Stephen Biro's Blog - Posts Tagged "stephen-biro-hellucination"
Here's the introduction from David Jay Brown for Hellucination...
I like it!
Introduction to Hellucination
By David Jay Brown
One of the first discoveries that the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project made in 1962 was how important “set and setting” is when conducting a psychedelic session. Coined by Timothy Leary, the terms “set and setting” refer to the psychological mind set and the physical environment that one is in during a psychedelic experience, which can greatly influence what happens.
Decades of psychedelic drug experimentation suggest that one should be encouraged to take these powerful substances in a safe, comfortable, aesthetically-pleasing and peaceful environment that supports a spiritually-transformative experience. Otherwise, the experience can be more than a bit unpleasant, and under the wrong circumstances, it can become truly hellish.
However, despite this understanding, when Timothy Leary, Richard Albert, and Ralph Metzner wrote The Psychedelic Experience--and adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead--as a guide book for LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin experiences, they neglected to realize that writing descriptions that were meant to be read aloud while tripping, which included phrases about the possibility of one becoming trapped in post-death realms, where “hungry ghosts,” “wrathful deities,” and “blood-drinking, flesh-eating demons” roamed, may not have been the best of ideas.
Many people have, unfortunately, reported that reading these descriptions aloud while tripping created precisely what they were meant to dispel. By invoking the dark imagery while one was in such a sensitive and vulnerable state of consciousness, these images can spring to life. This understanding is extremely important to remember, because in addition to heightening the senses, dissolving psychological boundaries, and enhancing brain processes, LSD directly effects the architecture of one’s belief system about the nature of reality. LSD is the most powerful tool ever invented for changing what we believe to be real, and this is why it is both cherished and feared by so many people.
An understanding of how one’s set and setting can influence psychedelic mind states may be helpful in understanding this extraordinary book. In your hands is an utterly fascinating story about someone who bravely explored the darkest, most extremely hellish aspects of the human psyche on a quest for God, and returned to share his mind-bending story.
Hellucination takes the form of a page-turning memoir, combining personal trip reporting with science fiction, horror movie, and religious mythologies, philosophical speculation on the nature of the author’s experiments with psychedelic drug combinations, strange encounters with other people who may not be what they seem, and the rationale behind his spiritual conversion from atheism to Christianity.
Underground film distributor and rare comic book dealer Stephen Biro’s journey through the darkest depths of his personal and collective underworld is every bit as frightening, disturbing, and enlightening as any of the creepy creations in his vast DVD and comic book collections. A connoisseur of the weird, the bizarre, the sensational, and the horrific, Biro filled his stores, his online inventories, his home, and his brain with the most profoundly gruesome imagery imaginable--“Cult, Gore, Anime, Kung Fu flicks for the Criminally Insane!”
Then Biro experimented with powerful, synergistic combinations of LSD, nitrous oxide balloons, and cannabis, while watching scary movies, with dazzling special effects, on a quest for God. He watched Rob Zombie videos, The Matrix, Fight Club, and other violent and disturbing films on his entertainment center while tripping. Not surprisingly, he had a series of hellish experiences, which he describes in great detail. The vivid and graphic visual descriptions in this book leave little to the imagination, and reading Biro’s memoir can seem like stepping inside one of H.R. Giger’s macabre visionary paintings at times.
Psychiatric researcher Stanislav Grof’s work with LSD demonstrated that the drug is basically a “nonspecific brain-amplifier.” So when Biro decided to experiment with LSD and other psychedelics he amplified the intensity of all this dark imagery and brought it to life.
Some of Biro’s extraordinary book Hellucination reminded me of my own attempts in Brainchild and Virus--the two semi-autobiographical science fiction novels that I’ve written--to describe psychedelic shamanic journeys that carried me from the underworld to the stars. I think that this journey from Hell to Heaven is an archetypal adventure, one that all human beings pass through when they take the path of psychedelic shamanism, and I also suspect that we are progressing through a similar pattern as a species.
Like Biro, I’ve also personally experimented with psychedelic drugs quite a bit, and on some of my journeys, have had similar experiences to those that he describes in this book. However, while the conclusions that I drew from my own experiences were different, the archetypal dynamics and many of the motifs are similar, and they clearly resonate with the story line in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Religious or spiritual experiences are certainly not uncommon on psychedelics. Research by psychiatrist Oscar Janiger showed that people tend to have spiritual experiences on LSD around 24% of the time in a non-religious setting, that is, even when no spiritual or religious stimulus is present. When religious or spiritual stimuli are present, then the percentage can be much higher. Recent research at John Hopkins University in 2006 has demonstrated that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can produce religious or mystical experiences in 61% of its participants, that are in every way indistinguishable from those reported by mystics and religious figures throughout the ages.
However, although these studies shed some light on this unusual book, Biro never seemed to have a classic mystical experience on his psychedelic journeys.
In this mind-blowing book, Biro experiences a progressive series of unbelievably bizarre personal hells, created, it appears, by filling his brain to the brim with dark and violent imagery while tripping--and this eventually propels him to break through into states of consciousness where he appears to meet and speak with “God.” While encountering the presence of “God,” or a higher spiritual intelligence, is not uncommon on high doses of psychedelics, Biro’s experiences stand out as truly unique among the reports that I’ve heard--like, for example, when he and the “real” “God” team up in hyperspace to violently kill and destroy the Western cultural “image” of “God.”
If this weren’t strange enough, as we progress further into Biro’s adventure, we learn that all of his encounters with “God” on psychedelics were really encounters with the Devil in disguise, or so Biro comes to believe.
Much of the book describes how the voices of “God” and “the Devil”--in the author’s own head, and coming through other people in various guises--are trying to win over his soul, and prevent him from succeeding in his spiritual quest. For Biro, his experiences became clear and convincing evidence for a divinely-inspired belief system that corresponds with the Judeo-Christian Bible. Although I’ve had many profound spiritual experiences on psychedelics, I wasn’t able to make this leap, and I still find myself surrounded by a universe of unfathomable mystery. Nonetheless, I absolutely loved Hellucination, and feel a resonance with its core message.
I completely loved the way that Biro weaves his personal experience with the story lines from cool horror and science fiction films, and how vivid descriptions of his hellish acid trips become so extreme, so intense and over-the-top, that I would simultaneously squirm with fear and and giggle with delight.
This can be a truly frightening book, and it is most definitely not for the faint-hearted. Hellucination ia so frightening in certain sequences, because when you read it, you have no doubt that it is honest and authentic reporting. The nightmarish hells that Biro experienced would scare the living daylights out of Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King--and Biro’s mind-blowing story really happened!
But Hellucination can also be a pretty funny book at times, as Biro never loses his sense of humor, and sometimes his vividly-described hells can just become so damned horrible that they eventually become comical. For this reason, and because of the spiritual fruits that the author achieved, I actually found the book to be uplifting, as the hellish sequences often appeared to be grotesque parodies of my own life, and society at large, offering us fruitful opportunities for profound insight and thoughtful reflection.
--David Jay Brown
Author of "Mavericks of the Mind" and "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse"
Introduction to Hellucination
By David Jay Brown
One of the first discoveries that the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project made in 1962 was how important “set and setting” is when conducting a psychedelic session. Coined by Timothy Leary, the terms “set and setting” refer to the psychological mind set and the physical environment that one is in during a psychedelic experience, which can greatly influence what happens.
Decades of psychedelic drug experimentation suggest that one should be encouraged to take these powerful substances in a safe, comfortable, aesthetically-pleasing and peaceful environment that supports a spiritually-transformative experience. Otherwise, the experience can be more than a bit unpleasant, and under the wrong circumstances, it can become truly hellish.
However, despite this understanding, when Timothy Leary, Richard Albert, and Ralph Metzner wrote The Psychedelic Experience--and adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead--as a guide book for LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin experiences, they neglected to realize that writing descriptions that were meant to be read aloud while tripping, which included phrases about the possibility of one becoming trapped in post-death realms, where “hungry ghosts,” “wrathful deities,” and “blood-drinking, flesh-eating demons” roamed, may not have been the best of ideas.
Many people have, unfortunately, reported that reading these descriptions aloud while tripping created precisely what they were meant to dispel. By invoking the dark imagery while one was in such a sensitive and vulnerable state of consciousness, these images can spring to life. This understanding is extremely important to remember, because in addition to heightening the senses, dissolving psychological boundaries, and enhancing brain processes, LSD directly effects the architecture of one’s belief system about the nature of reality. LSD is the most powerful tool ever invented for changing what we believe to be real, and this is why it is both cherished and feared by so many people.
An understanding of how one’s set and setting can influence psychedelic mind states may be helpful in understanding this extraordinary book. In your hands is an utterly fascinating story about someone who bravely explored the darkest, most extremely hellish aspects of the human psyche on a quest for God, and returned to share his mind-bending story.
Hellucination takes the form of a page-turning memoir, combining personal trip reporting with science fiction, horror movie, and religious mythologies, philosophical speculation on the nature of the author’s experiments with psychedelic drug combinations, strange encounters with other people who may not be what they seem, and the rationale behind his spiritual conversion from atheism to Christianity.
Underground film distributor and rare comic book dealer Stephen Biro’s journey through the darkest depths of his personal and collective underworld is every bit as frightening, disturbing, and enlightening as any of the creepy creations in his vast DVD and comic book collections. A connoisseur of the weird, the bizarre, the sensational, and the horrific, Biro filled his stores, his online inventories, his home, and his brain with the most profoundly gruesome imagery imaginable--“Cult, Gore, Anime, Kung Fu flicks for the Criminally Insane!”
Then Biro experimented with powerful, synergistic combinations of LSD, nitrous oxide balloons, and cannabis, while watching scary movies, with dazzling special effects, on a quest for God. He watched Rob Zombie videos, The Matrix, Fight Club, and other violent and disturbing films on his entertainment center while tripping. Not surprisingly, he had a series of hellish experiences, which he describes in great detail. The vivid and graphic visual descriptions in this book leave little to the imagination, and reading Biro’s memoir can seem like stepping inside one of H.R. Giger’s macabre visionary paintings at times.
Psychiatric researcher Stanislav Grof’s work with LSD demonstrated that the drug is basically a “nonspecific brain-amplifier.” So when Biro decided to experiment with LSD and other psychedelics he amplified the intensity of all this dark imagery and brought it to life.
Some of Biro’s extraordinary book Hellucination reminded me of my own attempts in Brainchild and Virus--the two semi-autobiographical science fiction novels that I’ve written--to describe psychedelic shamanic journeys that carried me from the underworld to the stars. I think that this journey from Hell to Heaven is an archetypal adventure, one that all human beings pass through when they take the path of psychedelic shamanism, and I also suspect that we are progressing through a similar pattern as a species.
Like Biro, I’ve also personally experimented with psychedelic drugs quite a bit, and on some of my journeys, have had similar experiences to those that he describes in this book. However, while the conclusions that I drew from my own experiences were different, the archetypal dynamics and many of the motifs are similar, and they clearly resonate with the story line in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Religious or spiritual experiences are certainly not uncommon on psychedelics. Research by psychiatrist Oscar Janiger showed that people tend to have spiritual experiences on LSD around 24% of the time in a non-religious setting, that is, even when no spiritual or religious stimulus is present. When religious or spiritual stimuli are present, then the percentage can be much higher. Recent research at John Hopkins University in 2006 has demonstrated that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can produce religious or mystical experiences in 61% of its participants, that are in every way indistinguishable from those reported by mystics and religious figures throughout the ages.
However, although these studies shed some light on this unusual book, Biro never seemed to have a classic mystical experience on his psychedelic journeys.
In this mind-blowing book, Biro experiences a progressive series of unbelievably bizarre personal hells, created, it appears, by filling his brain to the brim with dark and violent imagery while tripping--and this eventually propels him to break through into states of consciousness where he appears to meet and speak with “God.” While encountering the presence of “God,” or a higher spiritual intelligence, is not uncommon on high doses of psychedelics, Biro’s experiences stand out as truly unique among the reports that I’ve heard--like, for example, when he and the “real” “God” team up in hyperspace to violently kill and destroy the Western cultural “image” of “God.”
If this weren’t strange enough, as we progress further into Biro’s adventure, we learn that all of his encounters with “God” on psychedelics were really encounters with the Devil in disguise, or so Biro comes to believe.
Much of the book describes how the voices of “God” and “the Devil”--in the author’s own head, and coming through other people in various guises--are trying to win over his soul, and prevent him from succeeding in his spiritual quest. For Biro, his experiences became clear and convincing evidence for a divinely-inspired belief system that corresponds with the Judeo-Christian Bible. Although I’ve had many profound spiritual experiences on psychedelics, I wasn’t able to make this leap, and I still find myself surrounded by a universe of unfathomable mystery. Nonetheless, I absolutely loved Hellucination, and feel a resonance with its core message.
I completely loved the way that Biro weaves his personal experience with the story lines from cool horror and science fiction films, and how vivid descriptions of his hellish acid trips become so extreme, so intense and over-the-top, that I would simultaneously squirm with fear and and giggle with delight.
This can be a truly frightening book, and it is most definitely not for the faint-hearted. Hellucination ia so frightening in certain sequences, because when you read it, you have no doubt that it is honest and authentic reporting. The nightmarish hells that Biro experienced would scare the living daylights out of Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King--and Biro’s mind-blowing story really happened!
But Hellucination can also be a pretty funny book at times, as Biro never loses his sense of humor, and sometimes his vividly-described hells can just become so damned horrible that they eventually become comical. For this reason, and because of the spiritual fruits that the author achieved, I actually found the book to be uplifting, as the hellish sequences often appeared to be grotesque parodies of my own life, and society at large, offering us fruitful opportunities for profound insight and thoughtful reflection.
--David Jay Brown
Author of "Mavericks of the Mind" and "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse"
