(In an effort to bridge the gap between the coasts & inject some positivity around these parts, I’m going to be taking time to interview some of my favorite East Coast burners about the Burn & their experiences on-and-off playa. I’ll be talking to luminaries, logistics gurus, producers & minor celebrities in the Burner community here on the East Coast. Asking them about a number of things, but most importantly, why they burn.) By Terry Gotham
1. How long have you been burning & what originally motivated you to make the pilgrimage? Ryan: This past year was my 5th consecutive year. What originally motivated me? It all started when I went to go help with a DiSORIENT party back in 2010 I would say. I was going to New York City all the time on a bus, every weekend I’d ask my friend what sort of events were going on. He was like”You should go to this DiSORIENT party, they’re these like, burner people, and they need help setting up their party” and I was sort of into that at the time. I fell in love with the vibe of the whole Burner scene through that. In 2011, I had a brother-in-law/veteran burner of maybe 7 years? He messaged me on Facebook being like “Burning Man tickets are on sale you should buy one. If you can’t go, just sell it.” So that’s what I did. From there I managed to find friends who were going and coordinate with them. Erika: I have only been one year. I went because of Ryan, but I did say when I was a teenager that I would always go when I turned 25. And I’m 25 this year, so I decided to go.
This week, I want to discuss a substance that has developed a huge global following and staunch defenders on both sides of the Atlantic. Ketamine has become one of the most used substances in the Burner, rave & dance music communities. Whether you’re in London, New York City, Hong Kong, Cairo or Seattle, you’ve seen it diffuse into your scene. A dissociative anesthetic that’s never actually been used on horses, the crystalline powder took many dance floors by storm. In recent years, it’s not just become tethered to dance parties, but to treatment-resistant depression as well, with Ketamine infusion centers popping up at a surprising pace. But first, a little bit of local history.
I can’t speak for how the Ketamine may have filtered into your personal scene, but I can speak about the parties that I cut my teeth on, back during the era that people still thought we’d be greeted as liberators in Iraq. My friends and I first saw the issue when people in the psytrance scene couldn’t find LSD here in the city. While some chose to do 2C-I or roll, others began using this psychedelic powder that seemed to only last 40-60min. The utility of having a powder that only lasted 40min vs. a tab that could last 6-8hrs seemed to be immediately apparent and it started being THE thing.
There has been a lot of press this year about Susan Sarandon’s ceremonial procession to lead Timothy Leary’s ashes to the Totem of Confessions, where they were placed underneath the Masturbating Nun (supposedly locked up to censor protect children from offensive art).
Now, further details are coming out. Most of the people in the parade partook of the “sacrament”, which meant drinking the ashes. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some LSD was mixed into this magic punch.
A number of videos of her speech have been posted online, and covered in mainstream publications like the Daily Mail – but strangely most of them cut the video before she started talking about the CIA. This one contains the full speech, and some analysis about the broader occult context behind it:
Sarandon says “If anyone doesn’t know who Timothy Leary is and you’ve taken acid, you should be ashamed of yourself…he was the leader of the whole thing to take acid away from the CIA, and make it a means of exploration for everybody”.
She told Jimmy Kimmel: “Burning Man is a celebration in the desert of all different kinds of people. It’s about self reliance, it’s about acceptance, it seems to be about drugs and nudity – there’s a lot of that too. A lot of art all over the place. This year I had a mission, which was to take Timothy Leary’s ashes, which I had some of, and take them to a chapel…we did drink them”.
Leary said “at least 80% of the people I ever worked with were part of the CIA”. He described the “Liberal CIA” as “the best mafia you can deal with in the Twentieth Century”. He gave “total credit” to the CIA for creating the entire counter-culture movement.
John Lennon also said “we must remember to thank the CIA and the Army for giving us LSD” in his last interview. He was assassinated by a mind-controlled patsy in front of an ex-CIA doorman a few days later.
Timothy Leary and Billy Mellon Hitchcock at the Millbrook Estate
In fact it was British agent Aldous Huxley who tasked Leary with forming an “LSD Illuminati” to spread the drug. He did this with the help of members the powerful Mellon banking family, who provided a castle for his cult and helped fund global drug distribution networks after LSD was made illegal in 1966. At that point the CIA was the biggest purchaser of LSD in the world, having bought an estimated 100-250 million trips, or a third of all the acid ever manufactured, from Sandoz in Switzerland – owned by another powerful banking family, the Warburgs.
Today’s Titans of Transhumanism – now called ABC.XYZ
Leary’s famous catchphrase “tune in, turn on, drop out” was actually developed on Madison Avenue by marketing guru philosopher Marshall McLuhan.
There are some interesting parallels between the values of the hippies in the Sixties, who thought they were changing the world with drugs and free love, and today’s socially engineered Burners, who think they are changing the world with “drugs and nudity”, as Sarandon puts it.
Robert Anton Wilson said “perhaps the final secret of the Illuminati is you don’t know you’re a member until it’s too late to get out”…sound familiar, Burners?
Nothing to see here, move along…and be sure to worship the prophets you’re told to.
Sarandon on Jimmy Kimmel live:
The official mini-documentary from Future Eyes TV:
“America is going to become a Burning Man country”
[Update 9/22/15 5:09pm PST]
This occult ritual-within-an-occult ritual was promoted in Burning Man’s official newsletter The Jackrabbit Speaks V19#35, the week before the event started. As usual, not all of the information coming from this source was accurate. In particular, they got the details of his most famous catch-phrase wrong.
Burning Man 2015: Final Resting Place of Timothy Leary
Date: Thursday, September 3
Time and Locations:
6:00 pm – Gathering at Cirque Gitane (8:15 & Geek)
6:30 pm – Art Car Procession to the Man.
7:00 pm – Join forces with the Billion Bunny March Against Humanity.
7:30 pm – Marching Band, Art Car, Kazoo processional to Totem of Confessions. Electric Kool-Aid party
Lauren writes:
“One of the most famous countercultural icons of the 1960s, Timothy Leary, was among a small group of renowned social scientists who abandoned traditional Western methodologies for the sacred culture of Tibetan Buddhism in an effort to pursue mystical revelation and personal liberation. As an advocate of guided meditation through hallucinogenic drug use, Leary initiated a cultural renaissance with his ‘turn off, tune in, drop out’ mantra. After his death in 1996, several grams of Leary’s ashes were launched into space aboard a Pegasus rocket. The rest of his ashes were dispersed amongst loved ones, some of which are making their way to the playa this year through Cirque Gitane, an intergalactic travel camp located at 8:15 & Geek.
On Thursday at sundown, Cirque Gitane will encourage everyone on the playa to be a part of a Timothy Leary extravaganza. This celebration of Leary’s life will turn into an elaborate funeral procession that will travel through the playa to veteran artist Michael Garlington’s ‘Totem of Confessions’ on the 3:00 Promenade and 1600 feet from the Man.
The march will culminate with the ashes being placed inside the ‘Totem of Confessions,’ and when the Totem is burned, the ashes will burn with it. Burning Man will be one of the final resting places of this exceptional man, who President Richard Nixon called ‘the most dangerous man in America’. Leary taught people to tap into the wisdom of indigenous cultures and to treat the natural world as an extension of themselves.”
