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Sam Temple May 2016
it has become painfully clear
that in a land filled with English speakers
many of us do not speak the same language
there are individuals lost
forever locked into a mindset
void of color
only black and white
right and wrong
absolutists
living the lie of party lines
driven to madness
over personal freedoms
clashing with their value system –
eyes look past and through me
when I speak of a shifting planet
and the effects of humans
on the greater ecosystem
as if I were an alien
or an immigrant
without proper documentation –
when I bring up the ideas of holistic
healing
killing cancer with marijuana
fighting illness with a plant
easy to grow
easy to process
documented success
it doesn’t matter
they do not listen
they can’t hear me
I am speaking a foreign language
with a common tongue –
this is the state of my country
most of us run around
using variations on English
most of us have the same definitions
use the same education system
breath the same air
drink and eat
**** …..
yet we cannot come together
we cannot join forces
because you don’t know what I am saying
when I say I love you
you can’t hear
when I say I care
we will all die alone
looking into the eyes
of our brothers
wishing they could understand
what the **** we are saying –
poetry month prompt #30


didn't really follow the prompt, but such is life.....
faa May 2018
It is as if the world
is in a state of Hypnosis
allowing ourselves to succumb
to the 'Moral' Absolutists
letting them carve us
into statues of Uniformity
Masterpieces created
to be subjects of society
that instead binds us tight
with chains, numerous in form
watered down to be symbolized
as proper; Values and Norms
That can never allow us to identify
as who we truly are
Recently I was misidentified as a psychonaut
so allow me to clarify,
I am not.

I am no longer
part of that cabal,
I am no more a psychonaut than I am a catholic;

But, as a philosopher, I will write of it.


Psychonautics is an act of configuration.
It refers to a methodology
for describing and explaining
configurations of consciousness,
And a research cabal
in which adherents explore
and harness those configurations.

The power of psychonautics
is that configurations of consciousness
have resonant effects on meaning and belief.
The psychonautic cabal emerges from a recognition of this.

Psychonautic exploration is not without risk
to the physical and psychological well-being
of the researcher, to their essence and beliefs.

An experienced and trustworthy practitioner
can provide a tether to your shared reality,
Advanced practices require caution and patience
to navigate safely; "[t]here is no casual experiment".


In the Western paradigm, classical psychonautics
was defined by contemplative and ritual techniques,
The religious or spiritual practices of a tribe or society.

Modern psychonautics has been increasingly defined by
the use of psychoactive substances, which is likely the result
of secularization, advances in pharmacy, and the war on drugs.

In contemporary society psychoactives are a valuable commodity
that many people use (or misuse) for a variety of reasons.

Some will seek out drugs they have not tried before,
Few shall devote themselves entirely, investing
their time and resources in learning about,
acquiring and assessing psychoactives.

This latter cohort aligns with the methodology
of psychonautics, they commit to understanding
through practice. Many become well-versed
in Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS),
Some academics assume this is the mark of the modern psychonaut
but it is mere specialization  rather than characteristic thereof.


As more initiates into psychonautics emerge from drug experiences
so does the cabal become more chemical. Nevertheless
it draws its adherents from a diversity of practices.

Psychonautic practices entail ontological risks,
The ranks of the cabal are full
of disordered, misguided, or warped adherents
whose heedless practice undermines
the meaningfulness of consensual reality.
A lack of formal training and mental health
likely contribute to this, although no equation
can encapsulate the qualitative experience which
compromises ontological security.


The cabal is decentralized, without singularly defined leadership
or ideals, and it operates through intrigue. Its adherents
may dispute the ethos or validity of some practices
and their corresponding configurations, and so
within the cabal there is an internal politics:

Cognitive liberals
believe anyone using responsibly
should be allowed their methodology and be able to practice.

Universalists or absolutists
believe everyone should be initiated, if not adherent.

Elitists and psychocrats
hold that only their method and practice is valid.

Cognitive dissidents
believe the methodology and its praxis must not be vested
in nation-states, corporations, or religions
if it is/they are to retain its power.

The cabal's politics of intrigue
represent an unspoken power struggle
where the stakes are unclear, if even communicable.

If the war on drugs comes to an end, psychonautics
will be redefined by its next wave of initiates,
May they be wise and kind.


I have written enough,
That part of my life is well and truly over.
My purpose here is to explore ideas, to experiment with poetry.
The place I allocate psychoactives
has always been secondary to that;

Rarely do I deign to sail the soul now
but when I do, know I am a philosopher

and do so as an inquiry into mind
rather than in service of alteration.
Line Twenty-Two from PiHKAL by Alexander & Ann Shulgin.

"When you see a headline extolling the virtues of “resetting your brain,”
What’s missing is the “visceral, sometimes hellish experience”"
-Rosalind Watts
Parable of the Seventh Dream: "Dreaming of Procorus in one night, in seven dreams from which he had risen, escorted by corporate forms to his entity and dichotomy, delirium between dreams that supported him from some naive cords in their candles, when they were almost extinguished in submission majolica. Thus inaugurated the flow of the Oneiro Greek dream, in a sanctuary of scope that refrained from rooting it from ballasts of human practices that were transmitted from Delphi, the birds flew ringed from their legs with the traverse of the sailors of Skalá, and with sacrificed deities in forms of prophetic reparations. More than seventh desires and tears to verify, more than an eager ardor to let him enter with the birds and insects that wanted to discard the subsisted dreams, each night like the one who sustained them under three-winged beings on the deck of the Iustitia and Eunomia, "Justice and Economy", in which they were accentuated more extensively in the places of those nights of converted hallucinated visions..., that compiled sexuality of words that lavished cells in their own appeal, for advances of obfuscation and between-dreams that were fertilized between yes, retro feeding on unwanted daydreams.

Raeder, appears covered in washed-out colored amphibians with his pelican Petrobus, right in the monastery's electrical discharges, they devoid and null in effect before their inter-cells, of which only compressed air entered them. They used to manifest fecundities of species without being pre-fertilized of the gamete gene, not loading them with empty chromosomes, neither in the previous hymn, nor joyful dirge by the temple of Aphrodite in Megara. With the first two dreams (Peithó), the persuasion of the Mashiach was magnified primitively among all, with the wheels of existence turning in their garlands with the (Paregoron) of undivided consolations for preconceived territories, of (Himeros) in ******-neophyte anxieties that they were refounded with the trio-reveries of the foothills of Mount Latmos, divided into three segments, to finally rush into the longings (Pothós) that differed from their own names in each entelechy, in beneficial moral props and not, but in the face of a defining ploy, alongside Aphrodite and Megara's siege.

Of all the dreams that were transformed into other dreams, and that did not bloom stained or embryonated, they were absolutists in identical cloning and with the disdain of sleepiness that became guests of third parties, such as early development and parasitic mysticism, creating sixty-four instars. unfertilized in the bundle of their ethics results, to be delivered to Raeder, to be transferred to Vernarth's receptacle. Having in their interior amphibians and resident birds of the new auroras, they opened towards the sky in sixty-four calls from the new vital assistance. Procorus awake after seven dreams, each time he went with more splendor and temperance in pro-art ogival devices, which were lightened in the tips of his semi-awake fingers, and in the recondite count that was presented with clovers of maximum sublimated power between healed rales lacones, from a nucleus and its greatest pleas over-cloning one after another in quantum rhythm, after the dreamlike and somatic fantasies of the cycloid thirds of normality, protected by illusions of animal consciousness that were perfected by ultra harmony..., attached to Procorus.

(Procorus awoke when he saw that the birds forgot to fly and the animals to walk, running strongly to the north side of the magnetized monastery, to dream them of other delays that awaited him for gifts of creation not consummated, bringing on him all the surfaces of the humanity, in sordid fossilized sedimentations with one hand reaching for everything and poking around everything, bringing back the seven dreams again to dream them again, leaving all the doors and senses of creation wide open)
Parable of the Seventh Dream

— The End —