We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital. Furthermore, the proliferation of certain kinds of mental illness in late capitalism makes the case for a new austerity, a case that is also made by the increasing urgency of dealing with environmental disaster. Nothing contradicts capitalism's constitutive imperative towards growth more than the concept of rationing goods and resources. Yet it is becoming uncomfortably clear that consumer self-regulation and the market will not by themselves avert environmental catastrophe. There is a libidinal, as well as a practical case, to be made for this new ascesis. If, as Oliver James, Žižek and Supernanny have shown, unlimited license leads to misery and disaffection, then limitations placed on desire are likely to quicken, rather than deaden, it. In any case, rationing of some sort is inevitable. The issue is whether it will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too late. Quite what forms this collective management should take is, again, an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and experimentally.

• collpse
• post-capitalism
• mental health
• capitalism
• environment
• resources
• consumerism
• alchemy
• transformation
• transition
• capitalist realism

Belief makes it impossible to belive the opposite proposition and that means you've just truncated your freedom, no matter how noble the belief you've taken on, you have just rejected and limited your ability to believe other things. \nMy favorite story in the Gospels is the story of the Apostle Thomas because you will recall that after the crucifixion - this is an alchemical story - Christ appeared to the Apostles in the upper room in Jerusalem, 40 days after? Thomas was not there, I don't know where he was, somewhere, they'd sent him out for sandwiches or something. \nAnyway, he came back and they said, 'The Master was with us' and he said, 'C'mon, you guys, you've been smoking too much Red Leb we brought in 3 weeks ago' and they said, 'No, no, the Master was with us' and he said 'Unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it.'\nSo then time passed. Christ came again to the Apostles and Thomas was among them on this second get-go and Christ walked in and kicked off his overshoes and looked around the room and he said, 'Thomas, come forward. Put your hand into the wound.' Which he did. Which he did. \nPeople have different interpretations of this story. My interpretation of it, which is what I'll leave you with, is that alone among all human beings in all of human history, only one person was ever so privileged as to be allowed to touch the resurrection body. It was Thomas the Doubter that was allowed to touch the resurrection body because he didn't believe. So if you want to touch the resurrection body, be very careful with where you commit your belief.

• belief
• freedom
• resurrection
• alchemy
• doubt
• skepticism
• jesus
• christianity

The attention given to the unconscious has the effect of incubation, a brooding over the slow fire needed in the initial stages of the work; hence the frequent use of the terms decoctio, digestio, putrefactio, solutio. It is really as if attention warmed the unconscious and activated it, thereby breaking down the barriers that separate it from consciousness.

• attention
• unconscious
• work
• consciousness
• alchemy

The opposites between which Ostanes stands are thus masculine / feminine on the one hand and good / evil on the other. The way he speaks of the four luminaries - he does not know how to save himself from them - suggests that he is subject to Heimarmene, the compulsion of the stars; that is, to a transconscious factor beyond the reach of the human will. Apart from this compulsion, the injurious effect of the four planets is due to the fact t hat each of them exerts its specific influence on man and makes him a diversity of persons, whereas he should be one.^1\n\n1 The idea of uniting the Many into One is found not only in alchemy but also in Origen, In Libr. I Reg. [I Sam.] Hom., I, 4 (Migne, P.G., vol. 12, col. 998): 'There was one man. We, who are still sinners, cannot obtain this title of praise, for each of us is not one but many...See how he who thinks himself one is not one, but seems to have as many personalities as he has moods, as also the Scripture says: A fool is changed as the moon.' In another homily, In Ezech., 9, 1 (Migne, P.G., vol. 13, col. 732) he says: 'Where there are sins, there is multitude...but where virtue is, there is singleness, there is union.' Cf. Porphyry the Philosopher to His Wife Marcella, trans. by Zimmern, p. 61: 'If thou wouldst practise to ascend into theyself, collecting together all the powers which the body hath scattered and broken up into a multitude of parts unlike their former unity...' Likewise the Gospel of Philip (cited from Epiphanius, Panarium, XXVI, 13): 'I have taken knowledge (saith the soul) of myself, and have gathered myself together out of every quarter and have not begotten (sown) children unto the Ruler, but have rooted out his roots and gathered together the members that were scattered abroad. And I know thee who thou art, for I (she saith) am of them that are from above.' (James, *The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 12.) Cf. also Panarium, XXVI, 3: 'I am thou, and thou art I, and wherever thou art, there I am, and I am scattered in all things, and from wherever thou wilt thou canst gather me, but in gathering me thou gatherest together thyself.' The inner multiplicity of man reflects his microcosmic nature, which contains within it the stars and their (astrological) influences. Thus Origen (*In Lev. Hom., V, 2; Migne, P.G., vol. 12, cols. 449-50) says: 'Understand that thou hast within thyself herds of cattle...flocks of sheep and flocks of goats...Understand that the fowls of the air are also within thee. Marvel not if we say that these are within thee, but understand that thou thyself art another world in little, and has within thee the sun and the moon, and also the stars..Thou seest that thou has all those things which the world hath.' And Dorn ('De tenebris contra naturam,' *Theatr. chem. I, p. 533) says: 'To the four less perfect planets in the heavens there correspond the four elements in our body, that is, earth to Saturn, water to Mercury [instead of the moon, see above], air to Venus, and fire to Mars. Of these it is built up, and it is weak on account of the imperfection of the parts. And so let a tree be planted from them, whose root is ascribed to Saturn,' etc., meaning the philosophical tree, symbol of the development process that results in the unity of the filius Philosophorum, or lapis. Cf. my 'The Philosophical Tree,' par. 409.

• masculine
• feminine
• self
• compulsion
• alchemy
• tarot
• astrology
• influence
• unity
• knowledge
• microcosm
• nature
• elements
• symbols
• as above so below

As is indicated by the very name which he chose for it - the 'spagyric' art - or by the oft-repeated saying 'solve et coagula' (dissolve and coagulate), the alchemist saw the essence of his art in separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and consolidation on the other. For him there was first of all an initial state in which opposite tendencies or forces were in conflict; secondly there was the great question of a procedure which would be capable of bringing the hostile elements and qualities, once they were separated, back to unity again. The initial state, named the chaos, was not given from the start but had to be sought for as the prima materia. And just as the beginning of the work was not self-evident, so to an even greater degree was its end.

• alchemy
• separation
• analysis
• conflict
• unity
• chaos
• work
• self
• conscious development

...one might question the whole idea of 'preparing' for a psychedelic experience at all, a process that can be likened to gearing up for a tornado to rip through your home. The punch line of a trip is often enough that you can't take it with you. Still, the storm is more liely to be apprciated by the person who builds his own house than by the one who just lives in it. There are volumes of lessons about life's dynamics worth incorporating before you watch the cosmos engulf your puny, insignificant self and wash across your windscreen during the ensuing metaphysical twister. There's no sense in sumitting yourself to an experience that can strip you down to your 'nothing' unless you know it can happen and that you can fill the void imploded into you with something more life-enriching than it held before. Of that there are no guarantees, so who you are going into the experience - how supple and healthy your spirit and sense of self - makes all the difference in how you come out.

• psyche
• experience
• integration
• psychedelic drugs
• solve et coagula
• dissolution
• alchemy

After two months I had about forty analyses: the plants with a higher phosphorus content were sage, celandine, and parsley.

• plants
• herbology
• chemistry
• alchemy

If a description of the human body must include the description of what it, and all its 'parts,' are doing—that is, of its behavior—this behavior will be one thing in the open air but quite another in a vacuum, in a furnace, or under water. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins because it is not behaving in the same way. Its behaviour has changed because its environment or context has changed, just as the meaning of one and the same word may change according to the kind of sentence in which it is used. There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog. It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out 'how they are made.' This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more and more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. This was the grain of truth in the primitive and unreliable science of astrology—as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's, character or soul, he draws a horoscope—that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment—social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical—throughout every moment of his life.

• soul
• time
• life
• meaning
• body
• other
• will
• self
• science
• truth
• change
• birth
• behavior
• environment
• character
• activity
• analysis
• definition
• medicine
• relationships
• alchemy
• astrology

The natural world had come to be seen, by late Roman times, as a demonic and imprisoning shell. This was the spiritual legacy of the destruction of the partnership model of self and society and its replacement with the dominator model. The nostalgia for the Gaian Earth Mother was suppressed but could not, cannot, be ignored. Hence it reemerged in time in a clandestine form‑as the alchemical theme of the magna mater, the mysterious mother matrix of the world, somehow everywhere, invisible yet potentially condensable into a visible manifestation of the universal panacea residing in nature. In such an atmosphere of feverish and ontologically naive speculation, alchemy was able to thrive. Categories concerning self and matter, subject and object, were not yet fixed by the conventions introduced by phonetic alphabet and later exaggerated by print. It was not entirely clear to the alchemical investigators what about their labors was fancy, fact, or expectation. It is ironic that this was the context for the discovery of a powerful mind‑altering drug; that the spirit in alcohol, sensed and enjoyed in beer and wine brewed through the ages, became in the alchemical laboratories a demon, an elemental and fiery quintessence. And like those other quintessences that would follow it into existence, morphine and cocaine, the quintessence of the grape once passed through the furnace and the retorts of the alchemist had become deprived of its natural soul. That absence made it no longer a carrier of the vitality of the earth, no longer an echo of the lost paradise of prehistory, but rather something raw, untamed, and ultimately set against the human grain.

• gnosticism
• dualism
• alchemy
• self
• alcohol
• soul
• society
• time
• nature
• existence
• spirit
• paradise
• destruction
• model
• other
• matter

We take the human machine as a three-storied factory. The three stories represent the head, the middle part of the body and the lower part of the body with the spinal cord. Food enters the top story and passes to the bottom story as Oxygen 768. In the body it meets with a certain Carbon 192 and, mixing with this Carbon, becomes Nitrogen 384. Nitrogen 384 meets with another Carbon, 96, and with the help of this Carbon changes from Oxygen 384 to Nitrogen 192. It is an ascending octave, so these stages represent the notes do, re, mi. After mi there is an interval and the octave cannot develop any further by itself. It is very interesting that up to this point and one step further we can follow its development with the help of ordinary physiological knowledge. When food enters the mouth it meets with several different sorts of saliva and is mixed with them in the process of mastication; then it passes into the stomach and is worked on by gastric juices, which break down sugars, proteins and fats. From there it goes into the intestines and meets with bile, pancreatic and intestinal juices, which transform it into the smallest elements. These go through the wall of the bowel into venous blood, which is taken to the liver, where it meets with other carbons which change it chemically, and so to the heart, which pumps the venous blood to the lungs. Here it is oxygenated by the entry of air and returned to the heart as arterial blood. In this diagram all the various matters present in the body which the food meets with up to mi are divided into two categories: Carbon 192 and Carbon 96. Venous blood is mi 192 and arterial blood is fa 96. At the point when mi 192 cannot develop any further, another kind of food enters—air. It enters as Oxygen 192, meets with a certain Carbon 48 and with its help is transformed into re 96, and this production of re 96 gives a shock to mi 192 of the food octave enabling it to pass to fa 96. Beyond this, physiological knowledge cannot go. Re 96 of the air octave meets a corresponding Carbon and produces mi 48; and with the help of the same Carbon fa 96 of the food octave transforms into sol 48. Sol 48 can develop further, but mi 48 cannot, so the development of the air octave stops at this point. Sol 48 of the food octave passes into la 24 and la 24 into si 12, and stops there. Impressions enter as do 48, but cannot develop any further, because at their place of entry there is no Carbon 12 to help them. Nature has not provided it, or rather has not provided enough to produce any considerable effect, so do 48 does not transform and the three octaves stop at that. Think about this diagram and connect it with what has been said earlier, that nature brings man to a certain state and then leaves him to develop himself. Nature gives man possibilities, but does not develop these possibilities. It enables him to live, provides air, for otherwise the first octave could not go on, but the rest he must do himself. The machine is so arranged that air enters at the right moment and in the right consistency and gives a mechanical shock. It is important to understand that the Food Diagram or the Diagram of Nutrition consists of three stages. The first stage that I have just described shows how things happen in ordinary normal man: the food octave goes on all the way from do 768 to si 12; there are three notes of the air octave and one note of the impressions octave. If we want to develop further, we must increase the production of higher matters, and in order to do that we must understand and know how to do it, not only theoretically but in actual fact, because it needs a long time to learn how to use this knowledge and to make the right efforts. If we know how to bring Carbon 12 to the right place and if we make the necessary effort, the development of the air and impressions octaves goes further. The second stage shows what happens when the right shock has been given. Do 48 of the impressions octave is transformed into re 24 and mi 12. The air octave receives a shock from the impressions octave and mi 48 transforms into fa 24, sol 12 and even a small quantity of la 6. You must understand that the air is saturated with higher hydrogens which, in certain cases, can be retained by the organism in the process of breathing. But the amount of higher hydrogens that we can get from the air is very small. This stage represents the work of the human machine with one mechanical and one conscious shock. The third stage shows what happens when a second conscious shock is given at the right place. The first conscious shock is necessary at do 48. The second conscious shock is needed where mi 12 of the impressions octave and si 12 of the food octave have stopped in their development and cannot go on any further by themselves. Although there are carbons in the organism which would help them to be transformed, they are far away and cannot be reached, so another effort is necessary. If we know its nature and can produce this second conscious shock, mi 12 will develop into fa 6 and si 12 into do 6. The effort must begin from mi 12, so we must understand what mi 12 is psychologically. We can call it our ordinary emotions, that is to say, all strong emotions that we may have. When our emotions reach a certain degree of intensity, there is mi 12 in them. But in our present state only our unpleasant emotions actually reach mi 12; our ordinary pleasant emotions usually remain 24. It is not that our intense unpleasant emotions actually are mi 12, but they are based on it and need it in order to be produced. So the beginning of this second effort and preparation for it is work on negative emotions. This is the general outline of the work of the human organism and of how this work can be improved. It is important to understand where conscious shocks are necessary, because if you understand this it will help you to understand many other difficulties in the Food Diagram. You must understand, too, that these three octaves are not of equal force. If you take the force of the food octave, you will see that it gives certain results, certain effects that can be measured. Although the matter taken from air plays a very important part, the air octave represents a very small quantity of hydrogens, whereas the impressions octave is very powerful and may have an enormous meaning in relation to self remembering, states of consciousness, emotions and so on. So we can say that the relationship of the three octaves is not equal, because one has more substance, another less substance. This is our inner alchemy, the transmutation of base metals into precious metals. But all this alchemy is inside us, not outside

• the fourth way
• food
• impressions
• octaves
• conscious development
• work
• emotions
• centers
• negative emotions
• shocks
• alchemy
• transformation
• meaning
• time
• nature
• will
• self
• change
• knowledge
• force
• relationship
• consciousness
• how to
• body
• other
• matter
• note

From this point of view, self-study becomes the study of the working of different energies in oneself; of their present wastage in useless and harmful functions, and their possible accumulation for the purpose of self-development. The Study of hydrogens and their relation to one another also helps us to understand centres and their different speeds. Intellectual centre works with H 48, moving and instinctive centres with H 24, emotional centre should work with H 12, but it never receives the right fuel and never works as it should. If we could make it work faster, it would make a great difference to our perceptions and other faculties.

• alchemy
• the fourth way
• conscious development
• self-observation
• energy
• centers
• work
• self
• functions
• other

The mythological goal of the dragon fight is almost always the virgin, the captive, or, more generally, the 'treasure hard to attain.'  It is to be noted that a purely material pile of gold, such as the hoard of the Nibelungs, is a late and degenerate form of the original motif.  In the earliest mythologies, in ritual, in religion, and in mystical literature as well as in fairy tales, legend, and poetry, gold and precious stones, but particularly diamonds and pearls, were originally symbolic carriers of immaterial values.  Likewise the water of life, the healing herb, the elixir of immortality, the philosophers' stone, miracle rings and wishing rings, magic hoods and winged cloaks, are all symbols of the treasure.

• dragon fight
• religion
• treasure
• life
• symbols
• ritual
• immortality
• literature
• alchemy