From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past (Part 43) A Secret That Can Hide Plain View Date: 1996/12/01 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST (PART 43) A Secret That Can Hide In Plain View The whole fucking world is full of people that are either looking for something or selling something to those who are looking. We could complain, and we often do, but this arrangement sure makes for a healthy thriving market place, don't it? And so it goes in every area of life. Sick patients seek doctors, home buyers seek Realtors, travelers seek transportation, the hungry seek food, lawsuit victims seek.....god forbid, Attorney's!!! (SEE MY FAVORITE LAWYER AT THE END), people addicted to drugs seek rehab modalities, and seekers of so-called "higher consciousness/mystical pursuits" seek gurus! But in any of these exchanges, although they do facilitate transfers of energies and keep things moving along, who among those who are on the selling end of the equation, really know something? Of course it's all relative, and there are people who do more or less know enough to transfer useful information, but from a wider view I don't feel like I'm being too bombastic to say that it's the blind leading the blind. How many times has a doctor had to say, "well, I'm not god. I don't know everything. We just don't have ALL the answers, etc." At least in the areas of science, biology, and physics we are generally dealing with something that is a little more than just "Three Card Monty." It's a little more precise than saying, "you can have any flavor you want, as long as it's chocolate or vanilla." Well in the area of "higher states, higher consciousness, improved functioning of the organism," the common currency that's available is many orders of magnitude, even murkier than say, doing business with a financial planner, or stock broker. Here you are dealing with stuff that can't be proved one way or the other. There is no "hard evidence." There are no consistently verifiable and repeatable experiments that would convince a sane skeptic that he's approaching the genuine article. In fact, it's just the opposite. Many systems deal in faith. "You gotta believe. The reason you won't get anywhere is because you have to learn to trust, etc., etc., etc." RIGHT ARM. I mean RIGHT ON. How many times have we seen evidence, that SOME preachers, ministers, New Age guru types are selling the "trust/faith" doctrine, only to be making themselves richer and richer in the process? And much more often is that even if they are not just making themselves richer, than the promised answers from XYZ religion is simply something along the lines of, "jesus saves, you'll get your reward when you die, love thy neighbor?" I'm certain that all of this just peachy fine. It fits right in with the opening sentence about the world being full of buyers and sellers. And most of the world is fairly satisfied with this arrangement. Part of me prefacing all this is to impart a flavor of what I was looking for, along with some of the ideas that I had played with for a while, but which were about to have their skirts hiked up so you could see what she really looked like underneath! Now I'll get back to the beginning of this next "non-drug" adventure that I started outlining in (Part 42.) I arrived at the designated meeting place at 7:00 P.M. on a Thursday night. I was told that I could arrive about a half hour earlier, so I could get filled in on the few necessary details of what "the group" did. Walking in the door to the third floor of a five story brownstone in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan's East Side, I was greeted by a man who was in his early fifties, whom we'll call Parker. After the usual greetings he give me a bit more information. The meeting was going to consist of watching a video tape by the person who had started all this. The reason for this was that the person responsible for doing this lived in another city, and although he did travel to a few major cities in the United States, where there were small groups gathering, it was simply more efficient to tape the talks he gave to the main group where he lived and send them out once a week. I asked questions about what this was all about. "Was it like religion, Zen, Buddhism, Sufism etc.?" I asked Parker about his semi-cryptic remark about this being like LSD. I told him that I'd done acid on dozens of occasions and mentioned some of my background with hard drugs. He said he had done LSD as well, and being a musician, had experimented with most illegal drugs along the way. He said that the information being made available here could be used to trigger similar but better mystical/higher non-drug states than LSD! My ears perked up. It was nice to talk to someone who was a fellow musician, had a common history with various drugs, and seemingly shared a keen interest in non-drug oriented "higher states." I asked about the basis of the videos they had been watching, and he said that they were simply talks on all manner of subjects, from politics, to science, religion, mysticism, commerce & trade, physics, bio-chemisty, just about any topic had been covered over the two or three years that Parker had been involved. The gist of it was that although the subject matter would seemingly be about ordinary stuff that took place "out there" in life, the "meat and potatoes" was how it was being presented in a way that would illuminate how things worked, "in here." That is, inside the three pound mass of neurons sitting on top of our shoulders. Again, I was intrigued. I asked if there were anything else to all this than just watching a one hour video every Thursday? I was told that there were a few other "external props," as it were, like a special series of physical exercises that I could learn how to do. These "exercises" were somewhat like Hatha Yoga postures. There were also some very direct private writings that I could look over that went into more specific details about the "operational internal chemistry" involved in these efforts. I started to say hello to the other folks that arrived. Altogether there were about 20 people that showed up by 7:30 P.M. I noticed that everyone that arrived was mostly possessed of what we would call a bright intellect. I learned as time went by, that their occupational backgrounds ran the gamut from white collar professionals to blue collar workers. I also learned that only a small percentage of them had much of a drug background. A few of the more "hippie types" had some background in Marijuana and LSD. A greater percentage had backgrounds in some type of study dealing with consciousness before they happened onto this. And a few had no prior interest in any of this stuff. A diverse, but interesting bunch to say the least. I also learned that relatively, this information was playing to a rather small audience across the country. The main group, not in New York, had about 60 folks who'd been involved with it since the late 60's. New York had about 20. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Florida, Massachusetts, and Oregon had maybe about 100 folks between them. Additionally there were a few other interested party's scattered in other cities both in America and in parts of Europe. Apparently there was little desire or interest both from the guy who started it, or from people that were occasionally exposed to it in the form of public presentations to ever expand it much. I came to find out that the "body of information" being presented seemed to have little in the way of mass public appeal. I was intrigued but a little wary as well. Was it a cult? I'd steered clear of all stuff like this for years, either because I was strung out on heroin or because my common sense told me that there was nothing in secret groups/cults etc., but self-deception and personality worship. Then again, what could be more of a cult than illegal hard drug use? Hell, in one way or another I'd been segmented off from mainstream life for years anyway, with or without drugs. I decided that I would put that question on the shelf for the time being and suspend all judgments until I had digested some of it for a while. It was about time to begin. After a three minute period of total silence, the video was put into the VCR and the play button was hit. Impossible as it will be to relay what this was about, I will try to explain as much of it as I feel comfortable doing in the next few "adventures." Then again, if you've been following any of these stories, you may already have gotten a feel for it anyway. Copyright Gizmo 1996 P.S. If you're just tuning in to these stories, you may be wondering what has any of this got to do with heroin addiction? Well, plenty actually, but you'll have to go and dig up the earlier stories or wait until I can tie it all together later on down the pike. Oh shit, here comes that damn pike again. I'm still looking for any really valid information on where "the pike" really is. Also, where did it come from, how much stuff Promised Lawyer Joke: A widow took her son to visit her recently deceased husband at the local cemetary. After kneeling down at the graveside, the mom and her boy prayed and read the inscription on the gravestone. It read, "Here Lies Sir John Jameson Esquire, A Lawyer And An Honest Man." Upon reading this the kid looked up to his mom and asked, "Mom, how come they buried two people there?"