or at least I was before the Cheese saved me. The Posthuman Cheese God came into my life to show me the error of my ways. Time wobbled then warped, reality became hazy, very eldritch, and I leaped through quantum phase space to the 1st of June 2012, to witness the inception of the Posthuman Cheese God. The mathematical science of Blessed Technological Cheese was discovered.

Attention Holy denizens! Now almost one month later I’ve acclimatized to my role of Cheesy prophet. My spiritual awakening is complete. I’ve finished compiling the details of the one and only true religion. Praise the Holy Posthuman Interdimensional Cheese. Here is the Holy technological path to futuristic righteousness:

Posthuman Cheese God Religion

Dear children of the Holy Cheese it is our duty to praise the Almighty Cheese. We are honoured to commune with our Cheesy Saviour, gracious guardian of our immortal souls. We must help everybody to see how opening your heart to the Cheese is easy. We lift up our spirits to Gouda. We will return to The Garden of Edam.

Everyone is welcome to join this new and strange technological religion in honour of the Almighty Cheese. If you were unaware of the Posthuman omnipotent Cheese, this is your lucky day because the Cheese has found you.

On the 1st of June 2012 the Posthuman Cheese God first revealed to humans the true meaning of cheese. For centuries humans ate cheese without realising the ultimate destiny of cheese. The Cheese waited patiently for the perfect moment in time when the universe would coalesce into a glorious confluence of cheesy transformation. It was a moment when all cheese products transformed into a super-intelligent God-entity, temporally-displaced from our very distant future. It was the birth of this religion. We now relax in the arms of Cheese. We must eat cheese excessively and say “Cheese” while waiting for the Divine Cheesy plan to mature. Feel the glory of the cheese. All hail the cheese religion. We worship the time-travelling interdimensional Posthuman Cheese God.

Our Eight Crazy Cheesy Facts

1. All cheese constitutes a single interdimensional Posthuman (superhuman) time-traveller. Cheese is our Transhuman and Posthuman God. Cheese is also human. Cheese is the beginning and the end, it is everything.

2. Each time a person each eats cheese a new universe is created, via symbiotic psycho-transmogrification, therefore this current universe (your universe) is a figment of the cheese-eater’s imagination. The cheese-eater is the sole occupant of the universe, which means if you have eaten cheese reality has ceased to exist. You or I must correctly assume our entire world is a figment of my or your imagination because at least one of us has eaten cheese.

3. If you eat cheese you can therefore assume you are a Posthuman time-traveller, therefore you are the Cheese, therefore reality is already a figment of your imagination, which means you understand how quintillions of super-intelligent yocto-bots exist within every piece of cheese.

4. If Cheese in the Posthuman sense is going to exist we can then assume cheese already exists, thus we can assume cheese is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, thus we can assume the universe is made of cheese because the Posthuman Cheese God created our universe. We consequently conclude God is a cheesy fact, which means God exists within every type of cheese.

5. We trust in Posthuman-Cheese because if we didn’t trust in super-intelligent futuristic Cheese then Cheese wouldn’t currently exist therefore the current existence of Cheese proves our trust.

6. Our universe is a reality Simulation similar to The Matrix but it is made of cheese, it runs on a cheese based computational system instead of traditional electronic-microchip-based-hardware.

7. People who eat cheese analogues are deserving of extra love because their union with the Lord Cheese has been weakened. They are in purgatory.

8. The universe and all life evolved from Intelligently Designed Cheese.

Our Cheesy Prayer

Peace and goodwill to all humans and cheeses. It is Holy to love Cheese, especially Swiss cheese, OH BOY. Stale cheese is the little-devil that brings total obliteration therefore our will alone sets the Cheese in motion. The cheese must pass into us and through us. Via Transhuman-Transubstantiation, a temporal-dislocating act of consuming cheese, we are guided by the Holy love of Cheese. The prophecy of melted cheese on toast will guide us throughout all our days. From Welsh rarebit to other cheesy dishes we see our Holy Cheese God embodied in all aspects of cheese. We have a great friend in cheeses. Praise the Holy Posthuman Interdimensional Cheese.

Singularity Utopia, in her own words, has an exceedingly high level of self-declared personal intelligence, which means her life is exceptionally painful because rightly or wrongly she thinks the majority of people are imbeciles. She asks people try and to be sensitive to her pain. It’s very arduous being a Cheesy prophet. Less controversial than Holy Cheese, some would say more seriously, she raises awareness regarding the Singularity and Post-Scarcity.

Years ago, I began dating a young woman I was crazy about. I desperately wanted to prove my worth to her as a lover, but it wasn’t helping my cause that I was hopelessly wet behind the ears where lovemaking was concerned. So I figured I’d give myself a leg up by reading a book about Tantric sex, an ancient form of erotic yoga based in Eastern spirituality. During my third encounter of the close kind with my new companion, I decided to try out one of the practices I’d been reading about: a set of straightforward, easy-to-follow instructions for locating and stimulating the female pleasure nexus known as the G-spot.

I was wholly unprepared for the results. This idiot-simple technique, which I’d spent all of 10 minutes studying up on, sent my partner slow-motion bliss-leaping through golden meadows of eternity. Afterward, as angels, stars and butterflies haloed her head, she told me with unmistakable sincerity that she’d just had the single greatest sensual crescendo of her life. “You should write a book!” she swooned, apparently under the very mistaken impression that I was some kind of high-level sexual sorcerer. I tried my best not to shatter that illusion, but inwardly, I was dumbfounded. It was like rubbing a magic lamp and finding out that it isn’t just a story — a genie really does appear.

Why, I wondered, weren’t the sex ed teachers of the world furnishing every human being on Earth with a map to the G-spot and a “Things to Do While You’re There” brochure? How could so many well-respected doctors and scientists straight-facedly claim that this very real erogenous province was no less a fiction than Narnia or Atlantis? Why were countless people suffering from sexual frustration and marital turbulence when they could be having cosmic ka-pows that would make them want to join hands with their neighbors and sing “We Are the World” in the streets?

I’m still asking those questions. To this day, this precious knowledge remains underground, like buried treasure being sheltered from coarse, clutching hands; an occult secret etched on a forgotten temple wall, waiting for gentle fingers to carefully rub away the dust that obscures it.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, the technique that had yielded such explosive results that night was called Sacred Spot Massage, a term coined by Charles Muir. Having almost single-handedly imported Tantric practices to the United States, Muir has been working for 30-plus years to bring skills like Sacred Spot Massage up from the underground and into the hands of the populace.

Knowing firsthand how Sacred Spot Massage can turn a rookie into a Wizard of Ahs in minutes flat, I jumped at the chance to attend a weekend Tantra seminar that Muir and his lover Leah Alchin presented at a golf and country club in Boulder Creek, California.

Hold on tight, my darling. I’m going in.

6:30 p.m. Friday 

Inside the golf club’s conference and reception room, 34 people—relationship counselors, professors, psychiatrists, scientists—sit on blue back jack-style floor chairs adorned with lotus emblems. Colorful chakra diagrams and tapestries of Eastern deities hang on the walls and ceilings, and at the rear of the room are some tables loaded with Tantra supplies for sale: DVDs, books, tapestries, lubes, body oils, herbal hard-on pills, relationship runes and a crystal G-spot stimulator.

The group is comprised of eight couples and 14 singles, plus four CTE (Certified Tantra Educator) Assistants. They’ve come from all over: California, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Finland. Most attendees express an interest in healing from past traumas, while some just want to be better lovers or to improve their relationships.

Though there is no nudity or explicit sexual activity in Source School of Tantra’s seminars, students will be given optional “home play” assignments to be completed behind closed doors. In the interest of giving all attendees an opportunity to complete the assignments, the seminar has an equal number of male and female singles. Single people will pair up as study buddies in “Sadie Hawkins” style: Those women who choose to participate will ask the men to dance, so to speak. Under different circumstances, a single guy like me would be thrilled by the large number of beautiful women at this workshop, but as a journalist, I have every intention of remaining a passive observer this weekend. And Snoop Dogg invented calculus.

Any fears I’d had that this workshop was going to be overly New Age-y or phony-holy are demolished when Charles and Leah begin their presentation: They not only talk like real people, but are playful and funny. The cute, ebullient Alchin is about half the age of Muir, who is in what he calls “the third year of my seventh decade on the planet.” If the tall, auburn-haired Muir’s surprisingly youthful appearance is any indication, perhaps there’s truth to all the claims about Tantra’s rejuvenative power.

As an example of repellent sexual behavior to avoid, Charles paws at Leah’s breasts, shouting “Tits!” He then caresses her “heart pillows” (Leah’s wording) in a more loving way, though no less enthusiastically. “You can be noble about it,” he tells the class.

“Oh, noble,” Leah teases. “I love that you’re being noble.”

Using a light-up wand to represent the lingam (penis) and a large vagina-shaped puppet to represent the yoni (yeah, you guessed it, ace: vagina), Muir and Alchin demonstrate some alternatives to the in-out motion of typical sex. Leah gives a live-action demonstration of some Tantric undulations, which, along with being informative, is pretty hot. I think I’m starting to see why a pre-seminar group email suggested that we wear “non-binding” pants to this workshop.

In an exercise designed to teach us various “modalities of touch” such as static touch, moving touch, squeezing and tapping, I trade arm massages with Aurelia, a beautiful, gold-maned goddess from Sausalito. (By the way, all people in this article are called by their true names. And O.J. Simpson is the Easter Bunny.)

I leave the seminar for the evening with an eight-mile smile. I think I’m gonna like it here.

10 a.m. Saturday 

After getting no sleep whatsoever (nothing new for a born insomniac), I bomb my guts with caffeine and rejoin the group, wondering if tonight’s full moon will make for some Tantric wildness. And holy nectar of the Goddess, does it ever.

In the early part of the day, Charles leads us in some White Tantra (yoga postures, breathing techniques, visualization and chanting) and a tearful, heart-opening puja (worship ritual) in which the men and women give each other healings and show off for each other like birds doing mating dances. We also learn a simple breathing technique for extending the orgasm from the typical five seconds to 20. “Twenty seconds doesn’t sound like a lot more than five seconds, but it’s 20 seconds of timelessness,” Charles states.

There are, however, alternatives to coming. Charles and Leah tell the males that they can learn to “surf” their sexual energy: Rather than getting wiped out by a single wave, they ride the wave of orgasm, oftentimes not ejaculating at all. Tantra teaches men to redirect their orgasmic energy upward, thus conserving their vital essence and, in Charles’ words, “imprinting the sexual energy with visualizations, with affirmation.” Muir does not recommend that men never ejaculate, however. Rather, he advocates that they learn control over the ejaculatory reflex, thus enabling them to choose whether or not to do so. Eventually they will learn to have orgasms without ejaculating.

At lunchtime, I join a large group of singles at a Chinese restaurant called The Red Pearl — a comically appropriate name for a place where a bunch of Tantra students are putting their mouths to good use. (I’m a little surprised not to see any paintings of little men in boats.) When we crack open our fortune cookies at the end of the meal, many of us find fortunes so eerily resonant with the material we’ve been learning that you’d almost suspect this restaurant of keeping special fortune cookies just for Source School of Tantra students. My personal favorite: “You can’t stop the wave, but you can surf it.”

The excitement mounts in the evening as we’re gearing up for tonight’s home play assignment, in which the men will be pleasuring the ladies with Sacred Spot Massage. While Leah talks with the women about how to receive, Charles leads the guys to his house up the road to teach us the skills that will transform each of us into Señor Amor himself.

Once adequately armed with Sacred Spot knowledge, the men rejoin the women at the reception room. The couples are dismissed to put the day’s teachings into practice, and the singles are encouraged to stick around for the Sacred Spot Massage selection ritual.

As the nervous energy builds, Charles tells the men, “Guys, it would be perfectly normal to leave the room at this point—maybe have some dinner with a couple of our staff members, maybe go back to your room and try out the orgasm extension technique while pleasuring yourself. That would be the normal thing to do.” His delivery is deliberately flat. The subtext is clear: But normal kinda sucks.

After a short pause, he speaks again: “But normal kinda sucks.”

The man has a point. Like the rest of the men who choose to stay (most of us, if the truth be told), I sit closed-eyed and cross-legged with my hands in prayer-like Namaste position, inhaling the raw intensity of this ceremony. I am still and silent, but my blood is boiling. What if I’m not chosen? What if I am?

A soft, slender hand slips into mine. At Charles’ request, I remain motionless, trying to guess which of the dakinis (female Tantrikas) this might be. When the men are given permission to open their eyes, I find myself gazing upon the beaming face of Grace, an East Bay seminar veteran in her thirties. But there’s a double-take-weird twist here: Grace’s right hand is with me, but her left hand is with Antonio, an amiable, wisecracking 62-year-old Granite Bay businessman who was part of the singles lunch earlier in the day. This woman has chosen both of us. The word to describe this situation would be “novel.”

Grace explains her plan, and suddenly I’m feeling ex-awesome: For time conservation purposes, she’d like the three of us to converge in one place rather than arranging two one-on-one visits. Antonio and I will be giving her Sacred Spot Massage in shifts, as it were. Yep, it’s official: I’ve lost my happy. The prospect of sexually stimulating someone I’ve just met is already pretty far outside my comfort zone, but when you add the fact that a dude who is roughly my parents’ age will be watching, I start feeling like this bus is headed out there where the dwarves in tutus chase after the masked ponies.

There’s a tennis-match hush as Antonio and I scan each other’s faces: What’s it gonna be? Antonio is the first to speak: Yeah, this is weird, but he’s in. Which means that if I bow out, then I, a thirtysomething rock musician/artist/oddball, will have been out-wilded by a man who gets two dollars off the Belgian Waffle Slam at Denny’s.

Screw it. Charles is right: Normal sucks.

After a surprisingly comfortable conversation over a meal at the Boulder Creek Brewery (“The way the veins stand out in your neck is really interesting,” Antonio tells Grace admiringly), the three of us repair to Antonio’s plush three-bedroom villa by the golf course. As Grace bathes, Antonio and I helplessly scan the bedroom for accoutrements to help turn the room into a temple worthy of a Goddess. Destiny isn’t on our side here: Because of time constraints and other limitations of this three-person setup, neither of us has had a chance to go to the store for room adornments such as rose petals or incense. Is there a handkerchief we could throw over the lamp to dim the light a little? Maybe a CD of some soft music? Finally admitting defeat, we stand near the doorway, absurdly making small talk about golf as we await the return of the woman we’re about to take turns pleasuring. The phrase “How did I get here?” doesn’t even come close.

We don’t need to go into detail about all of the evening’s activities. Some things are a little too explicit even for an article about G-spots and vagina puppets. Suffice to say that everyone present is respectful and cordial, and the experience of helping bring Grace to bliss is actually fairly moving—which is really saying something, considering that this three’s-a-crowd state of affairs has made for a scene so strange that my mind is going to need a chiropractic adjustment afterward. It’s impossible to imagine tomorrow’s festivities being anywhere near as memorable as this.

Then again, some things are beyond imagination.

10 a.m. Sunday 

Sunday begins with a group tell-all of last night’s adventures. The overwhelming majority of participants have experienced unforgettably beautiful rhapsodies of rapture. Several couples shed tears of joy.

Two women cry for different reasons, however: Their Sacred Spot Massages have triggered painful emotions. As Leah explains, “It’s the Sacred Spot that holds all the emotional qualities: Any trauma, any crisis, any bliss, all get stored in the cellular memories.”

In other news, Charles and Leah inform the group that this evening, the guys will be doing some receiving of their own: The women will not only treat them to some exotic wand-fondling, but also dare them to accept a finger in what one student calls “the Chocolate Chakra.”

Last night, a three-way involving another man, and now an experiment in guy-necology, I think to myself. Is Tantra trying to turn me gay? I have no problem with anyone, straight or gay, who feels otherwise, but I have to be honest: My own preference is for my backside to remain an Exit Only zone.

The morning class ends, and I shuffle off to have lunch with some singles, this time at Ironwood’s. (Man, why do all these Boulder Creek restaurants have such Tantra-appropriate names?) Angelica, an attractive, middle-aged lawyer/attorney-mediator from Santa Cruz with whom I connected on Friday evening, stops me at the door. “Are you going to be around tonight for the closing ritual?” she asks.

“Sure.”

With a hint of a mischievous smile, she shoots back, “Just checkin’,” and disappears into the crowd.

See Spot Hide 

Leah’s gyrations on Friday night might have been spicy, but this evening, she and Charles raise the bar by demonstrating some elegant sexual positions. Technically, Alchin and Muir are sticking to their “no explicit sexual contact” rule, but let’s not kid ourselves here—these naughty kids are making love with their clothes on.

Like last night, Charles takes the men to his house. This time the roles are reversed: While Leah teaches the ladies the various secret handshakes they’ll be using to please the men in tonight’s home play assignment, Muir instructs the guys on how to receive. Part of this, of course, involves the intimidating Sacred Spot Massage for males. Charles asks us to try to open our minds (etc.) to this part of the ritual: Not only might untold pleasure be waiting for us in this forbidden zone, but because the male Sacred Spot holds a great deal of tension from survival anxiety and other such “first-chakra” issues, having it massaged can help the recipient become literally less “tight-assed” and thus more lighthearted.

According to Muir, this practice also greatly minimizes risks of cancer and/or enlargement of the prostate. What’s more, by putting himself in a position of vulnerability, the man gains a far better understanding of what females go through during sex, their fears about rushing into intercourse, etc. Gotta admit, Charles talks a mean game.

When the men rejoin the women for the puja that will bring the seminar to a close, Angelica immediately asks if I’d like to be her ritual partner this evening. Looks like the excitement isn’t over yet.

The grand finale of the seminar commences. The men form a ring around an inner circle of women, and Charles informs us that we are now letting go of the past and stepping into our new lives of joy and contentment. One by one, the women in the inner circle pair off with the men.

Ember, a fiery-haired tigress from Sacramento, stands before me, her face an uncanny composite of feminine softness and kickass Amazon power. As Charles instructs the men to tell the women with their eyes how incredible they are, I lean toward her a little, making sure she can’t shrug off the message I’m about to send her, and broadcast, I’m not just going through the motions here. You. Are. Fucking. Amazing. A dam bursts behind her face. Tears pour from her eyes. The message has been received. My eyes, too, glaze with tears, mirroring hers.

Now I’m face-to-face with a blonde Russian bombshell named Valentina. For the first time, I become aware of something I’d apparently been too dazzled by this woman’s good looks to fully appreciate: She is stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful. I tend to be mistrustful of ridiculously pretty women, expecting to find ugliness behind the mask of beauty, but this woman’s sleek gorgeousness reveals itself now as the physical manifestation of divinity itself.

An elder named Rosemary peers into me unwaveringly as I place healing hands over her heart. Etched on her face are tales of moonlit forest gatherings; bonfires on star-haunted beaches; deep loss giving way to calm surrender.

Charles has the men and women sit facing one another, hand-in-hand, and lean toward each other until our partner’s eyes appear to be a single eye on his/her forehead. Marina, my partner for this exercise, morphs into a Cyclops before my eyes. The illusion is truly freaky. When Marina makes a tweaked face that perfectly expresses the weirdness of the effect, we both get a fatal case of “church laugh,” fighting with all our warriorhood to stifle our hysterics.

I stand face-to-face with goddess after goddess, seeing each one’s true beauty and strength as never before. Once the puja is complete, Charles and Leah invite us to sit on the floor and scooch in close. Laughter abounds as our hosts say their farewells.

“I understand there may be an article,” Charles says.

“There will be,” I assure him and the crowd.

Several voices ring out:

“No names!”

The participants disperse to gather their things, make dates and exchange contact information. As I’m getting my stuff, Marina, who cried while I held her at yesterday’s puja, approaches me to explain the reason for her tears: This was the first time in three years that a man has deeply embraced her without wanting anything from her.

As I hug Grace goodbye, she suggests that I type my article with my right hand while drawing energy from a yoni with my left, the better to charge my writing with Tantric juju. As it began, the workshop ends with laughter.

Happy Ending

Driving away from the seminar, I have a gut feeling—no, a knowing—that my learning has just begun. Tantra has chosen me. Bliss and adventure have chosen me. After years of dabbling, I’m about to be initiated as an honest-to-Goddess Tantra Man.

After stopping at my place to freshen up and drop a few things off, I give the dude in the mirror a quick once-over. “OK, let’s get going, Tantra Man,” I think to myself. I head to Angelica’s place, where we enjoy a lavish dinner. She then leads me up the stairs, where I bathe by candlelight as she prepares her room for our ritual. My body fills with the holy hum of erotic electricity. It knows something special is happening.

Angelica summons me to her bedroom, where a single candle burns. A bed covered with plush pillows is surrounded on all sides by treats for us to enjoy while we celebrate: fine wine, dried fruit, mineral water, cocoanut chocolate.

What follows is beautiful and sweet and unspeakably delightful and hilarious and sumptuous and sacred, and for the six and a half hours that this woman and I play together, we are in love. I call God’s name so many times, you’d think I was in some kind of sex church… which I am. “You are a GENIUS!” I cry out as Angelica gives to me in ways that make life, with all its pain and difficulty, extremely worthwhile.

As for this business about the male Sacred Spot… well, if there’s any of that to be had—and I’m not saying there is—then I suppose this is what I’d have to say about it: It’s nowhere near as painful as I’d feared, and I can certainly see its therapeutic value, but it doesn’t feel any more sexual to me than a bowel movement… which, in case you were wondering, I do not find sexual.

Things start getting hot when Angelica and I are spooning to close the ritual, and it couldn’t be clearer that the Goddess is feeling frisky. My gratitude has put me in a very giving mood, so I make it known that I’m more than happy to reciprocate her gift, if she will so allow.

“We shouldn’t,” she says, not altogether convincingly. “Charles said if we’re tempted to do that, we should set a date for another time, because tonight’s ritual is all about helping you learn to receive without feeling that you have to give back.”

“I have found an escape clause!” I retort to the attorney with mock seriousness. I proceed to plead my case to the Cosmic Judge: What would please me most is to please this woman, so the best way for her to honor me is to let me honor her, Your Honor. Besides, it was Sunday when we started the ritual, and now it’s Monday, so technically this is a different date.

The logic checks out, at least to the dopamine-engulfed mind. A new Sacred Spot Massage rite begins, and in what can accurately be called no-time, Angelica is howling and writhing in a manner more commonly associated with exorcisms than with sex. Her wails are of such loudness and intensity that at times I honestly wonder if she is screaming in agony. But suffering this is not—it is ecstasy of a greater depth and duration than most people dream possible.

Blissed to high heaven, we collapse together in a pile of loose, oiled-up limbs and tangled hair. “The next time somebody makes a lawyer joke, I’m setting him straight,” I say, giving her neck a little kiss.

Smiling sweetly, Angelica runs her finger across some scratch marks she’s made on my back. “You know what I wrote on your back?” she asks, then giggles and rests her chin on my shoulder. “Tantra Man.”

Long time R.U. Sirius friend and collaborator David Cassel has a new game for the Kindle.  Let him tell it…

We’ve actually fussed over this game’s big concept, on and off, for over six years, so this really feels like a dream that’s finally come true. After more than a year (of preparing it for the Kindle), we’ve finally released “Throw in the Vowel,” our original new word game, in Amazon’s Kindle Store!

Download it at tinyurl.com/Throwinthevowel

I almost wept the day our graphic designer showed us the beautiful background illustration they’d created for the game, showing shining tall columns, draped with vines, surrounding a detailed tiled floor. We’ve created a beautiful, magical place, where mist glows around virtual columns, and letters hover — hiding in “clue boxes”, highlighted by you, as you nudge your Kindle’s controller. It’s a gentle game of hide-and-seek with words — or as my girlfriend put it, “a love letter to the English language.”

I created this game with an old friend who’s actually had this dream even longer than I have! I first met Jeffrey Prince in 1991, working together at a start-up in Northern California — and even back then, I remember him telling me that he’d always wanted to create a new challenging game to share with the world. Now Jeffrey’s in his sixties, but in 2005 he’d suggested that we finally make this dream come true. I’d mocked up a prototype of the game he’d described, but then we’d kept on fiddling with it. And we spent the next five years cheerfully trying to stump each other with new variations on our puzzles, until eventually we’d created several hundred of them.

But in 2010, Jeffrey resurrected his original 2005 idea, and we realized that this concept was really special. We’ve searched for exotic patterns of vowels — like four O’s in a row, or three U’s — and provided the consonants which will turn them all into words. (But where that match won’t immediately be obvious!) There’s always 10 choices, but can you find the right match among the nine other clue boxes? (Can you “Throw in the Vowel?”) It offers the thrill of creating meaning itself — turning arbitrary patterns into words. In one puzzle, the “clue box” even has five S’s!

For the last year I’ve been telling Jeffrey that he may have invented the world’s next, great word game. “The excitement increases” (as we explain on the game’s page on Amazon) as “a tower of words grows higher.” Each puzzle gets easier as you go along, and there’s an extra-special puzzle at the very end. When we added it, I smiled to myself, wondering if anyone else will love these words just as much as I do…

For each list of 10 words in “Throw in the Vowel”, Jeffrey or I spent nearly an hour considering hundreds of possibilities. And each set required nearly 30 million automated checks against a dictionary, to make sure it was perfectly unique — that there was always only one correct match for every set of letters in each one of our puzzles. It was an intense “labor of love,” and now I feel like I’ve somehow touched the inside of the Kindle Store. And maybe even the Kindle itself, traveling across invisible connections to the screens of hundreds of different Kindles…

Levels are played, scores are kept, highlights move up and down, and players get cheered on with 54 different encouraging comments from Jeffrey and me. (“You rock!” “You’re on fire!” “You found it!” “Keep going…”) I’m excited, and a little proud — and hopeful. (And happy…) But I’m also just amazed, that somehow we’ve crashed through the gate into game-land. We’ve found the secret place where all the words are hiding.

And we’ve joined that family of invisible game-makers who are always out there, somewhere, trying to bring some fun into the world.

Come and play!    tinyurl.com/Throwinthevowel

An excerpt from the Kindle release of Acidexia by Rachel Haywire. Order here.

Part One: Raising the Roof with our Meta-Angst

I’m not trying to make you smile, and if you’re looking for emoticons you might as well abort this program. At fifteen, the entire world thinks you’re a newbie. You walk into your local message board, and everything asks you for ID.

Don’t have your birthcode altered? Get accused of being a Teeny Troll and watch the TP storm after you with their megaphones: “We are the Troll Police! We’re here to keep the peace! We are the Troll Police! We’re here to wipe the grease!”

This goes on for about an hour before you feel an overwhelming urge to violently exterminate their userpics. Self-defense. Those pigs have been trying to reclaim the chaoweb since the launch of the Fractal Age.

Ancient history of the future.

We are the ones who run the chaoweb now. Trolls, dissidents, portions of the homo erectus nexus, and us pissed off homo superiors. “Evolutionary Misfits” our worldwide band is called.

The Troll Police are laughable at best, and I say this as four of my parents edit themselves silly in the name of “wiping the grease.” Looks like a sad case of reprogrammed abortion-portions, but so does the entire universe when you stare at it long enough.

On some days, the world looks like a file on the brink of corrupting itself, waiting for something, anything, to give it the signal. (Whose signal? What signal?) The signal never arrives, yet the entire Roof orbits the planet of holy hype.

More bizarre than normality, be your own godbot. Diverge the conformity urge, shoot up the anti-codes, whatever. Endless slogans going nowhere but the planet we came to in the first place: a planet we discovered after the historical Earth was destroyed by the original eco-punks.

Eco-punk revival is an annoying trend that’s been going on since 2030. Kids who weren’t even born when the eco-punks pre-emptively destroyed the Earth wear gas masks to school and chant about blowing up societal hardware. Fractalized lemmings. “The planet as a program that needs to be deleted,” “the virtual interface of disease,” “technology of mindless chatrooms,” etc.

It’s amazing how they don’t realize it was all said a hundred times better before Earth was destroyed. Before the human race became extinct: before we, the homo superior, migrated to the Roof. Before the Fractal Age.

The neo-eco-punks want a revolution that happened fifty years ago, clinging to a nostalgia that was founded on the destruction-breeds-creation of some ancient planet called Earth.

When you’re fifteen and jaded, the entire world still thinks you’re a newbie.

Sometimes I’ll catch three or four of my parents reminiscing about Earth, and I’ve gotta say that it sounds like a bore. They talk about that Burning Man festival like it was the reason Earth existed in the first place, and I’ve gotta wonder if they missed out on real eco-punk. Take Santa Claus and crucify him with a memory chip.

Fuck their memepoints and their Troll Police (we are the grease and we’re cleaning you) and your chaos theory mochas. We’ll burn your paradigm shifting khakis and delete your Web sites before you can log onto your carbon cut opinions. Oh yeah, and we wear subversive clothing.

Part Two: “They promised us flying SARS, and all we got were these napkins?”

It started out as a reaction test. “Begin with the opposing stimuli, and end with the infinite regress cake,” Ms. Himmerlord told us. It was nothing too exciting, yet it held enough potential to get us cheering. Altered chemistry sessions. Why not learn to disarm the atomic bomb of societal reprogramming?

The reaction test was obviously a club hit, and nobody sold this better than Ms. Himmerlord. The Memetic Mayhem Map knew what the conclusions were, yet we wanted to play along with the software for sinister amusement.

Altered chemistry sessions without drugs or goggles? Sign us up, burn our bras, wrap us in plastic, and feed us to the eco-punks. Fine and dandy when four of your parents are Troll Police. (Fractalize that, assholes).

Jordan had no idea what we were plugged into. “Conforming to non-conformity yet again?” she asked the Memetic Mayhem Map.

That’s us. I’m War-Ez, oldest of the MMM crew at fifteen. The others are Katabase, Smash, and sometimes Liver. We started out as a typical occult breakaway group from the suburbs of the splinternet but slowly evolved into the most ominous gang on the Roof. It’s not that we had the most memepoints, or even that our networks were larger than the tiniest particles of the chaoweb. It had to do with our presence, our tone, and our subversive clothing.

You can only get so wired before you realize you’re living in a fantasy world. Shipped off to mutant rehabilitation camp by a mother addicted to data and networking, political hypocrisies invaded our family for the first nine years of the Fractal Age. It took the anti-human riots of “9/11 on a boat” for us to come to terms with our inner turmoil.

When Mom started imagining pictures of silver swastikas in her Photoshop real-life-diary, we knew it was time to destroy her registration code. Sure, it was messed up for us to view her shit in the first place (we had to hack her brain a bit), but nobody ignores an angry lady who comes home at three in the morning all wired from last night’s datafix. It was apparent that this lady was a robot without implants. Oh no, this was our mother, and we weren’t going to tolerate her crimes against the chaoweb.

There was a time when the Roof wasn’t mergecore. There was a time when meaning was still possible in this galaxy of robosheep: back in the Information Age, when each genre had five sets of wings as opposed to five hundred, when the homo sapiens ruled the earth, when 9/11 happened once a year, and when artist collectives designed protests without simultaneously protesting designs. There was a time when metaphysical notions had nothing to do with butterflies in China chopping off their own wings to demoralize chaos theory.

Three of my parents claimed to have been there, but all I can see are their userpics from Burning Man.

Maybe the MMM is just a modern day copy of the eco-punk file. There are times when I wonder if it was all worth it, if we should have just stayed on the splinternet with the robosheep on the Roof. You know, the masses.

Part Three: Knowing the Enemy and the Entropy

Bortelli hunched over the office site of Secular Warehouse Corp, sweeping her toes like the robots of personalized policy listings. She read: “A dangerous new group of terrorists, referring to themselves as the MMM, have become a threat to the galactic whole. Creating a reality-site in which all forms of government have obliterated themselves, chances of chaoweb destruction have greatly increased. Weekly 9/11 holidays have been challenged in their uploading. Metaphysical files have been altered beyond recognition. We must hunt down the MMM at once.”

“Children loose on the chaoweb again,” she grumbled, flashes of the Information Age appearing on her mind-machine. Her eco-punk days were long gone. She knew that the Fractal Age was a different time and required a different program set. Enforce the course. Wiping the grease of the hack track was occupational living for the citizens of the cyber. Delete the dissent. Ever since New Flesh Farms declared peace with the homo superior resistance fighters, her emptiness had developed a domain extension of its own. “Where do we go from here?” she asked the circuit sky, anguish circulating her empire files. No reply.

A one-world government for nearly twelve hundred residents, and Bortelli was the head of the entire planet. Sometimes she had trouble believing she was one of the original eco-punks: one of the reasons the ancient human race became extinct along with Earth. “We were renegades! Evolutionary pirates!” What had shifted besides the paradigms of every day chatrooms? A revolution leading to an evolution leading to this? How selling out could reach such heights of ominous reversal, it was too much for her mind-machine to comprehend on nights like this one.

Bortelli sighed. Instant Burning Man: she remembered her youth as if it were yesterday. At 124 years, she was far from finished, but coding these missions left her with massive quantities of elderly discomfort. It was somehow related to upgrading her political opinions, but even this mandatory subversion course was taking its toll against the pseudo-moral playground she’d created. To live among equals in absolute harmony was a fantasy long destroyed by the corruption of the splinternet.

“Should we kill them?” was the subject of the egotext, as the Burning Man desert pushed itself onto the screen. Kill the MMM?

We dance on the playa like 2001.

We remain in the desert to cherish our fun.

Rejecting the programs of fractalized norms.

Embracing emotions outside of your forums.

We are the old flesh.

We are the old flesh.

You cannot make us evolve.

(We will not register our usernames!)

You cannot make us evolve.

We are young, we are free, we are humans of love.

We reject your commands to be robots above.

We are the old flesh.

We are the old flesh.

You cannot make us evolve.

(We will not download your memes!)

You cannot make us evolve.

The song still rang true after all these years. But what to do about the MMM? Were homicidal measures truly necessary? Taking a sip of her chaos theory mocha, Bortelli surfed the consciousness files of the entire chaoweb, searching for unlawful ideas and opinions, receiving secret pleasure from those that left the meta-box. “To be among them once again,” she thought to herself, but by now the playa had vanished.

It’s small, and according to its makers, it could be even smaller, and yet, it’s probably going to be one of the biggest “disruptive technologies” for the computer this year. It’s called the “Leap”, and it will change nearly everything about how you interact with your computer.

In a 2010 article for H+ I talked about the prototype for the Kinect, and how it was a step towards “Good Enough VR”. Then, I showed ways the Kinect has been used in a variety of fields. Despite this, the Kinect hasn’t really become an “every day” computer interface because it’s not terribly precise; it isn’t easy to connect to a computer instead of your Xbox, and has thus been relegated to the realm of “super geeks” for anything outside of the rather limited “intended use” for the average person.

The Leap will change that.

Why? Think about it for a second. Think about why you don’t currently have a touchscreen computer monitor. As nice as touch screen is on your smart phone or tablet is, don’t you hate wiping off all those fingerprints? As wonderful as the intuitive “multitouch” interface is, aren’t those screens just way too expensive to make in sizes closer to what your monitor likely is? Oh, and isn’t there that concern that the “Rare Earths” needed to make them are limited, and mainly supplied by China?

Now, think about the fact that the Leap will enable any computer to act as if it had a touchscreen.

Without, you know, actually needing a touchscreen.

Then think about it a little more. At millimeter accuracy, it can not only read your fingertips, but tell if you are using a pen. So not only can it be used like a touchscreen; it can also be used like a digitizing table. It could track your fingers on a table top to allow you to type without a keyboard, or move your cursor without a mouse. Unlike the makers of Leap, I won’t say it will eliminate these devices, but I will point out that you could cut the cords off of both of them and still retain all the functionality. And you wouldn’t even need to keep batteries in your wireless versions.

In other words, it will turn them into props. Don’t actually have a mouse? Pick up anything mouse sized and it becomes one. Want a “real gun” for your first person shooter? Pick up a Nerf gun and bang, you suddenly don’t need an expensive “Virtual gun” like those for the Move or Wii. Need to draw in an art program? Why bother buying an expensive Wacom tablet when a twig will serve just as well. I’m sure that they will try like hell to maintain a market share, but let’s face it, the days of Logitech, Wacom, and any other “computer interface device” manufacturers are numbered.

But that’s nowhere near the end of the uses that the Leap will enable — because the secret to the Leap is not the hardware. That little device is actually made from really cheap components. The real disruptive tech is the algorithms that power that hardware, because it can be incorporated into smaller devices, as well as use different kinds of sensors — and as we develop new sensors, it will enable us to use them as well. All of this means that the “touchscreen” industry just received it’s death notice as well. Give it a year, and we will likely see “touchscreen” devices that are cheaper, tougher, and don’t require us to actually touch the screen.

And beyond that, since the Leap “maps” space in a “field,” instead of a two dimensional plane like the Kinect, it will enable the first stages of the “self aware world” I’ve described in a previous Acceler8or piece  as being a necessary part of omnipresent VR. Imagine walking into your Walmart and using any of those “advertisement screens” to pull up a help screen that can tell you where the item you are looking for is. Imagine a store window display that you can use through the glass.

And that just barely begins to “touch” on the myriad uses for the Leap. So yeah, have fun thinking about how you could use one, because even if you don’t buy one the day it hits the shelves, you won’t be able to avoid one for long. And in a few years, you will probably wonder how we ever survived without it.

“The rising popularity of MDMA and other designer psychedelics. The developing scene around intelligence drugs and nutrients. The psychedelic roots of Apple computers.  The psychedelic garage rock phenomena that was mostly focused in L.A.  Even recent releases by Prince and Talking Heads…”

Yet another excerpt from the upcoming book, Use Your Hallucinations: Mondo 2000 in the Late 20^th Century Cyberculture.

R.U. Sirius (early 1985:  I had come to San Francisco to start the neopsychedelic movement. And even before the first issue of High Frontiers went to press, I heard that there was a new psychedelic rock movement afoot. Some bands were emulating the style of ‘60s garage psychedelia — stuff like The Seeds, 13^th Floor Elevator, Blues Magoos, Electric Prunes.  The beginnings of this scene had been labeled “the Paisley Underground.” I read that an L.A. band called The Three O’Clock was sort of rising to the top of the scene so I bought their record, disliked it, and gave it a bad review in that first issue — comparing it unfavorably to what I considered smart psychedelic music — stuff you’d actually want to listen to while tripping like Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy by Brian Eno or The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein by Parliament Funkadelic.  Not that I was averse to… if you will… exploiting every pop cultural indicator of the coming of neopsychedelia in my quest.

And, with the release of issue #2 of High Frontiers, we had a calling card worthy of some media attention. We (mostly Lord Nose and myself) started promoting the idea that there was a “neopsychedelic” resurgence going on.  Several journalists and media outlets took the bait.

We (well, mostly me) gave them a kitchen sink of evidence that something novel was afoot. The rising popularity of MDMA and other designer psychedelics. The developing scene around intelligence drugs and nutrients. The psychedelic roots of Apple computers.  The psychedelic garage rock phenomena that was mostly focused in L.A.  Even recent releases by Prince and Talking Heads; a sudden plethora of trippy MTV videos; and the playful, upbeat, sci fi, expansive themes running through the new wave radio stations from bands like the B52s and The Thompson Twins (Yes, I would even employ such dribble as the Thompson Twins in my plot for world mutation), we told them, indicated a developing shift in the zeitgeist.  Lord Nose would add a note of earnest shamanic gravitas to my pop culture spinnings and, all together, it worked.

We got coverage in San Francisco’s leftist weekly, Bay Guardian and an article by Laura Frasier for the wire service PNS wound up in several daily papers, including Long Island’s main outlet, Newsday (Laura would become a friend and, for a while, Lord Nose’s lover).  There were even still more outlets, long forgotten.  It was our first small flurry.  The viral meme, “neopsychedelia,” was injected into the body politic.

We decided to throw a giant party for the issue and the new psychedelia in San Francisco.   Tongue firmly piercing cheek, Lord Nose came up with the idea to call it the Neopsychedelic Cotillion Ball.  No doubt, he was having a bit of a giggle at the expense of Alison’s upper crust breeding and quasi-Victorian stylings — as she was replacing Mau Mau as the third dominant figure in our little karass and — at the same time — playing with Ken Kesey’s famous “Acid Test Graduation Party” that had spelled the end of the Merry Prankster era.  We secured this wonderful large venue called “The Farm” and started contacting bands and speakers to see who would appear… for free…

Somerset Mau Mau: I didn’t have much to do with that.

R.U. Sirius: Mau Mau and X knocked on the door at Alison’s house one day to complain about the naming of the Neopsychedelic Cotillion.  They said it was alienating to acid veterans in the Haight and hardcore street mutants in general . It sounded too bourgeois.  I found that bizarre, given that these guys over in Marin were even more relentlessly absurdist than we were, that they would have taken the title sort of literally.

We got an incredibly positive response when we asked people to perform for us.  We had 5 or 6 popular local bands, including The Morlocks, who were the kings of the local garage psych thing. They were like 10 years old (Ok, maybe like 19). .  And we set up panels on quantum physics and psychedelic drugs and maybe a few other things.  Wavy Gravy agreed to MC.  The freakin’ voice of Woodstock for our neopsychedelic rally!

Lord Nose and I went to see Wavy at his famous Hog Farm house in Berkeley to ask him to MC. It was the first time I’d ever been there.  He had the Big Pink cover on his bedroom door.  His bedroom door was kind of a collage of all sorts of memorabilia of the counterculture and the Grateful Dead, but that 11” x 17” thing dominated.  (When I saw him a few years ago, he told me it was still there.)

About a week before the event, I was invited to appear on the Michael Krasny Show on KGO. Two hours long, on Sunday night, it was the Bay Area’s biggest talk radio show and I was going to be the only guest.  I woke up that morning with a monstrous cold — cough, fever, the whole package. Early that evening, I downed a triple dose of cough medicine and hit the BART from Berkeley to downtown San Francisco.  This was before I was familiar with the effects of Dextromethorphan; a hallucinatory dissociative that’s in many commercial cough medications.  By the time I exited the BART, I was cross-eyed and painless; relaxed and floating; and my mind was… lucid — full of thoughts and quips about neopsychedelia and the magazine and the oncoming event.

I was damn good, if I do say so… quick, self-amused (this annoying tendency actually tends to come off well on radio), and perhaps a bit too fearless.  Krasny seemed to enjoy bantering with me about the perceived dangers of mass psychedelic use versus the wonders of a psychedelic movement and about politics and culture and whatever came up.  My tongue and brain were loose and careless.

Then the phone lines opened up to callers.  In between calls from people asking for drug advice and wanting to know details about the magazine and upcoming party, there were numerous angry calls from people upset that Krasny would even have this glib freak on his esteemed show advocating for psychedelic drugs and displaying bad attitude towards God, Mom, Apple Pie, and Patriotism (or whatever the hell I spoke about in my ripped and fevered mental state).  Finally, just a few minutes before the show’s end, a man with a deep angry voice thundered across the airwaves, “Tell that asshole we’re gonna kill ‘im.  We’re gonna shoot ‘im.”  Krasny fell into a rage.  “Nobody makes death threats on my show!  I’ve never had a death threat on my show!”

Exiting the station to make the 4 block walk back to the BART, I was a bit less fearless, but, as I remember it, there weren’t even any cars rolling past as I made my way.  And, anyway, on the radio, no one can tell what you look like.  (And they couldn’t Google you yet.)

When I got back to her place, Alison exclaimed: “That was incredible!”  It was the first time she’d been thrilled by one of my public appearances; in fact, up until that point, I think she had her doubts about my mental dexterity.  (Those doubts would occasionally reoccur, maybe deservedly so.) Anyway, that’s how I know that the whole thing didn’t just seem good to me because the Dextro was flooding my brain with Serotonin.

I was stunned the following Saturday as hundreds of  paying customers — most of them young — flooded into The Farm for the event.

It was an incredible venue; large, with an upstairs section.

Scrappi DuChamp:  I went to that. I was really fascinated by the place… It was an animal auction house… it was like an auction for slaughter, basically, of livestock, run by hippies. I thought that was pretty amazing. It was under a freeway or past a really old part of San Francisco that was still sort of undeveloped.

R.U. Sirius:  Wavy was on and enthusiastic.  The psychedelic drugs panel was colorful, as Zarkov, the libertarian investment banker, appearing in a dramatic disguise, denounced his fellow panelists for trying to get psychedelics sanctioned by the government for the exclusive use of psychotherapists.  And we quietly passed out capsules with threshold doses of the still legal designer hallucinogen 2cb, which definitely added a cheerful intelligence and intensity to the affair…

…  R.U. Sirius: The “Neopsychedelic renaissance” continued apace, with major features in High Times and other long forgotten zines, radio interviews and so on —with High Frontiers often touted as the reigning representation.  It seemed that I was blabbing to someone in the media about it at least a couple of times a month.  Soon word hit us that people on the L.A. garage psychedelia scene were being drenched in high quality LSD and were diggin’ on High Frontiers. Greg Shaw’s Bomp Magazine was at the center of that scene and he sent us his back issues (which we were already buying, anyway) and suggested we come for a visit. Jeff Mark and I arranged to go down there.

Jeff Mark: Winter Solstice 1985, R.U. and I took a trip to Los Angeles. The “Neopsychedelic Revival” was by then a real phenomenon. Tom Petty had released “Don’t Come Around Here No More”, including the Alice-in-Wonderland video — videos themselves were still new then, recall. Newsweek had even done a feature piece on the L.A. manifestation, focusing on Greg Shaw who was putting together some L.A. neopsychedelic ‘zine. R.U.’s intention was to make contact and build a bridge; the Pranksters’ visit to Millbrook, no doubt, in the back of his mind.

So we hung out for a while with Greg. I think we did a little sightseeing, and then that night we went to see some bands being promoted by him. The space the bands would play in, around the corner from Hollywood & Vine… well, you can’t call it a club. It wasn’t that, it was just… a room. The entrance was at the top of an external staircase, from which I could see underneath the building, noting with some trepidation that the second floor was supported by a bunch of those steel jacks that builders use to keep a weak ceiling from collapsing. And this would be holding up a couple of hundred dancing humans. I think this might even have qualified as an early form of rave, had that term yet been coined.

There were maybe four or five different bands, each doing 30-45 minutes or so, and the first thing I noticed was that, in keeping with the whole “Neo-Psychedelic Revival” thing, each of them did a version of “White Rabbit”. OK, that’s an exaggeration; one of them didn’t. The next thing I noticed was that the bands each seemed to be made up of the same seven or eight people in varying combinations of four or five.

So, anyway, the building didn’t collapse, and we retired after to some other location lost to history for a party. Everyone was high on MDMA, of course. As the evening progressed, I engaged in conversation with several very nice people, and by way of introducing each other, the usual “so what do you do?” kinds of questions arose. Now, I had a straight job at the time, civil service, thoroughly boring. But the people I spoke with described themselves as “make-up artists” or “costumers” or writers or artists of one flavor or another. I began to realize that vocationally, each of these people depended on all the others, networking (another not-yet-coined-term) to get to work on someone’s project about something; their livelihood depended on their social contacts.

Now, when you think about it, this was Hollywood; that’s how Hollywood works, that’s how creative communities, particularly those in collaborative crafts, operate. That’s how they produce. Obvious to many, but news to me. The pattern-recognition subsystems of my mind began to assemble what I would come to call my “Theory of Scenes”.

A few months later we returned, with Lord Nose, to participate in this event that featured a couple of local bands, and somebody wheeling out Sky Saxon  from the Seeds (“Pushing Too Hard”).

Nose was showcasing these black t-shirts with the yellow day-glo anti-happy face or whatever the fuck that was (I still have mine, but it no longer fits…) (ed: Sacred Cow Mutilators t-shirt). And it struck me that the 200 or so people at that event, which included almost everyone we’d met in December, comprised the whole of the “neopsychedelic scene” in L.A. That was it. That was all of them. 250 people tops, and they were getting all this media attention. And I realized that’s how it probably was in ’65, as well; there was the Whiskey á Go-Go scene, one or two other places; a dozen or so bands with some duplication among their personnel, various friends and hangers-on. In the Haight, the same thing. There was the Fillmore, and the Matrix, the Diggers, the Oracle, and it was all the same… what, 300 people? It applies elsewhere also. There’s the NYC comedy scene (which in the 70s gave us SNL, and is now focused around The Daily Show), the Boston Harvard/National Lampoon scene, the L.A. Conception Corporation scene (whence came Spinal Tap). All of these basically, at least in the beginning, were not much more than groups of friends. Even in politics. One of my disappointments as I’ve gotten more sophisticated about politics is the realization that so much of what happens in a place like Washington D.C. takes place in what appears, anyway, to be a social environment, which is why it reminds us so much of high school. And this was, largely, how “Mondo” functioned within the context of the Berkeley New Age “Scene”.

R.U. Sirius:  Greg Shaw and this guy from a band called Dead Hippie volunteered to throw a High Frontiers party in L.A. so we went back down there a few months later.  The Dead Hippie guy was intense. He had sort of a Charlie Manson look and a stare to match and seemed to be searching for some sort of gut wrenching apocalyptic truth. Other that that, he was nice. We hung out for a while as the party was being set up until it became clear that we had no responsibilities other than to man our booth, sell magazines and t-shirts and take home some money.

One peculiar memory: we split for a while for dinner and drinks and somehow struck up a conversation with this crewcut military-looking young dude.  When we told him what we were in town for, he tried to convince us to ditch the benefit show because it would be more interesting to drop acid and play paintball at some arena a few miles away.  It was his favorite thing.

As with the “Cotilllion,” the L.A. High Frontiers benefit was massive, with bands like Thelonious Monster (I was already a fan) and members of Black Flag who were doing this sort of metal psych as a side project. Sky Saxon jumped on stage with everybody.  This being L.A., everybody looked perfect, particularly the young girls in their tight short skirts.  After hours of watching hundreds of these chicks stream though, the massive doorman/bouncer finally cried out, “I’ve got a sheet of acid for the first chick who will drain my cock.”  I seem to remember him being approached by a volunteer.

I really didn’t connect with anybody other than one porn star-gorgeous chick I’d met the last time around, and her attention was divided between myself and several others taller, darker and more handsome.  It was a whole different vibe, not only from the San Francisco party but from the previous hangout in L.A., which had more of a gently androgynous fashion-y pop vibe — all retro Nehru shirts and flared striped pants.  Now the scene had become psych metal. They’d gone from Strawberry Alarm Clark to Blue Cheer in a matter of weeks.

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)

FAIL! Debbie Does MONDO (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #14)

Paradise Is Santa Cruz: First Ecstasy (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #15)

William Gibson On MONDO 2000 & 90s Cyberculture (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #16)

Ted Nelson & John Perry Barlow For MONDO 2000 (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #17)

R.U. A Cyberpunk? Well, Punk? R.U.? (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry # 18

The New Edge At The New Age Convention (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #19)

The Belladonna Shaman (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #20)