Darren Lorente-Bull

    He was a wise man who invented God. Plato It's not unusual for many people who are looking for a particular spiritual path to do so first by knocking on the door of mainstream, organised religion. After all, mainstream religions have achieved the impossible at least on one level: they have made the belief in the supernatural acceptable to an extent. Yes, they have sought this through unscrupulous means at times and by finding strength in numbers. The problem, of course, is that exclusive belief in one religious paradigm is at best hugely limiting. At worst, it's unadulterated fundamentalism. And fundamentalism, regardless of the particular flavour and packaging it comes in, is normally always a dangerous thing. Somehow, be it through the work of the crusaders or of  Buddhists killing Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or ISIS and their campaign  of terror in recent times, people always end up dying.  So, the most discerning spiritual se...

"Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot." Robert Anton Wilson Six months ago, seeking a new metaphysical model, I approached the IOT ( the Illuminates of Thanateros).  The Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) is an international magical order formed in the early 1980s, officially around 1987, by Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, key figures in the development of chaos magic. Emerging from the ideas in Carroll’s Liber Null and Sherwin’s writings in the late 1970s, the order took its name from “Thanatos” (death) and “Eros” (sex), representing the polar forces of magical energy and human experience. The IOT was created to promote chaos magic as a practical, results-oriented system stripped of dogma, emphasizing techniques such as sigil work, altered states, and belief as a tool to be adopted and discarded. Its objectives include fostering magical training and initiation within a struct...

My madness is sacred, do not touch it (Salvador Dalí)   In January 1973, psychologist David Rosenhan revealed the results of an experiment he had been carrying out in order to demonstrate the validity of psychiatric diagnosis and the resulting admission to psychiatric institutions. To this end, Professor Rosenhan managed to introduce nine false patients – volunteers and his colleagues – into different American psychiatric institutions claiming to suffer auditory hallucinations – they said they heard the sound “thud” -, an onomatopoeia in the English language that represents the sound made by an undetermined object when it falls, thus achieving admission for an average of nineteen days. The only way these volunteers or false patients managed to be discharged was by agreeing with the psychiatrists, admitting to suffering from the schizophrenia that they were diagnosed with, pretending to be cured in order to finally be able to be discharged or released after treatment wit...