New in-depth review from the Left Hand Path!
http://l3fthandpath.wordpress.com/201...
This one is really in-depth and highly detailed. Talked to the reviewer while he was writing it.
I copied and pasted it below bit click on the link to see the review, the way it was written.
Left-Hand Path
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
Hellucination by Stephen Biro
“I see God! I see God!” Thus were the cries heard from the basement of Marsh Chapel at Boston University on the morning of April 20th, 1962. The context was an event known as “The Good Friday Experiment,” an experiment in which 20 divinity students were each given a single gel capsule, 10 of which contained a placebo, and 10 of which contained 30mg of psilocybin, the active chemical in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Those who received psilocybin unanimously reported having undergone a profound mystical experience, and their descriptions of the experience after the fact were found to be indistinguishable from the religious experiences recorded by prophets in ancient sacred texts such as The Bible and Koran. While it may be considered unorthodox to use drugs for spiritual purposes, the Marsh Chapel Experiment lent scientific validity to the notion that they can induce experiences of this sort. Indeed it has been said that all paths ultimately lead to the same destination, and never was this more true than in the case of film distributor Stephen Biro, a man who was willing to go to Hell to find God, equipped with only the paper on his tongue and the balloon in his hand.
These are the forces some might read about but most dare not touch.
Stephen is best known as the owner and president of Unearthed Films, a film distribution company that specializes in extremely graphic exploitation films. Unearthed has released such titles as Philosophy of A Knife, Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, and the Guinea Pig series, the second installment of which received considerable media attention in the early 90s after actor Charlie Sheen reported it to the FBI thinking it was a genuine snuff film. It is precisely this unusual background that makes the story of Stephen’s religious awakening particularly compelling, and he fully recounts the journey in his recent memoir, Hellucination.
One of the most striking aspects of Hellucination is its experimental narrative. In essence, the story does follow a traditional three-act structure as Stephen first describes his childhood and adolescence, explaining the environmental factors that influenced his psychology as an adult, including how he initially became disillusioned with religion and his introduction to psychedelic drugs. He then jumps forward to a time in his young adulthood (presumably his late 20s/early 30s) in which he begins distributing underground movies from his apartment in Florida (a modest venture that would eventually grow into Unearthed Films) while simultaneously experiencing what could be described as an existential crisis. This stage of the journey opens boldly: after having inhaled several balloons full of the short-acting dissociative nitrous oxide during an LSD trip, Stephen witnesses Rob Zombie literally step out of his television while watching the video for the song “Superbeast,” setting the stage for him to embark on a quest to find the meaning of his existence. As he puts it, “There is something on the other side, and I just made first contact.” His soul-searching climaxes with a literal descent into Hell, during which the reader is presented with a truly impressive sequence of Biblically-inspired phantasmagoria.
All we can do is go with the flow, whether up or down, side to side, or Heaven or Hell. We are nothing but actual amoebas that are tossed and thrown away in our deaths. We have no say in the matters of the afterlife.
With that said, Hellucination differs strongly from other traditional narratives in its fractured chronology of events and the way in which Stephen crafts an interactive experience for the reader. For instance, the very first chapter opens with him being tormented by his personal demon and personal angel (or Id and Superego; it’s unclear to him at the time) who are battling for control of his mind in the middle 0f his living room. The entities disappear and grant Stephen a moment of relief which turns out to merely be the calm before the storm as shortly afterward alien spiders from an episode of Outer Limits that he is watching begin crawling out of his television by the hundreds and invading his apartment. Naturally, one is left wondering how his life got to this point and feels compelled to read on.
The book is interactive in the sense that Stephen not only addresses the reader directly but brings you in as part of the story, a risky literary experiment that could have easily failed but in this case is actually quite cool. There are frequent mediations in one of two locations: an ethereal white-tiled room in which anything that is thought of will materialize and The Library of The Ether, a shape-shifting library of assorted books that Stephen has read where logic and the laws of physics no longer apply. He reveals that the chaotic nature of The Library of the Ether is intended to prepare for the Hell journey. “I need to know you’re on top of your game,” he says.
The reader is also taken to Stephen’s old apartment by his present (or future) self so that you may bear witness to his younger self in the midst of his search for God, much of which consisted of watching films on his entertainment center while under the influence of LSD and nitrous oxide. At one point, you even knock over a stack of videotapes on the floor. These departures and asides further contribute to the fractured nature of the narrative.
I think there are many markers in the search for God. Devils, demons, angels and even the Lord himself put realities in the way to stop us from finding out all the truth.
It’s important that I touch upon the role of Christian theology in the book, as the mere presence of such is likely to deter potential readers. While the core message is decidedly Christian, this book will never see the light of day inside of a Christian bookstore given its abundance of drug use, sexuality, and some of the most gruesome violence that I have seen described in text. To describe Hellucination as a “Christian book” would be to overlook the breadth of the esoteric concepts it covers, which range from psychology to the occult.
When you open your mind to all possibilities and to the realms of ultimate reality and you go with it, you open a door that takes you places. Realize that you can not only control what you see in your mind, but you can change it to suit your own needs.
One particular aspect of Stephen’s worldview that would be considered heretical by traditional religious standards is his admiration of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whom we have discussed here before. I believe that his conception of Freud’s philosophy and its relation to the duality of God and Devil is deserving of further consideration:
The Id and the Superego are more scientific ways of considering the Devil and God, or personal angels and demons. Science has turned the relationship between God, the Devil, and you into a viewpoint for all to understand without the framework of religious belief to sidetrack the layperson into another whole realm of thinking.
The Id is directed into the most primitive, basic desires; lust, greed, envy, pride, sloth, wrath, gluttony, and even death. The Superego guides you towards chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, humility, and even life.
Freud was just trying to map the human mind but instead came across something inside many of us that hadn’t been documented before. I say “many of us” because some people don’t seem to have a conscience and have committed the world’s greatest horrors and atrocities. To commit murder, torture, rape, or genocide is pure Id and the Devil. Every aspect of every situation that is wrong comes from either of those two places.
Science and psychology were not looking to verify religious notions. But they did. They weren’t trying to verify the war between God and the Devil but again, they did. Freud was just trying to make us all better. He was trying to figure out the happening in our mind. He was charting previously unknown territory, and he found a bigger continent within us all that he never could have fathomed. If you think about it, it has made us better and will continue to do so.
Yes, he was wrong about a lot of things. He was doing coke and talking to himself a mile a minute. But look what he accomplished.
Numerology is also a recurring theme throughout Stephen’s life. He relates that it was not until his mother had suffered through 12 miscarriages that he was born, making him “Number 13,” a designation which he considers to be “a little ominous.” Later, after having experienced 2 different alternate lives (those of a British WWII fighter pilot and a Zulu tribesman), he refers to the number 7 as a “holy number,” acknowledging that Hindus have classically believed that a person can reincarnate up to 7 times. He then wonders if, having only experienced 3 different lives altogether, he only has 4 to go? This speculation is made all the more troubling when he remembers that Hindus also believe that one can be reincarnated as an insect.
During an out of body experience in which Stephen has taken the form of a high priest in the future, he imparts the following numerological theory to a crowd of thousands of followers:
Today is the day! It’s July fourteenth, two thousand and twenty-one! It’s seven, fourteen, twenty-one. Or how about twenty-one minus seven equals fourteen. Now, fourteen minus seven is seven. And take July, which is the seventh month, times it by the beginning number of the century and you get fourteen. Seven plus fourteen is twenty-one! Three sevens! You look at it: it’s divisible, it’s subtract-able, it’s added and it’s multiplied. Backwards or forwards, either way you look at it, seven is the holy number of the Lord, and three sevens is the ultimate number of God, while three sixes is the number of the beast.
In his introduction to Hellucination, David Jay Brown of the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies draws a parallel between the commonly-reported “bad trips” that have resulted from reading aloud the macabre descriptions of post-death realms in Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (a reinterpretation of The Tibeatan Book of the Dead) and the hellish experiences that Stephen underwent as a result of exposing himself to dark, violent films and music videos while tripping. We have previously discussed the relation between mirror neurons and motion pictures, concluding that the brain’s ability to mimic the neuronal state of observed entities extends to those that one observes on screen. This was clearly the case for Stephen as he watched the aforementioned films, this natural phenomenon being greatly intensified by massive doses of LSD, which psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has described as a “non-specific brain amplifier.”
I became a technological shaman. The earlier shamans were using the natural guide of magic mushrooms or pot to experience deep trances and help their tribes with new wisdoms. I was mixing the technology of our society with the chemistry of modern man to explore the recesses of my reality and my mind.
At this time, I believed I found the actual philosopher’s stone: the mix of N2O and LSD-25 in the human body, 400 to 800 micrograms of LSD and 12 to 16 Whip It cartridges filled in three to four punch balloons. This would give you five to seven minutes with the philosopher’s stone.
So I found that extreme amounts of both drugs brought about hidden wisdom and secret knowledge. From that point forward, I began my quest to find secrets men have never known. Or to come to grips with truths that have been discussed for ages but to actually experience them firsthand instead of reading them in a book.
The films and videos that Stephen watches also serve as a conduit through which mysterious entities and archetypal forces communicate with him, occasionally going as far as to step out of the television as I mentioned above. One specific entity that Stephen first interprets as God but later suspects of being a demon takes the form of Rob Zombie as well as Morpheus from The Matrix. However, these instances of physical embodiment are not limited to characters on the television. Stephen’s best friend Rhett is possessed by God, offering insights into his creation and ordering him to write the book. His drug dealer reveals himself to be his “muse,” saying “I’m here to help you gain a deeper insight into your reality, bro!,” while not long after, a socially-awkward customer identifies himself as an “antichrist” and takes Stephen out for a beer.
You are going through what most people on this planet would kill for. You’re coming across ideas and realities that some of the greatest men in history have experienced. So far, you have experienced what certain religions have based their complete teachings on.
Having said all of this, it is clear that the book would not have worked had the author not injected a great deal of his personality into the writing. Stephen presents himself as a learned spiritualist with a calm, light-hearted demeanor which seems to mask a mildly psychotic edge just beneath the surface. At one moment we see him using transhumanist technology to perpetrate a grisly act of genocide on a spiritually pure city during one of his out of body experiences, while at another he bestows selfless acts of kindness on a group of monks and a young boy who has run away from home, both of whom happen to stumble upon his video store. These seemingly contradictory natures add to the complexity of the character, but what stands out most of all is the sincerity and authenticity with which he approaches the admittedly fantastical subject matter. Whether or not your beliefs allow you to accept that the events Stephen describes happened in objective reality, there can be no doubt that he at least subjectively experienced the events that he recounts and believes in them wholeheartedly. Given what we know about the inherently subjective nature of perception, experiences of the type that Stephen describes could be argued to be far more “real” than anything that could be replicated in a lab. Phenomenology lies beyond the realm of empiricism, and such is the beauty of Hellucination. I can’t recommend the book highly enough.
Individuals willing to risk direct contact with their subconscious and unconscious will be called upon to provide us with a new and enduring narrative that inspires humankind with a sense of hope, leading the way to a vibrant spirituality divorced from the dusty tales of yore. We must all stop looking for others to supply answers to the world’s questions. We must instead heed the call of the unconscious to follow our dreams and seek the answers for ourselves.
You can purchase Hellucination at the Unearthed Films website or Amazon.
Disclaimer: One should never take any drug without being fully aware of the recommended dosage and potential side effects. Erowid is your friend in this regard. One of your besties, in fact.
This one is really in-depth and highly detailed. Talked to the reviewer while he was writing it.
I copied and pasted it below bit click on the link to see the review, the way it was written.
Left-Hand Path
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
Hellucination by Stephen Biro
“I see God! I see God!” Thus were the cries heard from the basement of Marsh Chapel at Boston University on the morning of April 20th, 1962. The context was an event known as “The Good Friday Experiment,” an experiment in which 20 divinity students were each given a single gel capsule, 10 of which contained a placebo, and 10 of which contained 30mg of psilocybin, the active chemical in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Those who received psilocybin unanimously reported having undergone a profound mystical experience, and their descriptions of the experience after the fact were found to be indistinguishable from the religious experiences recorded by prophets in ancient sacred texts such as The Bible and Koran. While it may be considered unorthodox to use drugs for spiritual purposes, the Marsh Chapel Experiment lent scientific validity to the notion that they can induce experiences of this sort. Indeed it has been said that all paths ultimately lead to the same destination, and never was this more true than in the case of film distributor Stephen Biro, a man who was willing to go to Hell to find God, equipped with only the paper on his tongue and the balloon in his hand.
These are the forces some might read about but most dare not touch.
Stephen is best known as the owner and president of Unearthed Films, a film distribution company that specializes in extremely graphic exploitation films. Unearthed has released such titles as Philosophy of A Knife, Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, and the Guinea Pig series, the second installment of which received considerable media attention in the early 90s after actor Charlie Sheen reported it to the FBI thinking it was a genuine snuff film. It is precisely this unusual background that makes the story of Stephen’s religious awakening particularly compelling, and he fully recounts the journey in his recent memoir, Hellucination.
One of the most striking aspects of Hellucination is its experimental narrative. In essence, the story does follow a traditional three-act structure as Stephen first describes his childhood and adolescence, explaining the environmental factors that influenced his psychology as an adult, including how he initially became disillusioned with religion and his introduction to psychedelic drugs. He then jumps forward to a time in his young adulthood (presumably his late 20s/early 30s) in which he begins distributing underground movies from his apartment in Florida (a modest venture that would eventually grow into Unearthed Films) while simultaneously experiencing what could be described as an existential crisis. This stage of the journey opens boldly: after having inhaled several balloons full of the short-acting dissociative nitrous oxide during an LSD trip, Stephen witnesses Rob Zombie literally step out of his television while watching the video for the song “Superbeast,” setting the stage for him to embark on a quest to find the meaning of his existence. As he puts it, “There is something on the other side, and I just made first contact.” His soul-searching climaxes with a literal descent into Hell, during which the reader is presented with a truly impressive sequence of Biblically-inspired phantasmagoria.
All we can do is go with the flow, whether up or down, side to side, or Heaven or Hell. We are nothing but actual amoebas that are tossed and thrown away in our deaths. We have no say in the matters of the afterlife.
With that said, Hellucination differs strongly from other traditional narratives in its fractured chronology of events and the way in which Stephen crafts an interactive experience for the reader. For instance, the very first chapter opens with him being tormented by his personal demon and personal angel (or Id and Superego; it’s unclear to him at the time) who are battling for control of his mind in the middle 0f his living room. The entities disappear and grant Stephen a moment of relief which turns out to merely be the calm before the storm as shortly afterward alien spiders from an episode of Outer Limits that he is watching begin crawling out of his television by the hundreds and invading his apartment. Naturally, one is left wondering how his life got to this point and feels compelled to read on.
The book is interactive in the sense that Stephen not only addresses the reader directly but brings you in as part of the story, a risky literary experiment that could have easily failed but in this case is actually quite cool. There are frequent mediations in one of two locations: an ethereal white-tiled room in which anything that is thought of will materialize and The Library of The Ether, a shape-shifting library of assorted books that Stephen has read where logic and the laws of physics no longer apply. He reveals that the chaotic nature of The Library of the Ether is intended to prepare for the Hell journey. “I need to know you’re on top of your game,” he says.
The reader is also taken to Stephen’s old apartment by his present (or future) self so that you may bear witness to his younger self in the midst of his search for God, much of which consisted of watching films on his entertainment center while under the influence of LSD and nitrous oxide. At one point, you even knock over a stack of videotapes on the floor. These departures and asides further contribute to the fractured nature of the narrative.
I think there are many markers in the search for God. Devils, demons, angels and even the Lord himself put realities in the way to stop us from finding out all the truth.
It’s important that I touch upon the role of Christian theology in the book, as the mere presence of such is likely to deter potential readers. While the core message is decidedly Christian, this book will never see the light of day inside of a Christian bookstore given its abundance of drug use, sexuality, and some of the most gruesome violence that I have seen described in text. To describe Hellucination as a “Christian book” would be to overlook the breadth of the esoteric concepts it covers, which range from psychology to the occult.
When you open your mind to all possibilities and to the realms of ultimate reality and you go with it, you open a door that takes you places. Realize that you can not only control what you see in your mind, but you can change it to suit your own needs.
One particular aspect of Stephen’s worldview that would be considered heretical by traditional religious standards is his admiration of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whom we have discussed here before. I believe that his conception of Freud’s philosophy and its relation to the duality of God and Devil is deserving of further consideration:
The Id and the Superego are more scientific ways of considering the Devil and God, or personal angels and demons. Science has turned the relationship between God, the Devil, and you into a viewpoint for all to understand without the framework of religious belief to sidetrack the layperson into another whole realm of thinking.
The Id is directed into the most primitive, basic desires; lust, greed, envy, pride, sloth, wrath, gluttony, and even death. The Superego guides you towards chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, humility, and even life.
Freud was just trying to map the human mind but instead came across something inside many of us that hadn’t been documented before. I say “many of us” because some people don’t seem to have a conscience and have committed the world’s greatest horrors and atrocities. To commit murder, torture, rape, or genocide is pure Id and the Devil. Every aspect of every situation that is wrong comes from either of those two places.
Science and psychology were not looking to verify religious notions. But they did. They weren’t trying to verify the war between God and the Devil but again, they did. Freud was just trying to make us all better. He was trying to figure out the happening in our mind. He was charting previously unknown territory, and he found a bigger continent within us all that he never could have fathomed. If you think about it, it has made us better and will continue to do so.
Yes, he was wrong about a lot of things. He was doing coke and talking to himself a mile a minute. But look what he accomplished.
Numerology is also a recurring theme throughout Stephen’s life. He relates that it was not until his mother had suffered through 12 miscarriages that he was born, making him “Number 13,” a designation which he considers to be “a little ominous.” Later, after having experienced 2 different alternate lives (those of a British WWII fighter pilot and a Zulu tribesman), he refers to the number 7 as a “holy number,” acknowledging that Hindus have classically believed that a person can reincarnate up to 7 times. He then wonders if, having only experienced 3 different lives altogether, he only has 4 to go? This speculation is made all the more troubling when he remembers that Hindus also believe that one can be reincarnated as an insect.
During an out of body experience in which Stephen has taken the form of a high priest in the future, he imparts the following numerological theory to a crowd of thousands of followers:
Today is the day! It’s July fourteenth, two thousand and twenty-one! It’s seven, fourteen, twenty-one. Or how about twenty-one minus seven equals fourteen. Now, fourteen minus seven is seven. And take July, which is the seventh month, times it by the beginning number of the century and you get fourteen. Seven plus fourteen is twenty-one! Three sevens! You look at it: it’s divisible, it’s subtract-able, it’s added and it’s multiplied. Backwards or forwards, either way you look at it, seven is the holy number of the Lord, and three sevens is the ultimate number of God, while three sixes is the number of the beast.
In his introduction to Hellucination, David Jay Brown of the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies draws a parallel between the commonly-reported “bad trips” that have resulted from reading aloud the macabre descriptions of post-death realms in Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (a reinterpretation of The Tibeatan Book of the Dead) and the hellish experiences that Stephen underwent as a result of exposing himself to dark, violent films and music videos while tripping. We have previously discussed the relation between mirror neurons and motion pictures, concluding that the brain’s ability to mimic the neuronal state of observed entities extends to those that one observes on screen. This was clearly the case for Stephen as he watched the aforementioned films, this natural phenomenon being greatly intensified by massive doses of LSD, which psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has described as a “non-specific brain amplifier.”
I became a technological shaman. The earlier shamans were using the natural guide of magic mushrooms or pot to experience deep trances and help their tribes with new wisdoms. I was mixing the technology of our society with the chemistry of modern man to explore the recesses of my reality and my mind.
At this time, I believed I found the actual philosopher’s stone: the mix of N2O and LSD-25 in the human body, 400 to 800 micrograms of LSD and 12 to 16 Whip It cartridges filled in three to four punch balloons. This would give you five to seven minutes with the philosopher’s stone.
So I found that extreme amounts of both drugs brought about hidden wisdom and secret knowledge. From that point forward, I began my quest to find secrets men have never known. Or to come to grips with truths that have been discussed for ages but to actually experience them firsthand instead of reading them in a book.
The films and videos that Stephen watches also serve as a conduit through which mysterious entities and archetypal forces communicate with him, occasionally going as far as to step out of the television as I mentioned above. One specific entity that Stephen first interprets as God but later suspects of being a demon takes the form of Rob Zombie as well as Morpheus from The Matrix. However, these instances of physical embodiment are not limited to characters on the television. Stephen’s best friend Rhett is possessed by God, offering insights into his creation and ordering him to write the book. His drug dealer reveals himself to be his “muse,” saying “I’m here to help you gain a deeper insight into your reality, bro!,” while not long after, a socially-awkward customer identifies himself as an “antichrist” and takes Stephen out for a beer.
You are going through what most people on this planet would kill for. You’re coming across ideas and realities that some of the greatest men in history have experienced. So far, you have experienced what certain religions have based their complete teachings on.
Having said all of this, it is clear that the book would not have worked had the author not injected a great deal of his personality into the writing. Stephen presents himself as a learned spiritualist with a calm, light-hearted demeanor which seems to mask a mildly psychotic edge just beneath the surface. At one moment we see him using transhumanist technology to perpetrate a grisly act of genocide on a spiritually pure city during one of his out of body experiences, while at another he bestows selfless acts of kindness on a group of monks and a young boy who has run away from home, both of whom happen to stumble upon his video store. These seemingly contradictory natures add to the complexity of the character, but what stands out most of all is the sincerity and authenticity with which he approaches the admittedly fantastical subject matter. Whether or not your beliefs allow you to accept that the events Stephen describes happened in objective reality, there can be no doubt that he at least subjectively experienced the events that he recounts and believes in them wholeheartedly. Given what we know about the inherently subjective nature of perception, experiences of the type that Stephen describes could be argued to be far more “real” than anything that could be replicated in a lab. Phenomenology lies beyond the realm of empiricism, and such is the beauty of Hellucination. I can’t recommend the book highly enough.
Individuals willing to risk direct contact with their subconscious and unconscious will be called upon to provide us with a new and enduring narrative that inspires humankind with a sense of hope, leading the way to a vibrant spirituality divorced from the dusty tales of yore. We must all stop looking for others to supply answers to the world’s questions. We must instead heed the call of the unconscious to follow our dreams and seek the answers for ourselves.
You can purchase Hellucination at the Unearthed Films website or Amazon.
Disclaimer: One should never take any drug without being fully aware of the recommended dosage and potential side effects. Erowid is your friend in this regard. One of your besties, in fact.
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