http://www.alchemyrevealed.com/node/15
by Mark Berry
(Fortean Times, Issue #235, June 2008)
(Note from Art Kunkin: This English magazine article has been
formatted into a one column width to be more readable on your
computer and require less scrolling. In the course of the retyping, I
have taken the opportunity and liberty of adding for the benefit of
the reader a few lines of scientific clarification to this splendid
and accurate presentation by Mark Berry. www.alchemyrevealed.com)
--
Mark Berry meets Art Kunkin, self-styled 'King of the Hippies', and
discovers that, far from having abandoned his Sixties ideals, the
legendary creator of The Los Angeles Free Press is gearing up for immortality.
--
"I would have shown you Timothy Leary's ashes, but I think I've lost
them," admits metaphysical guru Art Kunkin. "Or maybe they've been
stolen. I'm sure they'll turn up."
The sprightly 79-year-old points in the direction of a huge pile of
papers and a three foot-high golden statue of Buddha where the
remains of the legendary counterculture figure were last seen. The
creator of The Los Angeles Free Press, the broadsheet paper first
published in 1964 and considered by many as the original Beatnik
Bible, now lives tucked away in a trailer at The Institute of
Mentalphysics, a heady retreat in the hippie mecca of Joshua Tree,
California. Surrounded by a mountain of literature, folk records,
laboratory equipment and spiritual paraphernalia, Art studies
alchemical science while continuing to write on social and political concerns.
Known affectionately by its jazz and cigarette-smoking coffeee house
readership as '"The Freep,"the LA Free Press was one of the most
widely distributed underground newspapers of the Sixties (eventually
circulating 120,000 copies a week). It broke journalistic ground by
rigorously questioning the the actions of the government, promoting
personal freedoms such as the legalization of marijuana and being
actively involved in all the major left-wing counter-cultural
movements, from Civil Rights to Vietnam. The Free Press championed
Timothy Leary's experimentation with psychedelic drugs and boasted
the likes of boozy Charles Bukowski as one of its regular columnists.
Its 20,000- strong fundraising concerts, complete with clouds of
cannabis, featured the Mothers of Invention's first live performance
and the paper was responsible for spawning LA's Beatnik coffee scene
by having its office in the back of a smoky café on Sunset Strip.
The Freep was the kind of paper that published a list of all the
narcotic agents in California (complete with home addresses), got
sued both by the State (for $25 million) and the Narcs for invasion
of privacy, and took the whole sorry mess to the Supreme Court to
somehow emerge as a triumphant victor.
For the last 30 years though, Art has been continuing the Sixties
quest for spiritual enlightenment through the use of drugs -- not
through narcotics but by studying alchemy in the hope of discovering
the Philosopher's Stone, the legendary substance that was reputedly
capable of turning base metals into gold and unlocking the door to immortality.
His quest began in 1980, when he traveled on a journalistic
assignment to Salt Lake City to interview the alchemist Frater
Albertus at the Paracelsus Research Society. So impressed was he with
the alchemist's experiments, Art joined the famed school, which
boasted that it provided access to teachings previously available
only to members of a secret society or fraternity. Art completed the
seven year apprenticeship at PRS and became editor of its alchemical
magazine, Essentia.
"Frater Albertus -- Brother Albert, the term 'Frater' comes from the
Rosicrucian tradition -- taught how to make herbal medicines in a
totally different way," explains Art. "His idea based on the work of
ancient alchemists was that if you made a separation of a plant (into
its oil, minerals and alcohol 'spirit') and were capable of putting
these components back together and preserving its life, then at the
end of the process you would not only wind up with a medicine, you
would end up with something alive, an alchemical Herbal Stone. The
whole theory of alchemy is that the most basic principle of life can
be found in the elemental mineral kingdom -- that minerals are really
alive and thus evolve one into another over long periods of time. If
you can extract the life principle from a mineral, then you could
prove you had this life energy by changing one metal into another
through a rapid transmutation and, finally, you could process the
mineral life energy further into a medicine to rejuvenate the human
body. This is the Philosopher's Stone."
"For thirty years, I collected a library of 1,000 alchemical books
and I began experimenting and replicating the methods in the ancient
documents. But nothing was successful. I worked with mercury, lead
and antimony (the latter features heavily in the works of the
alchemical monks) and still nothing. The only thing that kept me
going was a book I found in 1980 titled Biological Transmutations by
a French scientist, Louis Kervran. This book showed a metallic
transmutation from manganese into iron using a soil bacteria -- it
wasn't one of the old alchemical books that talked of distillations
and other chemical processes. I replicated Kervran's work using a
soil bacteria called Leptothrix that I found in a mud puddle at UCLA.
After feeding the bacteria manganese, the bacteria transmuted the
manganese into iron (and I realized then in 1980, having seen this
transmutation, that there might be truth in the legends of alchemy.
That initial success is what has kept me going these past almost
thirty years)."
Although the would-be alchemist had been successful in using soil
bacteria to turn manganese into iron (a transmutation that he
discovered was also replicated by a U.S. Army research group in
Virginia when it was researching new kinds of batteries because
Kervran's bacterial process produces surplus energy), Art isn't
interested in getting rich with mountains of precious metals. In his
autumn years, he's more concerned with extending human life and
invigorating his body with new energy.
Incredibly, by pulling together the strands of his research, he now
believes he has created the mythical Philosopher's Stone, and for the
last year has been preparing and eating a special herbal medicine
with startling results. Art has just released an e-Book, Alchemy, The
Secret of Immortality Finally Revealed, so that the whole world can
have the chance to live forever. He also maintains that this public
disclosure of information means that any clandestine powers also
wanting immortality (like the ruling military-industrial complex) are
less likely to try and bump him off.
"I'm almost 100 per cent sure I've succeeded," he beams, with a
youthful glint in his eye. "Two years ago, I got an email from Albert
Cau in Paris, a French professor of chemistry who wanted to share his
work with me. He was working with a mineral that no alchemist had
ever specified because it was a mineral emitting an invisible energy.
No alchemist in the Middle Ages or earlier could even detect this
radioactivity. Therefore, gold and platinum miners would dig up this
mineral and then throw it away. It's called Pitchblende and consists
of uranium oxide. It looks like an ordinary rock with absolutely no
value but is giving off a steady flow of low-level nuclear radiation.
Radiation is all around us, much from the Sun, and radiation from
inorganic mineral elements like Pitchblende is probably responsible
for the evolution of plant and animal life."
"To determine how ancient peoples could have known about radiation, I
also studied the works of Zechariah Sitchin. He is a competent
scientific researcher and linguist who has found evidence that there
was a knowledge of radiation on earth 300 or 400,000 years ago before
humans even existed here. At first glance this is a bizarre theory,
but Sitchin shows that Sumerian documents of 8,000 years ago speak of
people previously coming from another planet in our solar system and
needing a workforce to mine gold. The Sumerian documents then tell
about these ancient astronauts extracting semen from a male animal on
earth and genetically combining it with an egg from a woman on the
spaceship to eventually create their desired intelligent workforce.
In other words, the earliest human writings tell of genetic
experiments that modern laboratories are only now able to do. Beings
that could do this level of genetic experimentation also knew about
radiation, according to the Sumerian documents, and even conducted
wars with each other using nuclear weapons. As proof, Sitchin has
discovered in the Middle East, at the site of one of these ancient
wars, the vitrified glass characteristic of a nuclear explosion. It's
totally anachronistic, (taking place before humans existed). He also
has drawings that show the use of radioactive instruments and
radioactive healing in Sumeria, centuries before the Christian era."
"If Sitchin's history is correct (and I believe it to be correct in
its essentials), this would explain how alchemy and religion first
started, that the first humans observed and learned from a master
race capable of working with metals who could seemingly create life,"
surmises Art. "Later alchemical legends, some found in the
Judaic-Christian Bible, tell of beings who lived for 1,000 years.
History also shows that there was even some one traveling around
medieval Europe doing demonstrations of metallic transmutations. For
example, there are European museums that actually contain alchemical
gold, metal that hasn't been mined as proven by the fact that this
gold has a different specific gravity than mined gold. There are
objects made out of this 'artificial gold' and nobody has been able
to explain these artifacts. My theory is that if a very ancient
civilization existed where nuclear energy and genetic work were
known, this knowledge may eventually have become the property of
priests who secretly transmitted it from one generation to another
until finally it was lost and forgotten. That knowledge was passed on
through ancient Egypt and various clandestine societies (Gnostics,
Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Templars, etc.) until the secrets of
Pitchblende and radiation were lost. This is a strange theory but I
recommend that people interested in these subjects read Sitchin carefully."
"In recent years, corroborating evidence has arisen that shows
low-level doses of radiation could be beneficial rather than harmful
to the human body. For example, an article in National Geographic of
January 2004 revealed that a number of purported 'miracle cures' have
been happening in underground mines in Montana. Doctors there are
even signing medical prescriptions permitting people to sit inside
the mine for several hours a day to improve their health by exposure
to the low-level radiation produced by the large amounts of radon gas
found there (450 times the amount specified by the U.S. government as
healthy)."
"There is a lot of research that a certain level of radiation is good
for you -- somewhat like homeopathic medicine where a large amount of
a substance can be toxic but a small amount of that same substance
can be healing," notes Art. "A very small increased amount of
radiation thus seems to be healthy for the human body. For example,
researchers have discovered that in Japan there are pockets of people
who are super healthy although, obviously, many people died from the
atomic explosions there. Evidently, these very healthy people
received an increased dose of healing radiation that was not enough
to injure or kill them. Then there are the spas in Europe where
people have been bathing for hundreds of years because of the healing
properties of that water. Up until now the healing was thought to
occur because of the sulphur in the heated waters. But all those
baths are now advertised in Europe as containing radon gas and being
radioactive. I have been collecting their brochures. (Note by Art
Kunkin: The reader can verify this material on the internet by
entering the keywords 'radiation hormesis' into a search engine like
Google or Yahoo). "
"In other words, humans seem to suffer from a radiation deficiency.
And all the ancient legends about humans needing special yogic
breathing exercises to draw on invisible sources of energy such as
'prana' or 'chi' may be due to an ancient and lost knowledge about
this radiation deficiency. Up to now I know of no one in any
spiritual movement or the scientific community besides myself who is
equating 'prana or chi' with the invisible field of natural radiation
that is all around us; no one else who is saying that we can extend
our lives and possibly become immortals with enough added
radiation-prana--chi."
In his studies, Art found that the U.S. Army's research into the
mechanism by which soil bacteria turned manganese into iron focused
on the mitochondria inside the cells of the bacteria. Mitochondria
are the organelles in all living cells that absorb the ever present
low-level radiation in the environment to make adenosine
triphosphate, or ATP, the substance used by living cells for
metabolic energy. Art combined this modern scientific insight of a
biological "battery" in the cell with his knowledge that the ancient
alchemical texts speak of a 'Secret Fire' necessary to create the
Philosopher's Stone and that this Stone was eaten in the form of
fruit. So Art began experimenting with adding apples and pears into
his Pitchblende concoction.
"It's a very simple procedure. I have a jug full of Pitchblende rocks
and I put a pear (or apple) on top of the rocks. (See photograph with
this article). The fruit itself doesn't become radioactive and
cancer-producing (I have carefully checked this with experts in
radioactive minerals) but it is heated and energized. I've been
eating this radioactive-treated fruit every week for nearly a year
now (Editor's Note: two years now), admittedly taking a risk
initially because I really don't have means yet of measuring the
radioactivity. Since I am now pushing 80 years of age, I felt I could
take this risk. However, the results have been entirely good so far
and several doctors have now offered to monitor my future health. I
will be sending research reports about this to all purchasers of my eBook."
"I should add that the latest theory of aging has to do with
mitochondria, that they are the source of life and energy in the body
but that they kill themselves and then the entire body by producing
dangerous free radicals in the process of producing the ATP. What I
am assuming is that the radiation from the Pitchblende is
beneficially affecting the mitochondria inside the pear, helping
those mitochondria to reproduce properly for more than the 50 times
known as the Hayflick Limit for human cells. (Note by Art Kunkin:
It's very interesting to know that human cells don't have to die
after reaching the Hayflick Limit. For example, cancer cells are
immortal. The problem with cancer cells is not their immortality but
that they grow in one place, thus causing a tumor and unbalancing the
metabolism of the body). Then this 'immortality' or life extension is
then transferred to the mitochondria inside the human cell. Thus when
you eat this magic fruit, this alchemical Philosopher's Stone, you
are taking in substances that add to your own energy, directly from
the inside. This conforms to the legends about the apples on the Tree
of Life in the Bible, the magic Date Trees of the Middle East, and
the Pears and Plums known in the Far East as the fruits of
immortality. I believe these legends stem from actual trees that grew
in radioactive soil."
Kunkin, the modern-day alchemist, says he's achieved some startling
effects from his magic pears and apples. Already sporting a thicker
head of hair than the average 20-year-old, he now claims it grows
twice as fast. So do his fingernails. He's admittedly a workaholic,
but his everyday energy has now increased to the point where he has
been known to sit at his computer for 30 hours straight without
eating or sleeping. With one previous purported owner of a
Philosopher's Stone being the infamous Count St Germain (who hinted
at being centuries old; see Fortean Times 146:40-44), perhaps this
freethinking mover and shaker in Joshua Tree may now have all the
necessary tools to complete the task started by his progressive
Flower Power peers back in the Sixties. But in a world of war and
injustice, why would a peace-loving hippie want to live indefinitely.
"One of our problems is that people die when they are just getting
mature. Our lifetimes are just too short. Hopefully, if we can become
more adult then a lot of social problems cans be solved. Of course,
if I'm right, the Philosopher's Stone is also going to cause a lot of
social problems. If people live for 200 years or more, overpopulation
may be a result - the system of capitalism is going to have to change."
It's commendable that Art continues to pursue the hippie ideals of
his Free Press heyday while so many of his peers have exchanged pot
for profit, renouncing their peace-and-love dreams for lives of
capitalistic excess. Art describes his position as the editor and
creator of 'The Freep' as being in the center of a spider's web,
feeling the impulses of the underground culture and collecting Beat
writers and anti-establishment legends like flies. Firm friends with
figureheads like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Art and his
'Freep' were in the thick of every historical event of the Sixties.
It was a paper of record, existing in a time of political
demonstrations by students, the growth of the feminist and anti-war
movement and experiments with psychedelic drugs like LSD. "I was the
King of the Hippies," he declares. Although Art lost financial
control of the LA Free Press in 1980 (Editor's Note: Actually Art
went bankrupt at the beginning of the 70s because a newspaper
printing press he purchased was defective), the radical broadsheet is
now back in the hands of its creator, once again tackling the issues
of the day and acting as a catalyst for social change.
With a bell jar brimming with herbal medicine that might prolong his
life indefinitely, who can say how much more the septuagenarian Art
Kunkin might still accomplish.
--
More information about Art Kunkin and his eBook, "Alchemy Secrets of
Life Extension Finally Revealed," can be obtained at his websites,
www.alchemyrevealed.com
www.Life-Extension-Today.com
www.losangelesfreepress.com
.
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