Unofficial Vital Student ‘Zine
Notes from Vital Psychedelic Training class of ‘23
Kool aid corner #5
Your five-corner round-up of trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life.
To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life
Graph/visual aid of the Week
Comparison of entopic phenomena with the cave art of the San, the Coso and of Upper Paleolithic Europe
After Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988
From: Visionary: The Mysterious Origins of Human Consciousness (The Definitive Edition of Supernatural) (2022) by Graham Hancock
My bookshelf weighs a ton
Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only.
This week: The Secret of the Yamas by that John McAfee
From a Buddhist centre in Birmingham for £9
Before he invented anti-virus software and became a tech billionaire John McAfee was a meditation teacher. He wrote this book, considered a classic amongst aficionados.
Eventually there was the whole thing in Belize. The abyss claims another: “Arrakis has seen men like you come, and go.”
Non-duality is not necessarily peaceful. The anima works in notoriously, poetically mysterious ways.
Next issue: Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes and psychedelic philosophy
Kool-Aid Corner #4
Your regular round-up of trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life.
To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life
Graph/visual aid of the Week
The first patent for MDMA
From: The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures by
Scott R Hutson (Anthropological Quarterly, January 2000)
My bookshelf weighs a ton
Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: The Archaic Revival by Terrence McKenna.
£25 usually £100+
Stories of space narcotics by major authors collected by druid of derring-do Michael Parry (d. 2014) , including The New Accelerator by H G Wells, Subjectivity by Norman Spinrad and What to Do Until the Analyst Comes by Frederik Pohl.
Plus a superb cover naturally.
If you like this sort of thing and haven’t read The Employees, a 2020 Booker Prize nominee by Danish author Olga Ravn, a ‘disconcertingly quotidian space opera’ (The Guardian), do so at light speed.
I can’t look at books like this without being hauntd by a sci fi short story about a co-ed college on a space station where the boys get these pets called teasels. I couldn’t find any reference to it online which was chilling in itself.
Next issue: Dr Rick ‘The Strass’ Strassman goes further than ever before… several times
Kool-Aid Corner
The reborn round-up of trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life.
To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life
Ask Savia Droid about reincarnation
Graph of the Week
Attribution of consciousness to living and non-living entities before and after a psychedelic belief-changing experience
After psychedelic experience
Before psychedelic experience
From: A Single Belief-Changing Psychedelic Experience Is Associated With Increased Attribution of Consciousness to Living and Non-living Entities (supplementary material) by Samdeep M Nayak and Roland R. Griffiths, John Hopkins University (2022)
My bookshelf weighs a ton
Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only
This week: Transcendent Mind by Imants Barrus and Julia Mossbridge. Swept on for £50 when I noticed prices were going up quickly
£52 at April 2022, £75 by early May 2022
Despite what the sort of thing I write in my day job would have you believe, government-backed public education openly invests in paranormal research (for better or worse). It even issues press releases about the positive findings. Here in the UK Northampton University is the crucible of not-so-forbidden learning, with parapsychological research taking place across several departments.
Published in 2015 by the notoriously conservative American Psychological Association Transcendent Mind contains an enthusiastic review of official investigations into consciousness, the soul, supra-physical existence and the cosmic whole.
Drs Julia Mossbridge and Imants Baruss, a former engineering scholar who quit to work as a roofer before taking up psychology, are heavy-hitters in the field. You may also enjoy Alterations of Consciousness: An Empirical Analysis for Social Scientists.
Kool-Aid Corner #1
The inaugural round-up of trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life.
To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life
Graph of the Week
The relationship between ego-dissolution and ego-inflation for experiences occasioned by:
Classical psychedelics
Coacine
Alcohol
From: Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI) by Matthew M Nour, Lisa Evans, David Nutt and Robin L Carhart-Harris (2016)
My bookshelf weighs a ton
Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts. Replaced after my first copy accompanied a close friend to his new life in NY
Snapped up for just over UK£25, copy for sale via GF Books in Hawthorn, CA for just over US$1000, UK price £95+
From the first chapter: ‘William Blake drew on Albion as a symbol of man before the Biblical fall and historian Peter Ackroyd has used the term for the title of his book charting the origins of the English imagination.
From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD.
Thus, Albion embodies the mythological imagination of these Isles, a state akin to the aboriginal Dreamtime, to which everyone should have access. This, then, is Albion’s dreaming.’
Andy Roberts is Britain’s answer to Erika Dyck; our national chronicler of the far out. Psychedelic Renaissance author AWAKN’s Dr Ben Sessa says:
“Andy is an anti-authoritarian, free-thinking individual who has happily nailed his colours to the weirdness mast without being lost in its sea of ethereal fluffiness.”
Indeed he’s unafraid of toppling sacred cows, like in this forensic inquisition into the Francis Crick LSD-DNA connection and his biography of disruptive-at-best prankster Michael Hollingshead. Grab his recent collection of essays from Psychedelic Press and see vids on the New Psychonaut YouTube depository.
Each ‘Zine features the most mind-blowing bits I scrawled down during each of Vital’s exclusive live lectures by the finest minds in the space. Browse them by issue or go straight to the introductions with lecturer details.
And search by the topics: Traditional and Modern Approaches, Therapy, Space Holding, Medical and Clinical, and Integration. Funnies at the end too.