We are saddened to report that Bouncing Bear Botanicals- a well known supplier of legal Allies- has been raided, and the owner taken into custody.
Jonathan Sloan was taken into custody by local authorities and charged with eight felonies (the majority of which are for (manufacturing, cultivating or distributing a controlled substance).
Authorities raided the Bouncing Bear Botanical warehouse.
We here at FleshCap see Johathan Sloan as another fallen hero in the quest for spiritual freedom. It’s people like Sloan who put there freedom on the line so that countless others may have access to the experiences of the Allies.
A website and support fund for Sloan has been established. Click here to find out what you can do to help.
March 9, 2010
By Sergeant Spore
We all understand the importance of setting while journeying with the Allies. A proper setting is a place where one can feel safe and relax into the other dimensions that the Allies carry you to. In our search for safe havens, one place has emerged as a sacred place, Joshua Tree.
This past weekend, FleshCap returned to Joshua Tree, a sacred place where we can safely journey with the Allies.
If you haven’t experienced Joshua Tree through the lens of an Ally, then you must simply take our word for it. Joshua Tree is sacred. There is without doubt an otherworldy presence in this desert. Universal lessons can be learned from simply observing the desert in action. See for yourself how new Joshua Trees are formed from the dead and decaying matter of a fallen tree. Witness the intricate web of life in the manner that certain cacti grows only in the presence of another.
Joshua Tree is our sacred place. It is the place I first introduced my girlfriend Lucy to the ways of the Allies. It is a place I found after endlessly searching for a safe place to journey. It is a place where many of us have safely lost ourselves. It is a place I would like to share with the rest of you.
November 18, 2009
- Mark Henson’s “Temple of Transmutations” reflects a wisdom often revealed through the psychedelic experience.
We’re way late on our homework, but it’s finally here. After weeks and weeks of research, we at FleshCap have finally put together a list of Top 10 Psychedelic Artists.
With all the great artists, it was difficult to narrow down the list to just ten. The ones we selected have two things in common: they have been deeply moved by the psychedelic experience, and they do a great job of communicating the experience to their audience.
We had a great time putting together the list and discovered many great artists in the process. Feel free to comment and we hope you enjoy.
Click here to view the list of Top 10 Psychedelic Artists!
November 11, 2009
Los Angeles is highly regarded by ravers world wide for the enormous massives that take place here. Not only are the events big, but the L.A. rave culture is noted for having an energy and a purity found in few other scenes. If you don’t rave, or if you only get out to a few events a year, Monster Massive needs to be one of your picks.
Thousands gather to become one organism and climb together to the next level of conciousness.
Something magical and mysterious happens when we all join together. If you’ve been there, then maybe you’ve experienced it too. Some theorize that the raves are allowing us to join together like one massive organism so that we may experience a higher plane of consciousness. Some even say that as the events progress, they are carrying us closer to the next dimension.
While not everyone who attends raves understands the transformation of conciousness that occurs there, enough people do understand to make raving a spiritual act. Those of you who understand the message that we put out realize that the plants and substances we consume are more than what they appear to be. They are essentially tools that we can use on this spiritual journey that we’ve ventured out on.
In order for us to reach the next level we need to continue to gather. Every person who makes it out does there part in propelling us forward into the next dimension. We hope to see you at Monster Massive this Saturday climbing higher on to the next level.
October 27, 2009
FleshCap is currently compiling a list of the top psychedelic artists of all time. There is a large number of artists that could make this list, but FleshCap is looking for your help in determining the handful of artists that have truly made an impact on psychedelic culture.
This piece "Mantis" is by contemporary psychedelic artist Luke Brown. See more of his "visions" at www.spectraleyes.com.
The “experience” delivered to us through the Allies is often best shared through visual art rather than words. What artists have done the best job in communicating this magical message?
Please help us by sending in your nomination to: contact@fleshcap.com
The list will be posted on Monday, November 2, 2009. In the mean time check out Luke Brown’s gallery of “visions”.
October 13, 2009
For the first time in over thirty years, the U.S. Food and Drug administration has approved a research study using LSD.
Since the 1960’s, world governments have waged a socio-political war against all psychedelics. Some have even called it a spiritual war, arguing that the government is limiting the spiritual pursuit of its people. Call it what you will, but years of biased government propaganda has effectively tarnished public opinion regarding such substances.
Despite the grim outlook for psychedelics, there are those who refused to give up. The passing of time and the undaunting work of psychedelic advocates has brought LSD back to the laboratory.
In his final days, LSD's discoverer Albert Hoffman called upon Apple Computer's Steve Jobs to make a donation towards studies involving psychedelics.
Rick Doblin, president of the psychedelic research organization called MAPS, believes that we are recovering from a “forty year backlash towards psychedelics”. He may be right. Public opinion regarding psychedelics seems to be evolving into a more open minded state. The FDA’s most recent move of approving a study using LSD is an indicator of this evolution of attitude.
There is still a long way to go before psychedelics are integrated into our culture. From this vantage point, it even seems unlikely that psychedelics will ever be fully accepted by secular culture. Legal or not, psychedelics have and will continue to ” reveal that reality is far more mutable, capacious, and capricious, than we generally allow ourselves to imagine,” as stated by Daniel Pinchbeck.
Click here to read the news story, “LSD’s Long Strange Trip Back into the Lab” as written by the San Francisco Chronicle.
October 7, 2009
By the time September hits each year, the seekers of Southern California are hungry for another one of Insomniac’s transdimensional events. Be hungry no longer. This Saturday September 26, Insomniac opens it’s gates to the 15th annual Nocturnal Festival.
Nocturnal Festival 2008
For those who didn’t get out to Burning Man or one of the other Summer time events, the time span between Electric Daisy Carnival to the Nocturnal Festival can seem like an eternity. Even if you did manage to get out to an epic event such as Burning Man, the Nocturnal Festival offers you a great opportunity to Decompress- a process familiar to all Burners who miss the playa and need to be weened off the experience.
Despite their numerous differences, events such as Nocturnal and Burning Man share so much in spirit. Being a veteran of both events, I can attest to the small group of people that dwell in both scenes. In fact, last year’s Nocturnal Festival featured a well known Mutant vehicle seen on the Burning Man Playa. These people who dwell in both scenes help unite the spirit of everyone and to create a unified psychedelic community.
It is the work of these individuals that is currently developing a worldwide psychedelic culture. Each scene has its different flavor, but at the core of each scene is pursuit for spiritual liberation.
Venture with us this weekend on a spiritual flight of the underworld known as the Nocturnal Festival. If you don’t think it’s your scene, think again…we are all seekers here.
September 22, 2009
Burning Man may have ended two weeks ago, but as with every Burning Man festival, the events of the playa will stick with us for life. This years theme “Evolution” has lived up to its promise to transform all of those present. Thousands of Burners left Black Rock City this year more aware, more in tune, more human.
Burning Man 2009 Evolution
A friend of ours emailed us an article shortly after the event. In my opinion, it is one of the best articles ever written about the magical-mystical event we call Burning man. We would like to share it with all of you.
By: Jay Michaelson: Columnist for the Forward
“Really?” the guy at the Alamo Rental Car place said, when I’d told him about Burning Man. “I heard it was just a lot of naked people running around on drugs.”
Coated in gypsum dust, and still high not on drugs but on the altered consciousness of radical creativity and community, I had just tried to describe what Burning Man is, somehow. I think I’d said something like, “It’s a temporary city of 50,000 people, devoted to radical self-expression. So you’ll find anything you’d find in a regular city — art museums, dance clubs, yoga studios — only in the middle of the desert, with no money, and with more creativity than you’ve ever seen.”
Of the two descriptions, surely Rental Car Guy’s is the more familiar. When Adam Lambert revealed that he’d gotten the idea to go on American Idol while on mushrooms at Burning Man, America groaned. The image, I assume, was of a drugged-out weirdo coming up with a loopy idea in the middle of wild, crazy party.
The truth, though, is that Burning Man is an ideal place for self-reflection and self-transformation, whether substance-aided or not, and as someone who’s just gotten back from his 8th Burn, Lambert’s revelation didn’t surprise me a bit. Friends of mine have changed their names, their professions, and their entire lives at Burning Man. And not because they were stoned or tripping, but because Black Rock City — the temporary city (built and erased within a month) where the event goes on every year, the week before Labor Day — has a tendency to expand horizons, reveal possibilities, and question the assumptions most of us make about how we’re supposed to live our lives.
Burning Man does this, I think, because of a combination of factors. One of them is the sheer size and scope of the thing. 50,000 people. Hundreds of cars and trucks modified to look like dragons, whales, radios, and steamboats; many breathing fire; most with dozens of revelers dancing on them. It’s like “Mad Max” meets “Blade Runner” meets “The Ten Commandments,” and it’s real, it’s actually happening.
And it’s happening without capitalism. There’s no vending at Burning Man — it’s a gift economy. Entire “theme camps” exist just to give away spaghetti, to serve people free margaritas, to make pancakes. Yes, it does cost a lot to get in (between $150-350), but that mostly pays for the rental of the land from the government, the porta-potties and other infrastructure, and grants made to large-scale art projects. No one — not the celebrity DJs who were there this year, like Armin van Buuren and Carl Cox, and not the people who build the solar electrical grid — gets paid. No one is making a buck.
This is incredibly liberating. It’s not sustainable, but it is a temporary autonomous zone of bullshit-free living. And just being there, just participating in the creation of an entire city devoted to what we want to do, rather than what we have to do to make money, has the tendency to invite self-reflection like Lampert’s. Who am I? What do I really want to be doing? If people can create a twelve-ton sculpture of a bird’s nest made entirely out of plumbing pipe, what are the limits on my own creativity? “Once you are free,” said Baudrillard, “you are forced to ask who you are.”
The freedom is more than just freedom from conventional economic life, though. Yes, there are some naked people running around on drugs, because the culture of Black Rock City is a very, very liberal one. (It’s not free of law enforcement — this year in particular, I heard many stories of people being busted for drugs, and for giving alcohol to minor-aged-looking undercover cops.) Of course, how people choose to exercise that freedom is up to them. For every NPRAOD, I’d guess there are two people wishing they had the courage to do so, one person playing the violin on a sofabed in the middle of a desert, two people cooking pumpkin ravioli, and another person writing the name of her beloved on the wooden walls of the Temple — this year a three-story, Lotus-shaped construction just north of the center of the city, that was burned last Sunday night.
Of course, we don’t hear about these other people, which, to me, says more about the puerility of the default world than the sexuality of Black Rock City. It’s as if radical self expression is boring, but if it means naked people on drugs, then it’s titillating, easy to condemn — and also comprehensible. Oh, I get it.
You don’t get it. You don’t get what it’s like to have 50,000 people circle around a wooden effigy, with 1000 people spinning fire and 500 more playing drums, all encircled by 200 art cars — and then all roaring in unison as the effigy is set afire. You might think you get it, and it may scare or tempt or delight you, but I assure you, you don’t get it. None of us do, because it’s not about any one thing in particular; “it” can be an orgiastic celebration, or the sad mourning of a lost loved one. Or a warm, hippie-like community. Or a mean, Mad-Max-like apocalypse. “It” is chiefly a space in which all these things are possible.
The temporary erasure of societal, social, and personal boundaries is, for most of us, terrifying. Such boundaries help build the structures of society and self; they give form to human life, which is often chaotic and unpredictable. Thus they have been the bedrock of religious and civil life for millennia, even before the Furies were imprisoned under Athens, and Moses descended from Sinai.
But if religion creates boundaries, mysticism and spirituality efface them. In the transcendence of ordinary distinctions, peak experiences such as those encouraged at Burning Man give a glimpse of the ultimate, the infinite. It may seem absurd to suggest that Burning Man is a mystical event. But then, if it’s just a big party, why is there a temple in the middle of it?
September 16, 2009
