secret societies - what are your thoughts?

obviously it would be hard to determine if they existed or not as of now, because by their very nature members would not confirm the existence of such organizations. but i was thinking this morning about how important these sacraments are to me, and how i wish very much to be able to promote and continue research, experimentation, and spiritual/psychological/otherworldly growth, but due to prevailing thoughts regarding psychedelic drugs both on the part of the general public and the government, it would of course out of necessity need to be underground.

leary and his ilk have tried the public, open and honest deal. so far, the results have not been good. rampant abuse prevails in trends of drug use, people who take nothing of significance away from their experiences make up a decent majority of -young- psychedelic users. on top of this, the law is more and more strict, with a literal drug WAR taking place. war on drugs, war on those who use drugs, war on countries where people use or make drugs, etc.

in the history of the world, there have been many revolutionary ideas or doctrines or practices that have met terrible and unjust opposition from the powers that be. whether these are in the form of gnostic christian cults meeting in secret in the old days of the catholic church, the continuation of pagan or magick based faiths and practices in europe after the introduction of the church, the central and south american use of mushrooms as a sacrament, or any number of various political, scientific, and artistic disciplines, they all went underground when they realised they hadn't the numbers or the power to gain acceptance through open and public means. many of them not only took their practices into hiding, but formed secret societies to help ensure that their ideas, traditions, beliefs, and practices may be passed on to future generations.

it strikes me as a good idea to increase formation of secret societies among the psychedelic movement. similar to the personalized cults leary promoted, they would not necessarily have religious overtones (though they very likely could and would), but the main difference would be oaths to secrecy about the identity of other members, and about the goings on related to the group. everyone would need to have something they could offer the group - gardening skills (for providing raw materials for extracts or use as they are....DMT containing plants, cannabis, mescaline bearing cacti, etc.), chemistry skills (synthesizing substances, or far more likely, safe, and reasonable so you have someone capable of producing relatively pure extracts), mycologists or mushroom cultivators, people with psychological training, people with spiritual training, etc. etc.

everyone would do what they could to keep the organization together and running, providing drugs, support, insight, and financial assistance. a fund would be set up in the case of an emergancy legal situation. all psychedelics would need to stay within the group; there would be no distribution of drugs to others by group members. the only drugs i could see people possibly needing to obtain from outside sources would be perhaps LSD (due to serious setbacks and difficulties in its manufacture) or MDMA (and similar chemicals to MDMA, if they're taking more of a psychological/therapeutic approach...certainly i wouldn't care to be too involved with it).....everything else should be able to easily be produced by members, for members.

they could be like support groups, like religious cults, like scientific research projects, or have any number of different goals. but the main idea would be the same: to further beneficial use of psychedelics to preserve their use for future generations, hopefully in the future being able to more freely express what we're doing, why, and what we've found out. people don't want to hear it now, and are willing to do terrible things to anyone who does.

i'm sure other people have had similar ideas, and i'm sure it would be very difficult to successfully create such an organization without it falling apart within the first few months or years. membership criteria and screening would have to most likely be thorough and complex to maintain safety on behalf of the organization (preventing infiltration by potential "snitches" and the like)

i know there are some relatively to completely underground groups pursuing such activities, such as ayahuasca circles and non-NAC peyote ceremonies and the like. what i'm curious about, but will likely never grasp, is how widespread and abundant such groups are, what the community is really like on a larger picture, and how secure it is. i definitely will keep these thoughts in mind in my travels through the future; hopefully i will find others who share my ideas and have things to offer to start our own group or organization. i feel a community of fellow "believers," for lack of a better term, would do wonders for me, and what i get out of my experiences.


what do you all think about this stuff? maybe i'm just rambling....

 

I was actually rambling in this forum not too long ago about something similar...though my vision for creating such groups would be with aims more revolutionary activist than spiritual probably. You might be interested in reading the works of Hakim Bey on Temporary Autonomous Zones and Ontological Anarchy. Check it out.

http://www.evolutionzone.com/kulturezone/bey/taz/taz_contents.html
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/
http://www.gyw.com/hakimbey/

He posits the "tong" as a organizational form for groups pursuing any illicit or immoral activities. In China, tongs were secret societies of smugglers that for centuries escaped penetration by law enforcement. One of the things Hakim Bey says is simply congregating is a fundamentally revolutionary act today.

 

well, i definitely want to take a look at those later when i have time, but depending on what your ideas regarding "revolutionary activism" are, i may be turned off to those ideas....i mean, i don't advocate any kind of acid revolution or the like....i simply don't think the general public can handle psychedelics for the most part, and i DONT think everyone should be taking them (though i think everyone should at least have a small dose of some psychedelic at some point in their life)........anyway, if you mean a mental, moral, intellectual, or spiritual revolution; as in gaining widespread acceptance and support of psychedelic use (without everyone and their mother jumping in and participating) then i'm on the smae page as you. if you mean any kind of destructive or rebellious act designed to "bring down the system" than i'm out for sure. i want to be seperate from the system, not destroy it. give to caesar what is caesar's....

 

I'm interested in creative destruction, a la Bakunin or Nietszche, as in destroying old ugliness with new beauty. A tree dies, it decomposes, a garden grows in its place. That kind of thing.


I definitely don't think everyone is prepared for a psychedelic experience at any given point in their life, and it may well be as it is in the Matrix - after reaching a certain age, it's best not to free someone. I am however all in favor of playful mischief, prankster style.

Based on your reaction to my brief description of Bey, you've gotten the wrong idea of his works. It's a pretty unique perspective, and though it has political elements, I would not at all describe it as a political philosophy. I would actually call it apolitical if anything. It draws alot from Situationism and Dadaism. I don't know if you're familiar with those, but they're pretty interesting in themselves. Here's some links

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/16
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/5

Some other influences are occultism, sufism, anarchism, psychedelics, and existentialism. It's an electic mix, and if anything worth a read.

Hakim Bey is just his pen name, his real name is Peter Lamborn Wilson. He's somewhat famous for his studies of the Old Man in the Mountain and Sufism, and his two year in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India and his seven years in Iran.

Please don't think I'm suffering from any teenage punk rage against the machine syndrome. It's all well in good, but I'm more interested in exploring new forms of social organization and aesthetics. My orientation is life affirmitive, and posseses none of that negativity or nihilistic ressentiment of the stereotypical revolutionary.

 

Aren´t we here at HipForums already some kind of secret society?

We swap info about reliable suppliers and exchange trip reports. We help each other on problems of storage of drugs or cultivation of plants. Our drugs are our sacrament and we celebrate the beauty of existence itself every time we take them.

 

I suppose in a sense we are a secret society based on sharing information. I think alot of us would be lost without an internet source like this. If it weren't for experienced people I could talk to about RC suppliers, I wouldn't really have anywhere to go. The only thing that sucks is the pigs still watch us. Still though, there would be something special about meeting in person to form a psychedelic secret society.

 

i know a bit about dada, never heard of situationism....

anyway, yeah, i think i may be a little more on the same track as you than i initially thought. dunno, really. still need to find time to look at those sites.

but yeah, i really don't think this is anywhere close to a secret society. first off, our identities (or at least locations) are available to anyone computer savvy enough.....second of all, we have NO common ideals, goals, or interests.....everyone here is largely in conflict. even if we help each other in some respects out of a desire for solidarity and a furthering of knowledge, our motives, practices, ideals, etc. are all very different. for example, over half the posts here are brain numbingly stupid to the point where it almost hurts to read them....posts like "how much sudafed do i take to get high? how do you sniff magic markers? how fun is ibuprofen?" etc. you get the point.

if ->I<- were to organize a secret psychedelic society, it would need to be about 5-20 individuals with a meeting place, coming together at least two times regularly each month for psychedelic sessions or organizational/etc. meetings without sessions. it would need to have some spiritual ideology, but not necessarily a hard and fast religious dogma. we would need a set, safe, secluded meeting place. i'd want someone that could extract resonably pure DMT and psilocybin from their naturally occurring sources, preferably someone in the medical field that could ->SAFELY!!!!<- have access to things like clean syringes and such (after reading dr. rick strassman's book DMT: The Spirit Molecule i've become extremely interested in the possibility of iv psychedelics for various reasons....the intesnity and rapidity of onset, the accurate dosage for "reliable" levels of effects....the elements of trust necessary for the tripper towards the rest of the group...this would not be the main mode of psychedelic usage though) and a few people, such as myself, that could cultivate things like mushrooms, or even cacti and DMT and/or harmala containing plants....we would keep cryptic records that would help us keep track of what is revealed to us but maintain anonymity and should they ever be found they must be as barely incriminating as possible.

hipforums meets none of this, it is a mish mash of idiots, scholars, old hippies, young unrealist idealists (such as myself and some others), etc. it's all over the place, and the community reflects it. it may have a lot of upsides, enough to keep me coming, but it DOES have a lot of depressing downsides, as well.

 

Quick history of situationism: Dada was supposed to reduce the image into a word and destroy conventional aesthetics. Dada branched off into Futurism, and Surrealism, which need not be discussed here, and also Letterism, whose central tenant was to go further than Dadaism and reduce the image to merely a letter, hence "letter"ism. Most of the Letterists eventually became Situationists, who took a dialectical perspective, abolishing the notion of art as a separate, specialized activity and transforming it so it became part of fabric of everyday life. They regarded art as revolutionary or nothing at all.

That's why I would just describe our forum as simply a psychedelic community, not a secret society. I dunno, I guess I'm just unusually adept at blocking out the white noise and recognizing only the gems of excellence. That said, there are alot of idiots here.

We're definitely on the same page here brother. This is very much what I have in mind. As far as I know and from my own experience, the psychedelic community in America as a whole is composed mostly of alot of isolated individuals or small groups with some loose bonds of communication (like this forum and others) for sharing information and promoting responsible use. The weakness of this situation is that it is altogether far too easy to get caught in the downword drag of the anonymous crowd. You have to figure the vast majority of the people in this forum will, after working a few knots in their life out, end up as typical middle class liberals with families, and will look back on their days of using psychedelic drugs with fondness of a youth long past.

I think a decentralized, non-heirarchal secret society of psychedelic savants would be a worthwhile endeavor for many reasons. It would serve to create a common identity to combat the alienation I know for one I feel from time to time, and to have a support system that actually understands what it's like to be kept up at night because of a cosmic riddle. Equally important as all of this would be developing a genuine American mystic tradition, and continuing the work of our forefathers from the 60's in a meaningful way.

The main barrier is of course geography, which would make regular meetings difficult in many cases. But yeah, if enough of us are interested, I would suggest we start PMing each other to find out who's down, and then start a private forum elsewhere to further discuss details.

 

well, distance is a problem, as is trust. i couldn't envision a secret society/cult like what we're discussing being formed online, there would of necessity need to be a number of small, independant, more local groups (at least within the same state) formed. obviously location may play a big role in the nature of the group. for example, i'd expect in the southwest such groups would be more likely to be eating peyote or other cacti which could be easily grown by members and shared with the group. people in the midwest, however, may have better luck growing things like illinois bundlefower and extracting the DMT, cannabis, and cultivating mushrooms indoors. people in the pacific northwest would have better access to a wider variety of more potent mushrooms, people in warm, sunny climates with rainfall could have extracted lsa pretty readily, when nothing else is available....then if chemists are involved you can get synthetic materials whose manufacture may be easier to get away with, and depending on the area's "scene" and the willingness of the group to participate in the area's larger drug culture, you could probably run across LSD and ketamine and other stuff no one would have the means or reason to make themselves.

but online....we're so distant, and your anonymity, while helping protect you, also has the drawback of not being able to trust anyone ELSE.......

 

I'm impressed, good to see there's people here that really know what they are talking about. You sound a lot like me at your age. Cheers!

 

I live in Wisconsin too man. Waukesha area. How about you?

 

i know that wasn't directed at me but i'm from the columbus, ohio area, and the drug culture here sucks.

i was thinking about this idea, as i often do, yesterday while coming down from a DPT trip, and while i know its a far fetched idea how cool would it be to have a psychedelic sanctuary? like essentially the equivalent of a church building, but for this type of community. i was envisioning a low domed ceiling, a circular room....adobe constrution or something similar, with thick carpeting and low to the ground furniture sort of in the style of a psychiatrist's couch. on the domed ceiling would be nice to have it painted like the sky, with stars and clouds and such. speakers built in to the wall could provide us with soothing sounds for tripping souls.....

heh, just an idea that will never see fulfillment...my ideal tripping room

 

Illuminati, Free Masons, (who actually started this country), and Templar Knights are the main ones to me. theyre kind of all in the same boat too.

check out this site about everything from the Nephilim to the supposed heiarchy of the Illuminati...

http://www.returnofthenephilim.com/ProphecyInTheNews.html

hope it trips somebody out