III.

7.

New Morality

117-153

8.

Long, Strange Trip

155-171

9.

Evangelicals Go Electric

173-186

p. 118

"millions of Americans are searching for a new sexual ethic that ... is nevertheless informed by the ancient wisdom of religious insight ... steering a course that ... celebrates sexual liberation ... . ... Sex-positive theology has ... proposed a new "... ethic of sexuality which ... does not restrict sexual activity to marriage.""

p. 119

"What God has joined together, let no one separate" (Markos 10:9).

{This aphorism cannot apply to marriage, for marriage is a joining together done by human (not by divine) contractual law. Instead, "What God has joined together" must refer to the union of male and female gametes in producing an embryo, which no one can be permitted to separate (by way of, e.g., abortion or infanticide).}

p. 120

"Take, for example, Diana Chornenkaya, the creator {creatrix} of a virtual temple devoted to sacred sexuality. Her portable set up each year in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, a dry desolate lake bed in northwestern Nevada. ... That's ... part of the Burning Man festival, an annual extravaganza ... . ...

There was the Thunder Dome, a geodesic frame covered with live nude people painted green.

There was the Temple of Joy, a seventy-eight-foot-tall masterpiece ... that resembled a Balinese temple ... .

And there was Water Woman, a giant abstract sculpture of the female body that stood upright, spraying showers of water down from between her legs ... .

Some Sixties survivors compare Burning Man to ... earlier hippie happenings in San Francisco -- to

the Trips Festival in January 1966,

the Summer of Love, and

the Human Be-In held in Golden Gate Park the following January. ...

p. 121

Burning Man dates back to 1986 and an annual fire ceremony held at a San Francisco beach. ...

Diana offers workshops on sex. They take place ... right next to Passion Dome and Tulip Temple ... . Chornenkaya ... offer ... workshops ... on how to move sexual energy throughout your body. ... Diana wears red and black lingerie. ...

p. 122

Women are able to walk around naked twenty-four hours a day and feel ... celebrated. ... There are women who downplayed their sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s ... and are now trying to reclaim it. ...

Chornenkaya ... was born in Moscow ... . Her father was a physicist in Russia ... so her only religious traditions are ... of the Russian Orthodox Church. ... I ask her if she sees Burning Man as an emerging religion ... . "I do see it as a religion ...," she replies. "There are thousands of people who are strong believers. ...

Black Rock City is our home. ...

{As a place of annual pilgrimage, Nevada's Black Rock is an American aequivalent to the Black Stone in the Ka<bah at Mekkah in the H.ijaz.}

You can play again ... we still need to play. ...

{The meaning of <arabi divine name />al-Lah/ is 'the fun'.}

p. 123

We were able to create heart space. ...

{A heart (qalb) is the emblem of the S.ufi.}

It was a beautiful heart space."

{According to the Upanis.ad, the soul is located in the space within the heart.}

Diana concedes that these experences are achieved by some with the help of Ecstasy {MDMA}, a powerful drug that produces feelings of empathy and compassion."

"references in the story of Sodom ... . ... careful translation shows that these references were to ... lack of hospitality."

{The reluctance to perform due rites of hospitality was on the part of Lo^t., for he was slow to supply his two daughters (B-re>s^it 19:8) for male revelers to enjoy sexual relations with as part of the celebration of the arrival of travelers (two messengers/angels -- ibid. 19:1) at his (Lo^t.'s) residence.}

"Christendom's condemnatory attitude toward ... sexual pleasure ... was embodied in Saint Augustine (354-430) , who infamously wrote,

"There is nothing which degrades the manly spirit more that the attractiveness of females and contact with their bodies.""

{Apparently, the only sexual activity which Augustinus permitted was homosexuality! (This would help explain why Catholic priests are required by the Catholic Church to be homosexual paidophiles.)}

"Article G-6.0106b of the constitution of the Presbyterian church. That 1997 amendment to the church constitution requires ...

"fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman,

{This would prohibit both polygamy and temporary spouse-trading.}

or chastity in singleness."

{This would prohibit both prostitution and fornication.}

[as explained by a female in the Children of God :] "if necessary, you'd have sex with men to get them to join. ... We were already having sex with people in the group."

"In 1848 John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida commune in New York. Its members, known as Perfectionists, believed they could be freed from sin on Earth by ... renouncing personal property, and practicing "complex marriage," in which all of the adults in the community were married to one another. ... the commune was dissolved around 1880."

p. 147

"their official policy statement on "law of love" still sings the praises of "sexual sharing" among consenting married and single members. "This ensures that everyone's sexual needs are being provided for in a clean, healthy, safe and loving environment," it states.

"Members can partake in such sexual sharing to bring greater unity or additional pleasure and variety into their lives." ...

{This is usually known as polyamory or "group-marriage".}

p. 148

Women would have six kids or ten kids, and would not know who[m] three of the fathers were."

"A lot of the young men and almost all of the women had sexual encounters with adults when they were children in the group"".

{This is also customary in some African tribes, e.g., the Maasai.}

III

8.

Long, Strange Trip

155-171

p. 155

"at the University of California in Berkeley, ... with free literature. The most popular items were glossy, full-color postcards describing ... various drugs -- {lysergic} acid, Ecstasy ... . They're published by DanceSafe, a group committed to "promoting health and safety within the rave ... community." On the purple Ecstasy postcard, ... It reports that users of this drug, also known as MDMA {abbreviation of chemical name}, will "experience heightened feelings of empathy, emotional warmth and self-acceptance.""

p. 156

"another brochure ... asks "What is Cognitive Liberty?" Published by the Alchemind Society, it explains that "cognitive liberty is freedom to ... engage in multiple modes of thought and alternative modes of consciousness.""

p. 156

"the program is ... to begin. It's sponsored by Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, and it's titled "Religious Freedoms, Spirituality, and Shamanic Practices." ... Her topic is ...

p. 157

substances that allow you to see God. ... . ... who else is speaking ... is ... a woman ... from ... the Hog Farm commune, a fun-loving group of unrepentant hippies led by the infamous Wavy Gravy ... who appeared on the stage at Woodstock ... . ... Wavy is ... in northern California. Every year he and his cohorts sponsor the Hog Farm Pignic on their land near Laytonville, which also happens to be surrounded by some of the finest and best-hidden marijuana fields in America. ... A few years ago there was a grand parade ... with ... Wavy Gravy, dressed like a Roman emperor, carried on a throne, and holding up a sign sign that read : People of the World ... Relax!

... Maria Vittoria Mangini, the founder[ess] of the Black Oak Ranch Free Medical Clinic at the Hog Farm ... spent ... the 1990s in libraries reviewing thousands of articles on the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs. ... The most universal theme reported by psychedelic veterans are memories of a "sense of connectedness" while tripping on drugs. They report feeling a religious or mystical "state of grace" or an "undifferentiated unity."

p. 158

... She then left her audience with an interesting question : Why is there such a discrepancy between those insights and the way many of those people are living their lives today?"

{The answer would be that capitalism's greed-maddened viciousness is to be blamed for ignoring of those mystical insights, and is to be blamed for godlessly seducing of innocent souls by capitalist-stooges.}

"for many of us ... in the 1960s and 1970s ... the right drugs taken in the right place opened doors to powerful experiences of unity, connectedness, empathy, awe, and wonder ... the feelings that religious mystics and enlightened masters have been reporting for centuries. Over the years ... many baby boomers ... told me that their interest in meditation ... or other spiritual disciplines were inspired by a dose of LSD or a bag of magic mushrooms back in the sixties and seventies."

p. 158

"Aldous Huxley, ... influential author of The Doors of Perception, noted ... that psychedelic drugs can give us a glimpse of heaven ... . ...

Richard Alpert and Huston Smith were both professors in Massachusetts ... . ... Smith was ... at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Alpert was ... at Harvard. In the fall of 1960 Smith helped bring Huxley to the MIT campus ... . ...

p. 159

A book written by a longtime Huxley associate, Gerald Heard, titled Pain, Sex, and Time, had also rocked his world. Smith sought out the two authors ... . ... He found Heard in a hideaway in Trabucco Canyon outside Los Angeles. Heard led him to Huxley, who was with his wife Maria, at their cabin hideout in the Mojave Desert. ... Huston asked Aldous to give him some mescaline so he could finally experience the mystical states he'd been reading and writing about for so long. Huxley suggested that he call ... Timothy Leary. He did, and the two men met in the Harvard faculty club. Leary ... was also dosing himself and a growing number of student devotees."

"Huston Smith was born in China to ... missionary parents ... . His maternal grandmother ... came to the East {China} on a nineteenth-century clipper ship. Smith's mother was born in China ... .

p. 160

... Smith ... taught at Washington University in St. Louis, MIT, Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley. It was at MIT that he met Leary, then a ... Harvard professor.

On New Year's Day, 1961, Professor Smith ingested his first dose of mescaline at Leary's home in Newton, Massachusetts. "The whole world into which I was ushered was strange, weird, uncanny, significant ... beyond belief," he wrote ... .

"... nondescript sense-impressions

{If "nondescript", then definitely not related to the sense-organs (as are hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching), but instead sentiments/emotions.}

were now being refracted {viz., sorted out}, spread out {viz, rendred distinctly detectible} as if by a spectroscope, into about five layers." ...

There was awesome significance to everything ... . There was heaven ... . ...

[Huston Smith, quoted from Forte 1990, p. 50 :] "I was aware of my body, laid out ... . ...

{by looking at it while astrally projected?}

p. 161

A number of religious traditions have the idea that no man can see God and live ... ."

{One can certainly see one's divine spirit-guide and continue living, as many a shaman can attest from frequent personal experience of such. But perhaps the "religious traditions" alluded to by Huston Smith worship a vicious, murderous "God".}

Huston Smith did come back to his body and had ... more psychedelic drug trips in the early {nineteen-}sixties. Smith prefers the word entheogen ..., based on ... the visions and states of consciousness he experienced ... doorways to divinity. ... .

... Leary ... in 1963 ... became the world's leading evangelist for LSD. Leary's infamous mantra, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," was ... the advice".

"Leary's partner in his Harvard studies, Richard Alpert, ... would reincarnate {be re-named, or dubbed} later as Ram Dass. ... Ram Dass ... and Leary were fired [from their professorships at Harvard], but their psychedelic explorations continued in the ... sixties at a country estate called Millbrook. ... Alpert ... went off to India ... . He came back transformed into Ram Dass ... .

Richard Alpert was born ... 1931, in the north end of Boston. His father, George Alpert, ... became chairman of the board of Brandeis University".

"Ram Dass was at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley with Leary and six hundred other proponents of enlightenment through

chemicals. ...

{designated "elixirs" in Chinese "internal alchemy"}

Sharing the stage with Leary and Ram Dass were leading psychedelic researchers, a Navajo peyote priest, the widow of Aldous Huxley ... . ... "Psychedelics ...," Ram Dass said "... opened up our link ... to an incredibly rich philosophical, psychological, and spiritual heritage." Millions of people used psychedelics ... in the {nineteen-}sixties and {nineteen-}seventies, opening up a generation to ways of thinking that go beyond the rational and intellectual, into the "intuitive, transcendental, unitive perspective.""

p. 166

"raves are all-night dance parties held in, among other places, abandoned warehouse in New York, London, and San Francisco. They began as underground events fueled by technomusic ... and energizing, empathy-producing drugs such as Ecstasy. But they can be traced back to 1964 and the infamous acid tests held by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Shortly before his death, Leary attended a few raves and blessed these "high-tech hippies" for "capturing the spirit of the Sixties." ...

p. 167

[In] the activities of the Divine Rhythm Society ... a "significant number" of the participants at the all-night events took Ecstasy. The drug is among a family of chemicals known as entacogens, which translates as "touching within." They produce feelings of euphoria, empathy, and increased energy. ... Many were looking ... to go beyond the one-night revelations ... . They referred to their entheogens as "training wheels" and "door openers," implying that they were just one step along

p. 168

the spiritual path. Many of them ... were ... dancing toward the divine. And in doing so, they were continuing ... to find God and love one another."

9.

Evangelicals Go Electric

173-186

p. 182

"Harvey Cox, author of Fire From Heaven : ... the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century, sees ... a brand of religion spread through families and other social networks. ... In 1994 it was the Toronto Blessing, a spiritual craze known for wild outbursts of "holy laughter." ... Then it was the "miracle in Smithton", also known as

the Cornfield Revival or

{cf. the personal name /Kornfield/ (supra, pp. 67-70)}

"the revival in the middle of nowhere," which drew thousands ... to rural Missouri.

Music was a big part of the Smithton revival. ...

p. 183

But some scholars see these seemingly disparate movements as part of a larger religious revival ... . ...

Both seek guidance from spirits and a direct experience of the sacred ... .

Both see the world on the edge of a radical spiritual transformation ... .

Both stress spiritual and physical healing through ... techniques outside medical science, offering a way of ... empowerment.

Both ... have inspired changes in worship styles in the religious establishment."