Melatonin... script???

[Rev]

human civilisations more that >8000 years ago? I wouldn't dismiss the possibility out of hand, but neither would I necessarily associate 'civilisation' with monolithic architecture

i wish id said that. so much simpler than the longwinded answer i gave and removed

It then occurred to me...'oh, this is like that shamanic archetypal experience where you get dismembered'...and then everything suddenly dissolved and i found myself somewhere else.

and that too

(anyway, I was responding to the idea of human civilisations 10s of thousands of years ago, which IMO is absurd tongue.gif...there's a big difference between 8000 and tens of thousands!).

weve been around as a species for 100000+ years. Civilisation could have ocurred at any point in that time

the main argumnet that it didnt remans the lack of material archaeological evidence. No pottery, no ceramic toilet bowls, no jewelery, no writing. If we are the same species wed have the same lifetyles and desires so similar artefacts. Man cannot live by monolith alone

It’s a relationship very bound up in our scientific understanding of plants, but its all very mechanistic and cold, or at the other end of the spectrum, very superficial and based on the pleasure of looking at their forms…

let me reverse that for my own take on it. We find plant forms pleasing to our consciousness which we make superficial by reductionism. beauty and its appreciation is anything but superficial, rather we make it so by an inability to articilate it. beauty is profound, a state of conscoiusness associated with amounts of information beyond comprehension but within intuition

or to eventually allow our tinkering with their very structure to suit our own needs via crops…

we arent the only species to do this. its very natural.

and our place in all of it, no doubt the trees and plants looking on to all this as bemused witnesses! tongue.gif

if trees could talk theyd say to us whats the hurry?

[apothecary]

okay so i kind of left this thread, as to me the whole thing felt like standing in a room with an elephant and saying 'wow check out that elephant!' and hearing in reply 'no no no scientific law is very clear and Final there can not possibly be an elephant in this room'...

I read it more as

"Hey a few people over there are saying there's an elephant in here. That's a pretty bold statement, an elephant....but I'm willing to believe that if I can see some evidence backing that up"

...but that was just me...

[folias]

Wandjina,

In this context, my dismissal of flower essences and, say, the loch ness monster, is not solely based on simple recourse to lack of 'scientific proof', but also on a contextualised understanding of the history of medicine and science , and on an appreciation, based in broad exposure to a wide range of ideologies, histories and sociologies etc, of well crafted arguments and nuanced/sophisticated underlying metaphysics/philosophies.

Well, this is the mental realm, it is the realm of theory, of ideas... it is not based on actualities here... what I have been atttempting to communicate is how people do use these essences and how they are deemed to work by the community of people around the world who actually do practise this field... these are actualities of human experience which have nothing to do with the kind of theory you are talking of here or your personal preference to dismiss the actuality of this field as being somehow invalid.

I've read many of the texts on flower essences, on vibrational healing... it is its own field, in parts, I would consider Steve Johnson's book "The Essence of Healing", to be one of the wisest western based metaphysical texts I have ever read.

Homeopathy is another field altogether... and I don't doubt its efficacy having also made homeopathic remedies myself and seeing their efficacy!

Your seeming experiences with bush flower essences and bach essence do not an adequate or assessment of this very large field make! To compare an actual practise of healing and communication of plants as being bogus like the loch ness monster actually just comes off as being very non-objective, closed minded and semi-smarmiily supersticious!

10s of thousands of years ago, which IMO is absurd

why is the positing of a civilisation 10's of thousands of years old absurd?... I have seen many, many indications throughout our known history which indicate such civilisations.

I have yet to know of any evidence which completely disproves such civilisations... like I said, I like to keep an open mind without being emotionally reactive about such things!

but the evidence would seem to suggest they are geological rather than human artefacts.

There isn't any evidence in fact.

There are only some extremely novel theories which explain how the pyramids could possibly be geological. And there does not appear to any evidence or backing supporting material to these theories! (which is all they are)

Most of the Japanese scientists who have studied these pyramids have concluded they are manmade...

Why?

Because you can see steps.

They have found tools.

They have found sculptures.

These objects are actually pyramids with a certain height and width.

http://www.morien-institute.org/interview4_MK.html

and

http://www.lightnet.co.uk/informer/civilisations/japan.htm

Perhaps it is that you are being closed-minded towards what seem to be less-fantastic or less-interesting explanations for phenomena?

Life appears wackier and wackier to me the more I see....

And I just often see skeptics who are always trying to think they are being objective, by actively disproving what doesn't fit into their traditional fallaciously reductionistic world view as the only reality, if that was superior(!), and actually are maintaining the closed minded realm of mental descriptiveness and assumptions of previous mere human knowledge which is innately based in a limited present time and space, which is often based on the fallacy of an ultimate reductive objectivity and crystallised 2 dimensional knowableness which IS demed to be the ONLY actuality of things work... I just see it all as a result of ontological insecurity, which must maintain the gross duality by stating YES or NO! YAY OR NAYE! but actually cannot be binarily unipotent!... then the subject/object wave collapses... and there is union!

Julian.

[mescalito]

Poor old IndigoSunrise

Just send away for them mate!

UTSE here and you'll find discussion on the issue re:scripts and melatonin and there's some links to reputable places that ship to Aus.

Fact is most docs won't prescribe stuff they know nothing about and most aren't interested in what you feel or want unless they're covered by law to make further enquiries...hell sometimes I reckon only 10% of practising docs these days actually give a shit!!

I recently made a scoop purchase from a bloke who imported a heap and split with some members HERE is the brand.

Just make sure you check that the sites will actually ship to Aus.

[wandjina]

Oh dear...guess I pushed a few of your buttons too Julian!

You are very intelligent, yet it seems when an intellectual basis cannot be found to defend your argument and its underlying ideologies, then the 'fall back' position rests on thinly veiled personal attacks...accusing the 'opposition' of being didactic, pompous, reductionist and inexperienced.

There is some truth in all of those words...and at least I'm woman enough to admit it.

However, your tone here has a malicious edge that tongue gifs cannot conceal, which I don't feel is at all necessary.

There is also the implication that I am lying or perhaps exaggerating, which is, as I have said before in regards to another aspect of your discourse, a not very sporting approach to winning a debate. Perhaps a discussion based solely on content is too challenging?

We do not know eachother, and I can not empirically prove to you or anyone else whether or not I have taken flower essences...so there's not much I can do if you can chose to paint me as a liar and hypocritically do to my argument and 'actualities' what you have critcised me for doing to yours.

Well, this is the mental realm, it is the realm of theory, of ideas... it is not based on actualities here... what I have been atttempting to communicate is how people do use these essences and how they are deemed to work by the community of people around the world who actually do practise this field... these are actualities of human experience which have nothing to do with the kind of theory you are talking of here or your personal preference to dismiss the actuality of this field as being somehow invalid.

I can see what you're saying...but you are still basing your argument on the a priori metaphysical assumption that the experiences and 'actualities' you refer to occur in a social and cultural vacuum.

That is, you seem to believe that personal beliefs, expectations and world-views do not play a part in human experience, and in the creation of reality in general. Or perhaps, you think that such 'external' factors only play a part in those beliefs, theories, experiences and 'actualities' you deem inferior and mired in a distant and obsolete human past.

You deny the possibility that observation can be theory laden, in fact, you appear to deny the attributes 'theory' and 'idea' to 'vibrational medicine'....but then this is contradicted later by talk of 'wise western' metaphysics (ie theory) as underlying your preferred philosophy)

There does not seem to be any self-reflexivity in your position....yet you seem to see rigidity and subjectivity everywhere else. Hence, those that do not see the 'truth', as you claim to, are categorised as mere skeptics 'actively disproving what doesn't fit into their traditional fallaciously reductionistic world view'.

In this way your argument comes across as no different than those of religious fundamentalists or rabid logical-positivists ('orthodox' or mainstream scientists).... - inflexible, dogmatic and arrogant....and utilising implicitly personal ammo to strengthen the 'case' and attempt to undermine the credibility of whoever disagrees.

My opinion is that we are all, every one of us, embedded in culture...no matter how alternative or counter-cultural, or revolutionary, or objective, or 'pure' we believe ourselves to be...and here I wholeheartedly include myself.

For one to deny their experiences are influenced by their beliefs and expectations is the height of arrogance.

There are many, many other 'actualities', ideas, theories and phenomena that don't fit into the 'conventional, reductionistic scientific world view' that one may believe in, and that I personally believe in and experience, without believing or experiencing flower essences as credible and effective medicine or remedies.

Dismissing one does not equate to the dismissal of everything else that science cannot explain or rationalises away...the way you have implicitly misrepresented my argument indicates that you have either failed to understand my position, or are so desperate to defend a cherished belief you are willing to resort to deceitful rhetorical measures. it would seem you are projecting your own ontological insecurity onto the 'outside world'.

Your seeming experiences with bush flower essences and bach essence do not an adequate or assessment of this very large field make!

No, you are right, they don't...and I do not claim that they do....but that is my opinion based on my experience and understanding.

To compare an actual practise of healing and communication of plants as being bogus like the loch ness monster actually just comes off as being very non-objective, closed minded and semi-smarmiily supersticious!

And that is your opinion....and another case of the pot calling the kettle black!

Obviously I have caused offense by putting one your sacred cows in the loch with Nessie.

why is the positing of a civilisation 10's of thousands of years old absurd?... I have seen many, many indications throughout our known history which indicate such civilisations.

I have yet to know of any evidence which completely disproves such civilisations... like I said, I like to keep an open mind without being emotionally reactive about such things! tongue.gif

look, Julian, I just don't believe those kinda theories, that's my opinion based on available information. The next question would be...if there is no evidence...then why do you? On the basis of zero evidence...then we must both be making choices to believe 'x' based on personal preferences.

Truth be told, I was once a huge believer in all things paranormal and 'out there'....from Erick von Danikens chariots of the Gods, to Uri Geller, to ancient lost civilisations. But years of study (occult, new age, history, philopsophy, biology, religion, psychology, anthropology etc etc) resulted in me coming to the conclusion that there really wasn't any good reason to 100% believe in these things. I still love them, read about hem...they continue to hold a fascination for me, but nowadays I feel I am more discerning in my choice of in-depth research topics....and I don't just mean academic research.

In my view, there are far, far more interesting things in this world above and beyond these kind of theories and ideas. They're just not bizarre or novel enough...they're dated, old hat, as far as I'm concerned.

There isn't any evidence in fact.

so you just grab onto the most outlandish theory available? Not such a bad policy...I'm all for wild ideas and novel theories, but...

There are only some extremely novel theories which explain how the pyramids could possibly be geological. And there does not appear to any evidence or backing supporting material to these theories! (which is all they are)

That's interesting...I remember not long after the formations were re-doscovered hearing some plausible geologic explanations...and sure, they and these more recent explantions may be 'just' theories, but so is the idea that the formations are human structures....so why the preference?

Most of the Japanese scientists who have studied these pyramids have concluded they are manmade...

Why?

Because you can see steps.

They have found tools.

They have found sculptures.

These objects are actually pyramids with a certain height and width.

all of those 'factual statements' are debateable....

but that said, I don't absolutely write off the possibility...but I'd hold it's extremely unlikely.

Perhaps it is that you are being closed-minded towards what seem to be less-fantastic or less-interesting explanations for phenomena?

Life appears wackier and wackier to me the more I see....

Interestingly, we share this perspective. The more I learn and experince, the weirder the world becomes.

but I'd paraphrase the first sentence of the next bit as:

And I just often see credulous suckers who are always trying to think they are being objective, by actively disproving what doesn't fit into their traditional supposedly wholistic world view as the only reality if that was superior(!)

and actually are maintaining the closed minded realm of mental descriptiveness and assumptions of previous mere human knowledge which is innately based in a limited present time and space, which is often based on the fallacy of an ultimate reductive objectivity and crystallised 2 dimensional knowableness which IS demed to be the ONLY actuality of things work... I just see it all as a result of ontological insecurity, which must maintain the gross duality by stating YES or NO! YAY OR NAYE! but actually cannot be binarily unipotent!... then the subject/object wave collapses... and there is union!

mmm, yeah. Again, I see where you're going here...only problem is, you have neglected to include yourself as a participant in the above mentioned 'samsaric' world of maya

Again, the implcit characterisation of opposing views as representing a much broader, 'ontologically insecure', fallacious, reductive, '2-dimensional knowableness as the ONLY truth' kind of paradigm... is complete and utter bullshit.

Just because I don't subscribe to some facet of your world-view does not mean that I, nor anybody else, must necessarily subscribe to all the other beliefs and perspectives you conflate with 'not believing' in flower essences and sunken cities off the coast of Japan.

Neither of us would be bothering to defend our preferred belief systems, which in actuality share more similarities than they do differences, if we really knew 'the truth', ie...were 'enlightened'.

The fact that you, and i, care enough about our ideas and experiences to debate them here, belies both our ontological insecurites and 'dominator' egoistic tendencies.

oh yeah, sorry for hijacking the thread Indigo Sunrise...if I find out any info on melatinin you'l be the first to know!

Edited April 4, 2006 by wandjina

[Being]

let me reverse that for my own take on it. We find plant forms pleasing to our consciousness which we make superficial by reductionism. beauty and its appreciation is anything but superficial, rather we make it so by an inability to articilate it. beauty is profound, a state of conscoiusness associated with amounts of information beyond comprehension but within intuition

excellent, indeed a very good point and very well put!

i guess what i was trying to say, without getting too caught in reductionism, lets say the symbolic left / right brain based perception of plants is present in general awareness, we go far into their inner workings via science, and very rightly ^_^ so, appreciate their exterior forms, yet, for me, a tying together of these aspects and a true wholeness of perception would be the acknowledgment of their non-physical reality, their consciousness.

we arent the only species to do this. its very natural.

mmm yes again good point, but i was referring more to genetic engineering, which is stemming from the same base, but so clumsy on our part as to be incredibly dangerous.. i really wonder, how is our tinkering with plant's genetic structure affecting their consciousness, the plant deva?

if trees could talk theyd say to us whats the hurry?

yes and the older they get the more so! i was walking in the nightcap today and came across a tree many hundreds of years old, maybe even well over a thousand years old, anyway it was massive, and i really felt this slooooowness..

its funny apart from the anthropomorphism the lord or the ring's 'ents' are kind of spot on... is it just me though, or does the 3d animation of these trees feel really ketamine/dmt to anyone else? something in the way they move and are rendered... heh lets see how far off topic this thread can go!

[Being]

I read it more as

"Hey a few people over there are saying there's an elephant in here. That's a pretty bold statement, an elephant....but I'm willing to believe that if I can see some evidence backing that up"

...but that was just me...

heh, apoth, from my perspective that was just you..

i wouldn't advocate believing in anything, but there has been some evidence provided and i don't feel it has made the elephant seem any more plausible... but this all feels pretty harsh, i'm not necessarily singling out people here ..the room for me isn't confined to this thread, but a very big global house filled with the members of the church of Science.

and if i am coming across as a bit harsh lately, for the record i am attempting to quit smoking at present!

[Rev]

good on you being

you are certainly a worthwhile human being. itd be a pity to see you brough down by something as frivolous as a tobacco addiction

i havnet had a smoke since feb 26th. I mean i prob will again for kicks and medication but no more will i even consider an actual nicotine habit as excusable

[folias]

You are very intelligent, yet it seems when an intellectual basis cannot be found to defend your argument and its underlying ideologies, then the 'fall back' position rests on thinly veiled personal attacks...accusing the 'opposition' of being didactic, pompous, reductionist and inexperienced.

heh, I’m not actually not depending on an “intellectual” basis for my “argument”… and I would say I actually don’t have one!

I just see reasons why you are using certain systems to construct and deconstruct certain forms of reality… and its obvious to me you really don’t know what you are talking about regarding flower essences and vibrational medicine, because you haven’t studied the field!

However, your tone here has a malicious edge that tongue gifs cannot conceal, which I don't feel is at all necessary.

There is also the implication that I am lying or perhaps exaggerating, which is, as I have said before in regards to another aspect of your discourse, a not very sporting approach to winning a debate. Perhaps a discussion based solely on content is too challenging?

We do not know eachother, and I can not empirically prove to you or anyone else whether or not I have taken flower essences...so there's not much I can do if you can chose to paint me as a liar and hypocritically do to my argument and 'actualities' what you have critcised me for doing to yours.

I personally think you are hiding in the mental plane as the only valid plane and the one by which all must refer back to and be referenced back to… which I consider a fallacious (and very common) way of perceiving reality.

That you are doing this so smugly makes you fair game for the pointing of this out as far as I am concerned!

I can see what you're saying...but you are still basing your argument on the a priori metaphysical assumption that the experiences and 'actualities' you refer to occur in a social and cultural vacuum.

That is, you seem to believe that personal beliefs, expectations and world-views do not play a part in human experience, and in the creation of reality in general.

yeah, sure they do… but they are not the meat of it… or don’t HAVE to be.

You deny the possibility that observation can be theory laden, in fact, you appear to deny the attributes 'theory' and 'idea' to 'vibrational medicine'....but then this is contradicted later by talk of 'wise western' metaphysics (ie theory) as underlying your preferred philosophy)

Sure, observation CAN BE theory laden, but the more accurate observation to take heed of, with discrimination, I find, is not!

Steve Johnson’s work is not primarily based on theory it seems, but experience in communicating with nature… and that is what he says it is.

There is almost no theoretical basis to his beliefs or observations, given nor stated, they may as well have come out of a vacuum!

That is why his work is interesting, he was a fireman in Alaska, and the flowers and nature spirits began to speak to him, a woman showed him how to make essences and it began from there…

There does not seem to be any self-reflexivity in your position....yet you seem to see rigidity and subjectivity everywhere else. Hence, those that do not see the 'truth', as you claim to, are categorised as mere skeptics

I’m talking about generalised ways of approaching phenomena that is not easily understood… OR, may not be typically understandable at all!

In this way your argument comes across as no different than those of religious fundamentalists or rabid logical-positivists ('orthodox' or mainstream scientists).... - inflexible, dogmatic and arrogant....and utilising implicitly personal ammo to strengthen the 'case' and attempt to undermine the credibility of whoever disagrees.

mirror mirror… BUT I actually don’t have AN argument here unless you think I do!

My opinion is that we are all, every one of us, embedded in culture...no matter how alternative or counter-cultural, or revolutionary, or objective, or 'pure' we believe ourselves to be...and here I wholeheartedly include myself.

For one to deny their experiences are influenced by their beliefs and expectations is the height of arrogance.

ah yeah sure, but then we can move on, and see that our experiences are influenced by so many different myriad factors, that vary so radically at times, it is ridiculous… reductionism inherently cannot take into account these variables, nor open up to new sets of variables, because it makes mentally apprehending something too hard with all those pesky variables and elements to account into the equation!

My point, mentally apprehending something is a kind of an artificially arrogant placebo effect in the first place!

There are many, many other 'actualities', ideas, theories and phenomena that don't fit into the 'conventional, reductionistic scientific world view' that one may believe in, and that I personally believe in and experience, without believing or experiencing flower essences as credible and effective medicine or remedies.

belief and disbelief, again is the action of the mentality which affirms or denies phenomena, is open or closed, says yes or no.

Dismissing one does not equate to the dismissal of everything else that science cannot explain or rationalises away...the way you have implicitly misrepresented my argument indicates that you have either failed to understand my position, or are so desperate to defend a cherished belief you are willing to resort to deceitful rhetorical measures. it would seem you are projecting your own ontological insecurity onto the 'outside world'.

nah, I just call stuff how I see it!

And that is your opinion....and another case of the pot calling the kettle black!

Obviously I have caused offense by putting one your sacred cows in the loch with Nessie.

Its just a very obvious and “too easy” to take a position… it IS a position.

I was just pointing out that I found your dismissal of flower essences a bit tawdry and hokey! And actually rather disrespectful in the context of this thread.

look, Julian, I just don't believe those kinda theories,

so this is an emotional personal thing about the kind of things you believe in and the kind of things you don’t, according to your beliefs and perceptions about who you are?

if there is no evidence...then why do you?

I don’t necessarily believe anything… especially evidence!

BUT, with these pyramids, I can see what they are through the photos. They are some kind of geological structures that if they are not manmade, are perhaps the most significant or amazing geological structures that the earth has made itself, randomly, by chance! oh yeah, just like us eh? ;-)

In my view, there are far, far more interesting things in this world above and beyond these kind of theories and ideas. They're just not bizarre or novel enough...they're dated, old hat, as far as I'm concerned.

I see this as a form “aesthetic snobbery”, so you have evolved and grown beyond “the laura lee” show and anything that may be in nexus magazine that may have previously captivated you in wild eyed rapture ;-)

Actually, all these nets and forms of media capture different things.. to categorically, call them “this kind of thing” is what skeptics do, they look into “that kind of thing” and then find ways to deny the realities of those things and then see if it is in their skeptics dictionary…

I’m not saying you ARE a skeptic, I am saying, you are using their rather shoddy tactics when it suits you!

so you just grab onto the most outlandish theory available?

Outlandish is your subjective opinion, there is no grabbing… hmm, underwater pyramids off the coast of Japan…looks like people may have lived there a long time ago!

People positing an “outlandish” geological explanations which try to be mundane and boring is so typical! …at the end of the day people will believe what they want to believe!

I personally cannot see how so many right angles, turret and ledges that happen to look like human structures that human beings make can be made by nature!

http://www.lauralee.com/japan/japan1.htm

Seems pretty far out to me any way you look at it!

I’ve never seen any example of any such thing anywhere else geologically.

but that said, I don't absolutely write off the possibility...but I'd hold it's extremely unlikely.

why bother holding a position, and rather just see the thing for what it is and keep an open mind!

Again, the implcit characterisation of opposing views as representing a much broader, 'ontologically insecure', fallacious, reductive, '2-dimensional knowableness as the ONLY truth' kind of paradigm... is complete and utter bullshit.

I’m talking about the sceptical position, which you are taking here…and seem to be attached to as you are defending it! ;-)

Just because I don't subscribe to some facet of your world-view does not mean that I, nor anybody else, must necessarily subscribe to all the other beliefs and perspectives you conflate with 'not believing' in flower essences and sunken cities off the coast of Japan.

seems like we have a case of pre-ontological insecurity here!

Neither of us would be bothering to defend our preferred belief systems, which in actuality share more similarities than they do differences, if we really knew 'the truth', ie...were 'enlightened'.

I don’t know if I believe in that we would be enlightened if we knew ‘the truth’

The fact that you, and i, care enough about our ideas and experiences to debate them here, belies both our ontological insecurites and 'dominator' egoistic tendencies.

or something! :saufen2:

Julian.

[wandjina]

WARNING!!!WARNING!!! EXCEEDINGLY LENGTHY POST!!!

This will be my last post in this thread, as I just don’t have the juice for anymore.

First of all, I apologise for being such a hard arse…the truth is I was in a pretty ratty place that day. I hadn’t slept, as I was kept up worrying about a bullying problem at my daughter’s school. I have become embroiled in this issue by going in to bat with the parents of my daughters best friend, who has been being victimised by some of the other children for being different. Its been quite a stressful situation, and I was in quite a shitty mood when I posted that. It’s a crappy excuse I know, but there you have it.

That said, I’d also like to apologise to anyone who I may have offended in that particular post, and any of my previous posts…I have been disrespectful of other peoples beliefs and lived experiences, and I hope I haven’t caused too much ill feeling.

I know I have been especially harsh in my appraisal of flower essences, but that is my opinion and I have better reasons for feeling the way that I do than many may assume.

But before I get into that, I would like to be as open as I can be, and admit that my ‘position(s)’ (semantics notwithstanding), is/are in some respects, hell, many respects, hypocritical and internally contradictory.

More, I think I have even misrepresented myself by taking an extreme ‘position’ to bolster my currently preferred version(s) of reality, because, in all honesty, I entered into a competition with Julian. I am not afraid to admit that. Nor am I afraid to let a great deal more of myself known to the members of this forum, within which there is at least one person who knows me well enough to substantiate much of what I am about to reveal.

First of all, and I have been asking myself: ‘Why do you, Julian, a person I do not know, get under my skin? Why do you push my buttons so?

‘What is it about me that makes you seem so damn annoying?’

Well, from one perspective, I think it may be that I see in you things I see in myself.

I see my arrogance, my tendency to be patronising and condescending, an at times glib disregard for other peoples beliefs and feelings, and other aspects of a big personality and intellect with egotistical and haughty tendencies.

I don’t know if you see these things in yourself, but I think all people have them in varying measures.

Now as far as my disrespectfulness goes, I can admit that some of what I posted was specifically designed to be provocative, if not antagonistic (I.e. to deliberately push a few buttons), but I am very surprised that this is an issue for you.

Over the past few weeks I have been reading a lot of your posts at SAB, EBA and other forums, (along with many other peoples posts in preparation for my research), and a defining characteristic of many of them is a flagrant disregard for, or jocular dismissal of, other peoples beliefs, or religion, and for anything that is seen to fall within the category disparagingly referred to as ‘culture’.

This thread reminds me of ‘Chef’ (I.e Isaac Hayes) from South Park quitting the show when they had a go at scientology…whilst he had previously tolerated jabs at every other faith and belief.

But that’s human. We all believe something, at some points. And I still hold that a ‘solid’ division between belief and experience is an artificial distinction….I do not see there is a separation, or a dualism: in my view separating the two as distinct ‘territories’ is the same as the Cartesian separation of mental and physical, mind and body etc.

Anyway, I know I was harsh, pretty bitchy actually, and you were spot on with the ‘mirror mirror’ thing and many other points you made about my character…and I apologise for being so rude and aggressive.

Regarding my experiences, or lack thereof, well maybe relative to you and other people here I am not very experienced, but for all anyone knows I may be very experienced in other areas of which they know little or nothing of. Or more experienced in some areas that I do not appear to be. whatever the case,

You give as good as you get Julian, and what I put out came right back and kicked me in the arse! That’s the way I like it…instant karma!

However, that said, I’m disappointed that you don’t seem able to yield and admit to being as full of (metaphorical) shit and brokenness as the rest of us.

Many people, including yourself, say they don’t really believe anything, but its clear that you do, even if its for a moment, or an hour or a micro second. We all do.

And we all have our shadows, our darkness. I find people who seem to deny this side of their being quite frustrating to deal with, because ‘problems’ are all too often seen to lie everywhere but inside themselves. And, when people disagree, the fault is often perceived as being in the other persons inability to see the truth as experienced by thee other persons self, ‘the truth’ being a misleading concept to start with.

I know, because I do this too. It is a hard thing to recognise and admit to oneself, and to other people…but its also quite liberating.

I think we would both benefit from being more humble, showing more humility, and allowing ourselves to see the arrogant and narcissistic aspects of our personalities that others experience as harsh, rude, supercilious and disrespectful. I know people see it in me, and I’m getting better at seeing it in myself…and, with due respect, it takes one to know one.

I can see and sense it in you, but I also sense you are unwilling to own it, or are perhaps not particularly conscious of it in your day to day life. Or perhaps you are, and simply don’t care about other peoples feelings and sensibilities? I don’t think that is the case.

Perhaps we both need to try and be more aware of how our words affect other people.

Nobody likes a ‘holier than thou’ attitude…but after reading both our posts, we both come across that way. We can both be harsh and insensitive.

Part of the reason I got so agro in that thread was because you trod somewhere very sensitive. I will explain.

I’ll try not to be too intellectual from here on, you were also right that I have a tendency to 'hide in my head', but there have been times in my life, and no doubt in many other wounded-healers lives, where there was nowhere else to go if you wanted to survive. But that's only half the story.

Anyhow, perhaps here I am merely indulging myself, but my sincere desire is to clear the air and resolve any bad feelings there may be. I would also like to give you more of an idea of who I am…not just what you have garnered from ‘the thread’ (cue scary music), because, firstly, I think you are a fascinating person, and I sense that in some respects we are very much alike. I would very much like to have you as a friend.

I don’t believe in enemies, the notion is entirely ridiculous.

So I extend my hand in friendship, and humbly apologise for being such a hard arsed cow. But you still bug me

Moving on:

Since childhood I have experienced strange feelings and occurrences. Although I do not often speak about it (because my ego likes it a bit too much), there is a story on my mothers side that the women in the family are ‘cursed’ (or blessed, depending on how you look at it).

The story goes that my mothers family (from Wales) descend from the Druids, and in the blood line there have apparently been ‘eccentrics’, healers, spiritualists, clairvoyants, artists, scientists and fruit cakes.

The ‘cursed gift’ is said to be passed from mother to daughter; and my mother and aunts, and all their daughters, have ‘it’ in varying degrees.

In a nutshell, various ‘paranormal phenomena’, for want of a better term, have been experienced by myself and the rest of my female relatives throughout our lives.

The other side of the coin, the 'cursey' bit, is said to involve insanity and loss.

My strongest recollections of experiencing ‘it’ start between the ages of 8 and 10. My mother and her friends became interested in the New Age movement, and there were lots of crystals, channeled books, tarot cards and, for example, Bach flower essences in the house. So this was my introduction to flower essences.

Mum gave them to my younger brother and I quite regularly, and I can honestly say that although I expected and wanted them to work (eg for insomnia, I sometimes had trouble sleeping as a child), I don’t remember them doing anything.

I don’t remember being impressed by them…and I feel that as an 8 year old I was relatively pure of thought, naive, and unprogrammed when it came to such things.

I certainly wasn’t a skeptic, if anything, I was being programmed to belive and experience them as real. I believed in channelling, tarot and astrology. But really, in all honesty, the essences had no discernible effect on me, irrespective of whether or not I believed in them.

Anyway, life went on, and I was bought my first tarot at 10 (which I still have!), and was reading for my mum and her friends not long after (I still do readings, and I’m not too shabby if I do say so myself!). Mum would also get me to scratch those free scratchies where you have to get three the same without scratching all of the panels, and compete in guessing games and stuff; I can’t remember how accurate I was. I was also encouraged to read auras…and truth be told… I never ‘saw’ them, even though people seemed to think I was good at it.

I think I was just good at sensing people’s moods and empathising, there was no need for auras or reading the cards per se. With cards especially, they’re more props than anything else.

So yeah, I was brought up in a pretty open-minded household, I was allowed to attend any religious scripture I chose, I was encouraged to develop subtle faculties, was absolutely fascinated with everything weird, spooky, supernatural or unexplained, I read a lot about all sorts of things, more peculiar the better…and I courted the other. I yearned for the other.

It called me and called me, and the older I got, the harder I looked.

Moving on…weird things continued to happen throughout my childhood and early teens, mostly innocuous minor stuff; knowings, feelings…'knowing' or sensing what other people were feeling, that kind of thing. The occasional prediction. I think this happens to alot of people...especially here.

Then, when I was almost 16, I experienced the weirdest paranormal event in my life to that point. I had a very intense and peculiar dream, unlike any dream I had had before.

In the dream it was the future, there was no sun, it was always dark and overcast, and alien beings in their space crafts would intermittently attack the cities. When they came, people knew to hide. One day, my brother and I were headed home, when the aliens attacked. I knew there was a place to hide, a caravan in our back yard, and that we must hurry, but Cameron (my brother) stopped running and just stood there.

‘Run!’ I shouted, but he wouldn’t budge

‘Run Cameron, we have to run and hide!’, but he just stared blankly…then I realised that something was wrong.

It was like he was hypnotised, staring, transfixed to something in the sky. And then I saw it, a large grey craft above us, and it had some kind of beam on him that had put him into a trance.

The next thing I can remember was my Mum and I running, running…and ahead, a towering wall, above, my brother atop a large stone platform. The platform was rising up out of the earth, which shook with the force of an earthquake, as monolithic crucifixes rose through the cracks.

The craft hovered above, still projecting an image of the caravan that it had used to lure my brother to the platform.

Only now it was killing him, it was firing a different kind of beam at him now, one that caused him to writhe in absolute agony. My mother and I were running, running, trying to get there to save him…but it was raining so hard, and suddenly we were in deep water, and couldn’t get to him.

Then I woke up in abject terror.

The worst feeling I had ever had, awful, truly awful. This feeling freaked me out, and I spent the rest of the week shaking it off. I told no one about the dream.

Then, a few months later, I felt that terrible feeling again, when Cameron fell from a cliff near his school and died. He suffered horrific injuries, and there was nothing the doctors could do. He was 14.

It is not possible to explain what losing a sibling or a member of your immediate family is like. They call it ‘high grief’…and it is absolutely obliterating. Only those who have experienced it can know how it feels and what it does to you, and you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy…if you had one.

In the days, weeks, months and years following my brother’s death, my mother and I had some very strange experiences. She left her body and communed with my brother shortly after he died, she also confessed to me that she had known for many years that one of her children would die.

I had the peculiar sensation of having inherited some of my brother’s essence, or energy, or life force…whatever you want to call it. I was different after he died, and it wasn’t just the grief that changed me.

The few months after Cameron’s death was a period defined by a proliferation of books about grief, long silences, take away food and bottles of essential oil and flower essences. I was open to many things at 16, perhaps especially new age philosophies and attendant remedies….they were a staple in our household. Yet again, and I say this in all honesty, they didn’t have any discernible effect on me.

Nothing can ‘cure’ grief, and I was old enough to understand what was happening and to not expect as much, but my mother’s friends believed that taking them would help…but in my experience they did absolutely nothing.

The things that did help me in the months after my brother’s death were spending time with friends and taking acid.

Things seemed to get a little bit better, but then they got worse.

My mother lost the plot.

When I wasn’t invisible, I was punished for having survived, and for all intents and purposes, after the first few months had passed, I was alone with my grief.

My mother told me that I was happy that my brother had died because I always hated him anyway…and also because I didn’t cry.

In fact, I had simply withdrawn; it wasn’t safe to be emotionally open in my home any more. A lot of the time I wasn’t even welcome there (cue violins).

And so you were right, I escaped into my head, and an internal world, because I had to. I wouldn’t have survived my mothers grief stricken rage if I had not.

But I ‘came out’ on the weekends:

I stayed at friends places and took drugs…including increasingly ’heroic’ doses of LSD.

It may sound strange to some, but it kept me sane. It was my respite.

Anyhoo…I completed school and left home immediately. I moved to Nimbin and lived in a tipi village with some of the freakiest and most outrageous people I have ever known.

Everyone was into the stuff I was into…from ESP to Wicca, from channeling to UFOs…shamanism to eastern mysticism.

Finally I was free!

And I rejoiced in this new found freedom. I started to come back out of my shell on weekdays, on all days! ...and find out who I was, what I wanted, where I wanted to go.

I got pierced, tattooed and dreadlocked.

My family was mortified…and I liked it!!!

(Incidentally, whilst living in the ‘Star Earth’ community, I met one of the editors of Nexus, a magazine I had a lonnnnng history with. My primary school choir teacher’s partner designed a lot of the covers and back issues were brought to school and given to the kids…which I devoured, also my mums friends and my friends with hippy parents always had copies lying around. Anyhow, I met this guy, and he was talking about the magazine around the fire one night, and he tells us all that every now and then they just make up a story and see if anyone notices, he reckoned no one ever did, including one about Russian scientists who found a fiery inferno, AKA Hell, under the polar ice cap!).

So I lived a carefree and hippy-trippy life at Star Earth, and then one day He walked into the commune.

He called himself Trance.

I had never met another man like him…tall dark and handsome, just the way I like em ;-D.

He was covered in unusual tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks. He oozed otherness and seemed so exotic and intriguing.

I think it took all of 5 minutes to fall in love with him, and I knew almost immediately that we were destined to be together…and within a month we were living together.

I had never felt about another human being the way I felt about him, and nor have I since. Besides the love I have for my daughter, it is the deepest love I have ever known.

We were both interested in, or rather obsessed with, ethnobotany and psychedelics, and the scene was just getting started in the area. Over the years we lived around the shire … grew interesting plants in the garden, and shared a great many profound psychedelic and/or psychic experiences.

I’m sure many members of this forum can understand this kind of relationship. I imagine you have shared with your partner the kinds of experiences I am talking about. You would know the special connection you develop with a friend who is also your lover. Of course it is not possible to express in words. But isn’t it wonderful!

Anyway, it came as a surprise to me when Trance told me his name was actually Cameron, and it also turned out that although he wasn’t from Sydney, he had been born in the hospital my brother had died in. But compared to the other weird shit that happened to us on a daily basis, this was small fry, and for a long time I paid it little attention.

After all, we were head over heals, and unlike other relationships we’d been in, the honeymoon phase just kept going, which is not to say we didn’t have problems, we did as all couples do, but overall we just had this remarkable connection.

One of the problems revolved around his former heroin habit, and his ex and their child. It was very complicated, and I won’t dredge up that chapter here…a long and tragic tale it is.

Anyhoo…even with a few problems, being with Cameron made me feel more myself, more loved than I ever had before. He showed me how beautiful I was, as we all are, and helped me to clear away the guilt, shame and layers of protection I had encased myself in to survive my brothers death and its aftermath.

In one sense, he saved me…but towards the end of our 3 and half year relationship it began to look like my life would take a path that may have destroyed me.

Whilst in Sydney for my fathers birthday, Camerons ex, ‘Sara’, died of a heroin overdose. I got on the first train back, and when I got to the station there was Cameron and my step daughter ‘Anne’ waiting to pick me up….and in the car, fits (syringes) on the floor.

After having to identify Saras body he had snapped and gone and got on. He’d been clean for a long time. I was angry…but it was no time for lectures.

Two days later we drove up to Brisbane for Saras funeral. It was gut wrenching yet familiar territory for me. Her mother and brother were absolutely devastated, and 5 year old Anne was too young to appreciate the magnitude of what had happened. Cameron was in shock, and behaving very strangely, even for him…it was surreal.

Saras family wanted Anne to stay with them for awhile, and we agreed that she could stay for the weekend…then we returned to Rosebank…and for some god-awful stupid reason we made a detour past Nimbin and got on.

I met a friend in town, one of my oldest friends who I have known since school…and she knew what we were doing. She could see I was worried…and kept saying ‘you don’t have to do it, you don’t have to.’

But we did, even in the face of a feeling of impending doom. The details of the rest of the night are not important, and it is with difficulty I write what I am about to write.

I woke up some time the next morning, and found Cameron dead beside me. I could tell the moment I awoke. It wasn’t the strange colour of his skin, or the lack of breath….I could feel he wasn’t there. I screamed his name, I screamed in hysterics, I panicked…and I tried to resuscitate him…and until the ambulance arrived our brave and beautiful friend did too. But Cameron was dead. I knew it. I felt it. There was nothing anyone could do.

Again, I was rocked to the core of my being. It was beyond comprehension. The pain was immense, how would I survive this? How could I lose another Cameron? It was like a sick fucked up joke, and I wondered if the story was true and I really was cursed.

After the first few hours I realised it was different from when my brother died. It is hard to describe, and perhaps you have experienced it, so forgive me this….but it is only when someone you are very close to dies that you realise the etheric connection you have to them. I think with relatives, lovers and intimate friends there is a connection, a bond, that is always there….because it is always there you oftentimes do not notice it, and take it for granted.

When that person dies, you feel that they are no longer there. Its not just knowing that they’re gone, its like this feeling of having an amputated limb or something. There is a hole, or a spot where the thread that connected you together once was…and now there’s just this raw wound, or half a cord with nothing at the other end.

It’s a weird, unearthly and desolate feeling. And its how I felt when my brother died. He was just gone for me, well, virtually gone, I did sense him a bit, but in a different way.

But when Cameron died, the connection remained. I could still feel ‘him’. It was like, again, a cord connecting us…yet it was getting stretched thinner and thinner as he moved through, well, lets call them the Bardos.

It was like the connection between us was so strong, in part because of the shared psychedelic and psychic experiences, on multiple levels, that physical death could not sever it. More, spending time with his body was in some respects similar to a profound psychedelic experience. In this sense it was the same as in the hospital with my brother. Surreal, bizarre…indescribable.

Yet, unlike the grief I experienced after my brothers death, the obliteration of my ego, heart and sense of self had a different quality. I felt high, an extraordinary sense of clarity.

Although I was at times in terrible psychic pain, I was also incredibly ‘dispersed’.

It was as if my ‘life force’ or aura had become greatly enlarged…had diffused or stretched out many times further around my body/being than usual.

I was incredibly sensitive, especially to the psychic energy and thoughts/feelings of others, and of Cameron. ‘Wherever’ he was he couldn’t communicate with me, although I could sense ‘him’. He wasn’t really a ‘him’ anymore though, if that makes sense.

For a week I barely ate, for the first three days not at all, and I think the fasting contributed to the altered state.

I experienced many strange things before and after I left the house Cameron and I lived in, too many to list here…one that stands out was when a close friend and another person who had never met, ‘saw’ Cameron in a ‘place’ of purifying fire.

This close friend actually tsmoked some spice and went looking for Cameron to see if he was OK…he had taken alot of high dose spice…but he was not prepared for what he saw on this occasion.

He came to me, absolutely beside himself with terror, regret and grief…he had found Cameron, and it is conceivable he may have even interfered with whatever was going on ‘in there’. I really don’t know. But that was his experience.

And, again, flower essences were given to me in abundance.

Living up North, bottles of flower essences and other similar products were always around the share house I lived in…it’s a big part of the culture up there. But I knew, from experience, they didn’t work for me…so I didn’t give them much thought.

Anyway, as I have already mentioned, I was in an extremely sensitive state, and at 21 I was still not a skeptic (9 years ago on the 14th of this month).

What I can say, with heartfelt sincerity, is that they had no discernible effect on me. Perhaps it could be argued that I was grieving and in shock, that I wouldn’t have felt a sledgehammer in the face…but I found other remedies to be extremely effective, from herbal tea, to massage, reiki, essential oils, osteopathy, TCM and fruit and vegetable juices tailored specifically for my needs.

There was one thing I did get out of the essences, and it was knowing that they had been given to me with much love. Just looking at the bottles reminded me how much my friends loved and cared about me, but I’m afraid what was inside them had no discernable effect on me.

And that is my experience. And hopefully some insight into to why I see things the way that I do. That my beliefs are founded not solely on what I’ve read in books or dreamt up in my head, but also in my lived experience.

Interestingly, is wasn’t till I was 23 that I began my tertiary education. At university, as many students will know, you don’t often get to choose what you read…and are thus exposed to ideas one may otherwise have never known or taken into consideration.

As my education progressed, especially after I ‘defected’ from the faculty of science and moved to Arts and ‘Social Sciences’, I found increasingly that the ideas, approaches, philosophies and accounts of other peoples lived experiences would often, sometimes in a most uncanny fashion, confirm what I had already suspected based on personal experience.

Just like the fireman in Alaska…he had these experiences, these ideas...and then wrote this book, and no doubt he also read some stuff whilst writing this book and thought ‘Wow…there are other people out there who also have sensed this, what a beautiful confirmation of my lived experience!’.

While we’re on flower essences, you are right, I havn’t read/researched the literature in this field. Perhaps if I did then I would understand and then they would work for me….but then this would just confirm my suspicion that knowledge/belief underpins experience, instead of experience underpinning what one comes to believe and regard as true…or at least more true than other ‘truths’.

Anyhoo, with regards to experience based beliefs, there were some beliefs and their attendant experiences that I could have conceivably reinforced by staying within the genre with which I was both familiar, confident and comfortable…but in being forced out of my comfort zone by new ideas as expressed by many great thinkers and their reported experiences, I began to reassess my stubborn attachment to some ways of knowing and being.

It is an infinite process, for me.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t get bogged down or favour certain beliefs that are most meaningful and effective for me at a given point, or in certain systems to construct and deconstruct reality.

And I do often favour the latter…the mental plane. In part this is a result of my maladjustment to family dynamics and the effect of various events in my life…from another perspective it is because I have become accustomed to the conventions of academic/scholarly argument and debate, within which one must try to stay objective, minimize personal bias, and only in some very ‘post modern’ fields, insert the self and ones experiences into an argument.

You may see this as, or denigrate this, as fallacious, and see my perspective as ‘aesthetic snobbery’…but from where I stand you are doing the exactly same thing to what you call the ‘mental plane’. Making an arbitrary and sweeping generalisation about something, and here I am referring to academia and its various disciplines, that you are not very experienced or versed in. Mirror mirror indeed.

I see it as one of many ways to be, to see and experience the world.

In principle, I see all aspects of reality as constructible and deconstructible, and everyone may participate in these processes if they so desire.

It really comes down to personal preference, personal experience, personal beliefs.

Anyway, perhaps the earlier biographical and more experiential account I have presented here has gone some way to explain my reasons for my dismissing flower essences, and getting so full on…you accused me of exaggerating or lying, of not having experience…but my experience with flower essences is intimately connected with some of the definitive moments of my life.

I am still coming to terms with the losses, and the ground I have fought hard to reclaim can be raw and hypersensitive. I can be like a dog with rabies if I think you’re stomping on my freshly sown garden beds.

But I am speaking my truth when I say to you that from my childhood, to my twenties I have directly, and frequently, experienced flower essences, and they have no discernible effect on me.

But Reiki does…so there you go….it aint just my apparent skepticism of ‘vibrational medicine’…and essences are still in my life today, indeed one of my dearest friends spends a small fortune on them, and she has no idea I think she’s wasting her money.

Perhaps I seem narrow minded, or blinkered, by not believing in a lot of the things that you and many other people do, including articles published in Nexus magazine and sunken cities off Japan…but there remains a part of me that would like to believe. But maybe not for the reasons you’re thinking.

I would also like to believe that one day I will see my brother and my lover again, that they are out there somewhere waiting for me, or that i can communicate with them. It is a very human yearning.

I miss them so much sometimes, but I know that chasing their memory as if they were still Camerons is not going to help me. What will help me is letting go, and accepting that all things change, that nothing is forever…surrendering to the vastness and infinite mystery of the universe.

For a similar (but not same) kind of reason(s) I do not believe in some other things, because deep in my being I can sense that just because I want to believe in something, just because the idea of it is cool, or appeals to my penchant for fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural or whatever, doesn’t mean it will necessarily help me to grow and change. In fact it may even become an obstacle.

You may think this sad, that I’m like some beaten down kid that’s stopped believing in fairies, and hence no longer sees them.

On the contrary, many of the ideas and experiences that used to seem novel and peculiar to me have become familiar and relatively uninteresting…they are not new to me anymore…they used to hold wonder, but have lost it through years of being believed in and experienced.

Like a treasured toy (and I don’t mean to deprecate), or a well-loved and worn teddy bear…I still love them, they just don’t thrill me the way they did the first time I ‘opened the box’.

So I seek what is novelty to me…and I see magic everywhere I go, and experience wonder and weirdness in things other people may overlook or dismiss as 2-dimensional or boring.

But I also believe the universe is holographic…any piece can reveal the beauty and majesty of all creation if experienced/perceived from the right angle.

Put another way, I have my preferences for ‘wow factor’ ideas, theories and experiences (including my current outlook/world view/position that experience is informed by, and in some mysterious way created by belief/intention…lets not get into the semantics of ‘position’ again though), and you have your preferences.

Although I think we both agree on psychedelics.

Its just that from our respective positions it is hard to see how the other can see and experience magic in their preferred rendition of reality. And we may get frustrated, upset, or irritated when the foundations or features of our world and our experiences are challenged as being illusions or delusions, or misinterpretations, or naïve, or whatever.

We are both familiar with the idea of not really believing anything…and it’s a principle I wholeheartedly embrace, but for all intents and purposes, in day to day life, its just not the way humans feel and live their lives. Everyone believes something, and maybe some beliefs and experiences are better than others, but we should be careful not to collapse ourselves into believing that our experiences definitively represent the way things really are. We cannot know this, we cannot vouch for other people…we are all unique expressions of the universe, and we all experience, participate and contribute to it in a unique way.

Ideally, I feel we need to respect each other, I need to respect you and your views no matter how silly they are in comparison to mine, and you need to respect mine no matter how silly they are in comparison to yours.

I’ll stop trying to persuade you of the sillyness of what you may or may not believe, if you stop trying to persuade me of the sillyness of what I may or may not believe (again, can we please forgo the semantics of 'believe' and 'disbelieve'…I think you understand what I am trying to say).

But, as I said, I think we agree on psychedelics (did i in fact say that?).

And I’ll only say a few words here (oh god…when will this end!!!). As many people are aware, the sheer intensity and ‘absoluteness’ of high does psychedelics leaves one with no doubt that this is unmediated, pure, immediate, unadulterated, 'in the moment' experience.

At least as far as we experience and know it.

That is, perhaps there are parts of our being that remain ‘subjective’ or, erm, ‘unique’ to us, even after our conscious, thinking, intellectual mind and ego have been 'annihilated' or subverted.

Could it be that, even in the face of ‘pure experience’, absolute and utter surrender, that there remains, unrecognized and unexperienced, some vestige of our ‘subjective selves’ that continues to filter even the most extreme, absolute and ultimate experiences….that perhaps there as aspects of our beings so totally removed from ‘base-line’…or even from the heights of transcendental states, that we are unaware of ?

I think it is a mistake to assume all the 'cobwebs' have been well and truly removed or transformed….although we may experience not only pushing, but transcending, all the limits…even the strongest gale, the most violent and all pervasive ‘hurricane’ or vortex may leave intact a few ‘cobwebs’ in 'corners' and ‘crawl spaces’ we have not as yet discovered and explored.

Well, maybe a few more words:

I’m reminded of when Terrence McKenna sees a stereotypical flying saucer whilst at La Chorrerra….in the book he seems to favour a Jungian view of what this experience, the saucer itself, meant and was…which is not to say the answer to the question is whether or not the saucer was ‘real’.

Its a lot weirder than that…and I would say the same thing about alien abductees ala Whitley Striber….it isn’t as simple as there are either aliens with a fetish for anal probing and reproductive experimentation cruising round the galaxy, or there isn’t…or that its all an hallucinatory delusion….or that the aliens are merely an allegory, a modern manifestation of the transformative matrix of the Other filtered through minds and souls predisposed to technological, surgical and science-fiction style understandings.

It is all and none of these things…and a lot more besides…I really don’t know…but its interesting to ponder…and I don’t 100% rule out or dismiss any of these ideas, although I do of course have my preferences.

Lastly, I might as well get it off my chest, there is one more experience I’d like to share with you.

Eight months after Cameron, my lover died, I smoked some spice with a dear friend.

Although I hadn’t intended to, whilst in there I found myself ‘calling’ his name…then some beings were there, and they were observing me doing this. And they ‘said’… “ ‘He’ is here, but he is too shy to show himself”….then they kind of just ‘stood’ there, looking at me, ‘talking’ amongst themselves….and then they motioned with their ‘arms’ for me to take heed of what was happening inside this large pink door…I then just started to see the physical room again, and realised it was my friend they were motioning to…she was panicking and needed some comfort. Then, as the ‘other’ ‘room’ began to fade, a small brownish ‘larval’ being reached out an ‘arm’ as the ‘portal’ began to close and touched me… ‘I am here.’

It was an experience of great magnitude for me…but to this day I do not know if the being that touched me was some vestige of the being that was once Cameron. Was it wish fulfillment? Did I just see and experience what I wanted to…that he was OK…so that I could move on? I don’t know, and remain undecided.

I sat with this for many years, and I didn’t talk about it. It kind of haunted me…and for awhile after leaving Byron I didn’t have many people around me that would have understood or taken me seriously (a number of my older friends regard me as having lost the plot…I.e. I’m a crazy tripper)…anyway, for years I had wanted to share this story and find out if I was the only one who’d had an experience like this.

Then, one day at uni when I was feeling particularly alone, I found the Ethnobotany Australia forums…I lurked for awhile before joining up, and decided to take the chance and make my first post about this experience that was so special to me to people I assumed would be sympathetic and understanding.

Yours was the first reply, and I found the tone disrespectful and flippant. It hurt me, and I was saddened that someone would make light of something that was so very serious and sensitive to me.

So I’ve been harbouring a grudge ever since….

Anyways…I’ve waffled on for long, long, long enough…who knows if anyone will even read it all, it s a big ask…who is this crazy chick and why is she writing all this shit anyway?

I dunno, and I do…but if we could be friends Julian that would be nice…even if we might get up eachothers noses.

[n00dle]

So if melatonin needs a script, is it illegal to import pure melatonin/"proper" melatonin tablets/capsules without a script?

[folias]

Penny,

I read all of this in a kinda nice icecream shop/internet place in ballina!

it was the most sincere, bestest forum post I've ever read!

Will reply when I am far from prawn country... and can give some time to replying!

Julian.

[Thelema]

Ive come to realize that my baby and the mirror analogy was a bit confusing. I guess all analogies are in some sense vague and point a direction. Some people struggle hard to treat analogies ungratuitously and force them into a direction that was unintended; some analogies are weaker than others in allowing this to occur.

The baby looking at its reflection and thinking it was other, was meant to characterize the "objectifying" state of "meeting" an "entity".

The baby coming to realize that the reflection was itself was meant to indicate a merging of "subject and object" and in the course of having to communicate that, I was forced to use language incapable. So it ended up looking like I was advocating a "narcissistic" theory, as Folias labeled it, where everything is ego.

I was using "reflection" analogous to the rest of the total perceptual field, and in such a circumstance, as atman becomes brahman, both atman and brahman are void. It is not a case of "atman-ism."

ironically, once this analogy of mine as i intended it is fleshed out, it seems that the only "narcissistic" theory derivable from the subject and its analogy is folias' own theory.

LOL double irony at work

[folias]

Penny,

Good on you for really going the distance with this one and revealing your personal life in this manner…I would say not enough people are prepared to do this in the spirit of communication!

I’ll pretty much stick to the main points you have brought up here regarding what we have been talking to each other about…. As there is so much one could possibly reply to! (surely major parts of your life story!)

Regarding, flower essences….personally, I can say that I have been given bach flower remedies by various people close to me… mostly from older men… beginning when I was 18… I never noticed a major effect from them…or really felt anything happening at all with them… the people who gave them to me said they could see changes… but then, these were often times of change (which came first?)

And something else, I though of at the time, is that people take all kinds of vitamins and supplements and herbs…and how many people can really notice or tell that a change is occurring or that they are “working”!

Then I encountered the bush flowers in 1998, and I could feel them and how they worked immediately… then over a few years, I took flower essences many times (often a different blend every week!) from many different makers and made flower essences and have been friends with people who have been making flower essences for many, many years!

Now, this is the interesting part, even though I could feel the flower essences working on me, and would communicate with the devas of the flower, and they would give me very precise and intricate information about the flower essence – should be used, I still myself didn’t totally BELIEVE they worked!

There was a part of me which couldn’t/wouldn’t believe/compute this… it took quite some time, before I in, some sense, just gave up this idea of believing and not believing… in very simple terms, the clincher in the physical plane (and I’m not dismissing that!) was experiencing the effects of the flowers I made on myself and on other people, the internal and external evidence was overwhelming, and it was not just one case of conclusion, it was dozens of experiences and observations until it was simply a matter of practical and evident observation of many faceted effaciousnes rather than belief or disbelief.

That was over years of research, I’ve read most books you can find on flower essences, I even considered doing courses overseas to see what else I could learn… and making this my lifes work.

It still really surprises me how powerful these vibrational essences are, and so when someone dismisses the effaciousness of flower essences based upon their own theories or presumptions, its simple, I consider that they really don’t know what they are talking about because it is usually ONLY mental theory, ideas and doubt and disbelief all posit the expressions of a closed mind.

And I know this is not the case with you… and I am glad you have explained more of how you came to believe in how you understand flower essences, but, it does seem you were not operating in ideal, clear, objective conditions in order to really come to a conclusion about the effaciousness of flower essences for EVERYONE! And then it did seem to me you had an emotional charge about this issue, and I am glad you have cleared up why this may have been the case!

I had a similar story with entities as I had with flower essences, I met hundreds and hundreds of entities over about three years… yet there was still a disbelieving part of me there, which questioned and wondered what was going on here, question if it was in fact exactly as it said it was and stated how it was, or something else....if how I interpreted them actually was accurate as I was interpreting them.

No matter how real, how stark these beings were (sometimes more real than most humans!), even when they came into my body and began speaking through me… there was a part of me which could not “believe”

I think it was the night one interdimensional amorphous being, in equisite details, actually came to my stomache and touched and played with my present energy configuration in a way nothing else ever had, and I could feel them and see them in the same way I would see any human being.

And at that point, the weight of unbelieving particles, just threw out the whole mental apparatus as actually being able to interpret and experience these beings… from then on in, I have experienced them and communicated to them at a totally different level of apprehension – which is the type of apprehension and communication they come to me with.

For people who don’t believe in entities, I can understand, because like I said, it would have taken me the visitation of a few hundred or so until I TOTALLY ceased to question mentally in the ordinary sense. And I know what it takes until that whole mechanism is no longer needed… (some may see this view as being arrogant, but for me, it is sincerely how I see it!)

And perhaps a very, very slim percentage of human beings living on this planet would have any idea of the possibility of the existence of such beings, let alone actually experience them!

Flower essences are not that common around the world either!

Now, the thing about the essences from flower, is that they are not innately necessarily designed to “fix” problems or states that we as human beings have, that is perhaps a human demand or want for them…

AND, even if they are, the whole system of flower essences companies only having a limited range of essences which are supposed to treat any human being is actually a little bit erroneous!

Ideally, one has the choice of thousands of essences to choose from all over the world, to choose the exact one and combination of flowers that can assist and help in any given situation! (I used to order essences from overseas sometimes!)

BUT, I find, it is not in the realm of assistance or “help” or alleviating problems, that flower essences are actually the most useful. It is in the spirit of wanting to communicate and commune with the consciousness of the plant and learn from that plant, and enter into a communion and understanding… there are benefits and gifts in this communication and resonance… and in some sense, we must choose to enter into this consciously as an evolutionary act… so that is my approach to flower essences. It is in that light, in which I find that they work and are beneficial for human beings… of this I have no doubt whatsoever.

Over the past few weeks I have been reading a lot of your posts at SAB, EBA and other forums, (along with many other peoples posts in preparation for my research), and a defining characteristic of many of them is a flagrant disregard for, or jocular dismissal of, other peoples beliefs, or religion, and for anything that is seen to fall within the category disparagingly referred to as ‘culture’.

Well, from my perspective, it is more a critical appraisal of the way the human mechanism is used… that’s right, I don’t feel that the natural and integrated way of human beings lies in culture, religions, belief systems, thoughts, theories…anything that addresses us back to the some form of mentality, as a referential guidance system.

This kind of approach is not new, by any means, but it is rare… and there is teeth there… and it is unapologetic!

However, that said, I’m disappointed that you don’t seem able to yield and admit to being as full of (metaphorical) shit and brokenness as the rest of us.

Its not really the way of common debate is it?

You’ll find my web site is rather raw… actually I am more likely to admit my “brokenness” than most! (and whatever the antithesis of that is!)

http://www.conone.org/conscripta.html

Some people think I AM full of shit! ("dood!, your whole schtick is based upon a mad homeless baglady you were stalking!)

And that's deliberate on a few levels perhaps!

Many people, including yourself, say they don’t really believe anything, but its clear that you do, even if its for a moment, or an hour or a micro second. We all do.

I see that as more of a ‘faithfulnes’ that form of belief…

I think we would both benefit from being more humble, showing more humility, and allowing ourselves to see the arrogant and narcissistic aspects of our personalities that others experience as harsh, rude, supercilious and disrespectful. I know people see it in me, and I’m getting better at seeing it in myself…and, with due respect, it takes one to know one.

I can see and sense it in you, but I also sense you are unwilling to own it, or are perhaps not particularly conscious of it in your day to day life. Or perhaps you are, and simply don’t care about other peoples feelings and sensibilities? I don’t think that is the case.

I don’t believe in “showing” more humility, or being more “humble”… as these are active statements of being, which are supposed to be the opposite of what you are talking with.

I think you are judging negatively here, and then providing what society believes to be more positive traits… when is this self acceptance?

If one is working with one’s ego, I think acceptance works best, and then gentle tempering!

I think it comes down to not being harsh… ultimately, and being more gentle! I’m into learning to be more gentle…

So I extend my hand in friendship, and humbly apologise for being such a hard arsed cow. But you still bug me

I’m glad you find me provocative!

And I do often favour the latter…the mental plane. In part this is a result of my maladjustment to family dynamics and the effect of various events in my life…from another perspective it is because I have become accustomed to the conventions of academic/scholarly argument and debate, within which one must try to stay objective, minimize personal bias, and only in some very ‘post modern’ fields, insert the self and ones experiences into an argument.

And, Penny, I think really, I was just pointing out that actually, although you were positing something a scholory/academic approach, here, I felt your dismissal of flower essences was emotional… and non-objective.

You may see this as, or denigrate this, as fallacious, and see my perspective as ‘aesthetic snobbery’…but from where I stand you are doing the exactly same thing to what you call the ‘mental plane’. Making an arbitrary and sweeping generalisation about something, and here I am referring to academia and its various disciplines, that you are not very experienced or versed in.

Sure, academia works for what it is!

But I am not saying it doesn’t work at all!

Julian.

[MORG]

Well, looks like we have a nominee for SAB post of the year!

I feel simultaneously unentitled but obliged to comment after reading your very open and personal post.

Thanks for sharing your experiences Penny. I think you've earned alot of respect with that display of courage, honesty and literary flair.

"...letting go, and accepting that all things change, that nothing is forever…surrendering to the vastness and infinite mystery of the universe"

I love it.

(Edited to add 2nd line)

Edited April 10, 2006 by MORG

[cisumevil]

"SS stated they were pretorius, which is the company that makes the homeopathic melatonin in australia.

Bottom line is that all australian melatonin supplements have to be homeopathic or prescriptive."

Hey Everyone

Can someone please clear this up for me. I have been trying to get some "Higher" dose Melatonin & have the backing of my Dr. My Dr says she has no problems writting me a prescription but the problem seems to be that you can NOT get this product in Australia because no company has succesfully "Registered" this product with the "Therapeutic Goods Administration", Is this True?

Can it be ordered over the net legally?

Will I get into trouble if I import Melatonin?

Can you get a prescription filled in Australia as all Chemists have told me it can not be obtained!

Sorry if I have asked Questions already answered but I have done a fair bit of reading on this subject and find many contradictions.

Thanks for any help

[faustus]

My Dr says she has no problems writting me a prescription but the problem seems to be that you can NOT get this product in Australia because no company has succesfully "Registered" this product with the "Therapeutic Goods Administration", Is this True?

this is thoroughly confusing! my doctor said he couldn't write me a script... but there is this strange chemist in sydney that can do it. they have their own pill press and said they could make me the high-strength melatonin, but that i'd need a script for it. it was too much effort so i got my supply of melatonin from ebay, within australia. my understanding is that you can use non-approved drugs in australia, so long as they're not also controlled? i import cognitive enhancers like piracetam all the time, and these aren't registered with the TGA either.

[Torsten]

Any medication that is prescriptive can be imported legally as long as you have a script that states the exact dosage form and number of dosages (ie, if your script says 3mg per day for 3 months then you can't import 45 6mg tablets). So, find the product first and then take the product form to your GP to get a script that matches the product. The good thing about this is that customs only checks about every 3 small parcel. So you may well import one or more boxes before they intercept one. When you get the intercept notice you simply fax them the script and they release the item. You can then not use that scrip again (if the import quantity was equal to the script quantity).

All "compounding chemists" are allowed to sell Melatonin on prescription. Richard Stenlake in Bondi Juntion is such a chemist and he does sell it. Problem I've had is that his melatonin is barely perceivable in effect when compared to the 3mg tabs I get from overseas. I'd be surprised if his pills contain even a single mg each. I spent nearly $1000 with Stenlake when I stockd up for 4 people at the time it was being scheduled (years ago). I dumped at least 80% of this after finding it to be of unacceptably low quality. I don't trust him.

I used to always get mine from qhi.co.uk

[cisumevil]

Wonderful guys thanks so much for clearing that up for me

[oxydiser]

I worked tonight and thought you guys might want to know that the pharmacy I work at sells melatonin 3mg, I think the brand was thorne, and I think 30 caps were going for ~$60 but I can't remember (study has fried my brain). I checked the label, and this is bona-fide proper non-homeopathic product.

It lives in a strange section of the pharmacy with the other 'practitioner only' products... things that are usually exclusively supplied through complementary healthcare practitioners. The naturopath next door is also owned by the same fat-cat owner as the pharmacy along with the pharmacy 50m up the road and I think he just wants to make more $ through the inflated price of everything we sell.

People come in from the naturopath with a product scribbled on any old piece of paper, and repeat customers just ask for product by name.