by Stephen Biro
Hellucination
WRATH EDITION
Stephen Biro
Kindle Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Biro
www.unearthedfilms.com
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Preface and Forward by David Jay Brown: Psychobiologist
The Id and Superego are out of the shadows
Birth, divorce and childhood trauma
My first childhood step towards Atheism
Religious mishandlings and walking down the wrong path
Step into the Ether with me
Out of the TV and out of my mind
Video debauchery and the loss of the comic book dream
You and me in the Library of the Ether
Hallucinogenic realities and the shadow of The Quest begins
Stumbled into belief and the assassination
Morpheus steps out, past life regression steps in and The Quest to find God matures
The Resurrection chair, schizophrenia and the future self
Morpheus returns and the splitting of the ego
The Quest begins with a step through the Level of Atrocity
He comes and shows despair, exhilaration, ultimate powers and isolation
Another dream come true, paranoia and possession by God
The Muse unmasked and Satan revealed
Monks visit the store and a runaway child finds his place
The Lord answers the call and the Bible speaks
The fall into Hell, demonic drugs and the Mountains of Greed
The Chambers of Gluttony and The Valley of Lust
The Maze of Vanity
The Cavern of Sloth
The Auditorium of the Envious
The misunderstanding and the understanding of Hell
The tortures of the Damned and the hopelessness of Pride
Escape… understanding and belief: hope and fear
PREFACE
Having come to the realization that religious conviction is fundamentally a symbol system bridging the personal and the spiritual, psychologist C. G. Jung predicted the occurrence of a modern-day calamity of massive significance.
He understood what most couldn’t: That though Christianity dominated the spiritual realm, it was a belief system that could only take one so far. His answer was to essentially abandon religion and encourage the valiant of soul to seek what he termed “direct contact with the unconscious.” This doctrine was later expounded in Joseph Campbell’s ever-popular book, The Power of Myth.
Despite their enthusiastic proselytizing, both men were well aware that direct contact with one’s unconscious could be such an overpowering experience that it could lead to madness and, even worse, to a total disregard for a higher power.
If the potential of religious conviction is to ever achieve a regeneration of spiritual power to the extent foreseen by Jung and Campbell, 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.
Introduction to Hellucination
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—an 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 affects 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, Stephen filled his stores, his online inventories, his home, and his brain with the most profoundly gruesome imagery imaginable.
Then Stephen experimented with powerful, synergistic combinations of LSD, nitrous oxide, and cannabis, while watching ferocious movies, with dazzling special effects, on a quest for God. He watched psychedelic videos, The Matrix, Fight Club, and other violent and disturbing films on his entertainment center while taking massive amounts of psychedelics, mixing it with nitrous oxide. 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 Stephen’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 Stephen decided to experiment with LSD and other psychedelics he amplified the intensity of all this dark imagery a
nd brought it to life.
Some of Stephen’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 Stephen, 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, which 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, Stephen 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, Stephen’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 Stephen’s adventure, we learn that all of his encounters with “God” on psychedelics were really encounters with the Devil in disguise, or so Stephen 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 Stephen, 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 Stephen 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 giggle with delight.
This can be a truly frightening book, and it is most definitely not for the faint-hearted. Hellucination is 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 Stephen experienced would scare the living daylights out of Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King—and Stephen’s mind-blowing story is his reality and a part of his life; that we are lucky he is willing to share with us.
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”
THE ID AND SUPEREGO ARE OUT OF THE SHADOWS
I exhaled, and the nitrous oxide exited my lungs. I sat on the couch—waiting—and I looked around the cramped apartment. Horror movie posters and bootleg videotapes surrounded me on all sides, in every crevice and between all the furniture.
I wasn’t alone in the apartment.
I didn’t want to see them, but they were both right there in front of me. They waited for my next move. Unsure of what to do, I spoke to the strongest of them.
“What the fuck are you doing? I can’t live like this. I can’t even carry on a normal conversation with you screaming at me all the time!”
He looked at me.
“You have to understand,” he said. “Nobody is going to care about what you’re experiencing now. They’re too busy playing Xbox, deciding what TV shows to watch, worrying about getting laid tonight or otherwise grabbing a few happy moments so they don’t have to think about their miserable lives.”
“You do understand that, right?” he continued. “Everybody’s lives are miserable to some degree or in some sense. Nobody can ever truly be happy without some sort of madness creeping into their souls.”
I wanted to stand up and shout at him but instead, gave up. How can you compete with the devil? Your own personal Id? The part of yourself that wants to destroy you? So I continued to sit there for a moment, smoking like a chimney.
I turned to the part of myself supposed to give me guidance. He was standing in the corner, staring off into space. He gave the impression of being just like me—in fact, they both did. Sure, they wore better clothes and were clean shaven. But still me.
My Superego and my Id were made flesh. I’ve been screaming at them, pleading with them for longer than I want to admit. But they never changed. My Superego—or, personal angel, as I came to consider him—didn’t know what to say. I often begged for guidance, and only sometimes would I get it. Other times I got nothing. But my Id—my personal demon—knew exactly what to say. It knew how to manipulate me. It could even pretend it was me, masquerading as original thoughts growing inside my skull. But this time they weren’t in my head. This time, they were external. I could finally see them standing in front of me.
So I screamed at my personal angel, “Say something! I’m counting on you to be my better half. How do I deal with his manipulations, his wanting to send me down the wrong path?”
My angel finally looked at me. I looked it up and down and locked gazes with its brown eyes—just like mine—as it spoke.
“You’re doing what is right. You’re doing what you need to do to find God, and if you keep knocking, he will have to answer you. Even the most horrendous sinners of this world will be answered if they knock long enough. Never stop until someone answers the door.”
I gave a knowing sigh when my demon approached me. It said, “Listen to what this asshole is telling you—knock until your knuckles bleed and maybe, just maybe God might answer you! What kind of shit is that? I know who you are: You’re nobody, a piece of crap that shouldn’t have been born. You don’t offer anything to this world. You just rape, steal, lie and screw others over. What makes you good enough to find God? Why would God answer you?”
A flash of evil spread across the demon’s face as it leaned closer. I could see the hatred flare behind its pupils. My spine trembled, as its words were something I wasn’t prepared for.
It said, “Many men and women—some very worthy—have tried to find God. They all
failed. You are nobody. Nothing. And you’re sure not what God wants.”
I turned to my personal angel. “Is it true?”
It turned to me and said, “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
Goosebumps covered my body as I stood up and yelled, “I need to know how long I’m supposed to knock, to search! I’ve ripped my mind apart, unleashing both of you.”
My cigarette went out and I reached for another. I snubbed the filter in the ashtray and lit another in the time it took to take a breath. I looked at them both—not in the eyes, but rather at their feet. I didn’t want to see too much of them anymore. I set the cigarette in the ashtray and let it smolder while I argued with these things, these extreme versions of myself.
“Fuck you both,” I said. “Neither of you is helping me one bit.”
I turned to the Id, daggers in my eyes.
“You not only do everything you can to destroy me—even disguising yourself as my actual thought processes—but you flip every good idea I have into something selfish and wrong. Your guile is beyond anything I can manage.”
Before the Id could respond, I ripped into the Superego.
“And you speak in whispers. I can barely hear you because my demon is always drowning you out. It seems you can’t be bothered to tell me the other side of the story. You only talk after my demon manipulates me! That doesn’t protect me! If you sense my demon coming on, why don’t you tell me what to do that is right? Why do you let me hear the wrong first?”
I continued shouting, directing my anger at both of them.
“Don’t tell me Satan wins the first round in everything! I’m a human being, and if I’m in the middle of a war that is already given over to the Devil, because God is testing souls on some unknown criteria, then neither of you serve any purpose to me.”
I flopped back down on the couch, and both sides of me stood there, momentarily speechless. My cigarette went out so I reached over to re-light it, while waiting for them to say something… anything.
