“Ignorance is the worst form of disease, and that which heals ignorance is therefore the most potent of all medicines.”  –
Manly P. Hall – The Secret Teachings of all Ages

About the Author

    The purpose of presenting this section is to introduce myself to the reader. Often when I read a book, I like to know the reason the author wrote the book in the first place and what qualifies them to write the material they chose to write about. Having never attended college, with no educational background to write on this subject matter which I can point to and claim any “degree” of status, I figured a short description of the events in my life which led to the creation of this book, would be in order.
    Having searched for knowledge my entire life and never being completely satisfied with any truth or information I was given, I’ve had to hack the matrix to learn firsthand about the nature of reality. I’ve always had a steadfast determination to seek out esoteric and strange facts, ideas and information. I would always read through all the metaphysical book titles in bookstores and every day, I read the headlines of news from around the world. I’ve always had a thirst or hunger for information that goes deeper than anything given to the public. I’ve held an understanding that we are being lied to from a very early age. Possibly my greatest ally in my fight to learn the truth has been my internal distrust of all major news and events around me. Anytime I start to recognize the status quo, I realize, that is not the reality I desire to participate in. That is the “manufactured reality.”
    Religion has always been a subject that has turned me off. I grew up in a Jewish household with very little emphasis on religion and I was never pushed to involve myself much in Hebrew school. The idea that there could be an image of “God” that everyone shared was silly to me. I believed in reincarnation, ghosts, supernatural and psychic powers of magic from a very early age and there was little anyone could do to convince me otherwise. I had a very active imagination as well and I kept an open mind through my youth into adulthood.
    By the time I was 11 years old, I had seen almost every science fiction and horror film made. As a kid, I was a monster freak, with a fascination for dinosaurs and everything reptilian but also a bend towards the good old fashioned black and white horror of The Wolfman, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Abominable Dr. Phibes. I loved Ray Harryhausen, especially The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and The Clash of the Titans.  Star Wars was a favorite of course, along with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Alien. This led me to experiment with ouija boards. I developed a relationship with a “ghost friend,” who I used to play with by asking “Running Fox” (a deceased Sioux Indian boy) to throw objects around the room, which he happily did for me, each time I requested this. This went on for a couple years until I gave up interest. I learned a lot about the supernatural from these experiences.

    My early teenage years were spent either catching snakes in the Florida everglades or smoking a lot of cannabis. By the time I turned 15, I had tried LSD on more than one occasion. I had read books on the subject and especially enjoyed Acid Dreams, LSD, the CIA and the Sixties Rebellion. That book convinced me I had to try it. Especially weary of mind control and insisting that I was determined never to allow my mind to be controlled, I worked a path of taking control of it myself so others could not use it against me. This means I started studying secret histories and conspiracies while I was taking psychedelics and by the age of seventeen, I was attending Grateful Dead concerts. When I graduated high school in 1987, a thesis for my government class was a study on Iran Contra and the Senate Hearings, based on the video called Cover-up, Behind the Iran Contra Affair.
    After graduation from Grant High in 1987, I went to work canvassing for the Los Angeles office of Greenpeace for two years from 1988 until 1990. It was here that I met a lot of great people including several “deadheads.” One of my favorite people there was a kind older woman who everyone considered to be like grandma. She was tough and slightly heavy set, with a deep spiritual glint in her eye. She was the last person you would want to catch you littering. It was this lady who gave me a tape of John Lear and Bill Cooper. I remember her telling me something like, “You’re the kind of person who might be interested in this. You’re into some pretty weird stuff.” This was before Behold a Pale Horse was published. This led me to the UFO expo in Los Angeles in 1990 and meeting Bill Cooper in person, along with Jordan Maxwell. (At the same time, yet.) Bill was an ex-Navy serviceman who had caught a glimpse of some “Top Secret” Majestic UFO files he was not supposed to see. Cooper believed, along with John Lear, that the US government had an ongoing secret treaty with extraterrestrials, and this was all tied to a genetic engineering “hybrid” human program. I was not sure what to believe at this point, but I was young and impressionable and would have bought into anything, for a moment at least, to consider its possibility.
    Around late 1990, I read an article that completely changed my perception of environmental politics, titled “Who Owns the Environmentalist Movement?” in Leading Edge Research publications. This article outlined corporate control over the largest and most effective environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. I was disappointed to learn I was being used, albeit for somewhat of a good purpose. I could not help but feel a little upset that the majority of the funds raised on the turf while house to house canvassing, went towards administrative costs. Reading this article though just helped confirm to me that I could be placing my energy in more effective places and accomplishing much more.

    In January 1991, I read an article about hemp in High Times magazine, and everything hemp could do to save the planet; being an earth activist, this intrigued me. I met Jack Herer at a Grateful Dead Shoreline show in 1990 and he gave me a free copy of his book. I read it and in March, 1991, I quite Greenpeace and joined Jack Herer’s organization (HEMP – Help Eliminate Marijuana Prohibition) to volunteer to help legalize cannabis and hemp completely (not like this bullshit Prop. 64) and became the top signature gatherer for both the 1991 and 1994 hemp initiatives in California. For seven years, from 1992-1999, I ran a hemp booth with Jack’s organization on Venice Beach educating people about hemp and cannabis and eventually participating in the signature collection effort for 1996 for hemp legalization and the first medical marijuana initiative in California with Dennis Peron.
    Around 1992 or so, shortly after meeting Jack, he introduced me to the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John Allegro. Jordan Maxwell was my first introduction to esoteric knowledge concerning the church and Jesus Christ, and after meeting Jack and learning about Allegro’s information, that Jesus was supposedly a mushroom, I was a little confused as to which was correct. Was Jesus the Sun or was Jesus a mushroom? This question kept popping up and bothering me so I figured it must have been both at one time or another, but I didn’t know where to go to investigate this too much further.
    When Jack passed away, in 2010, Jack was living up at Eddy Lepp’s place in Lake County and he was in the process of writing a book to be titled “Jesus was a Mushroom.” Jack once told me something that really struck me. He said, “My purpose in this world is not the legalization of marijuana, as much as I’m here to teach people that Jesus was a mushroom!” In other words, Jack felt his greater purpose after legalization, would be to help the world learn about the mushroom, which he felt deep down, was even more important than cannabis legalization. Jack would scream about Rome and how the world had to believe the moon was made of green cheese and it was only twenty miles from the earth, or they would put you to death if you didn’t believe it. He would tell us all how one neighbor could just tell the authorities that you didn’t believe it and they would come raid your home and take you away. He would embellish these stories a little bit, I think, for dramatic effect. He also had a tremendous sense of humor. Jack was the greatest activist that ever lived, and I was fortunate enough to have spent a good deal of time with him over a twenty-year period. Editions of the Emperor signed directly to me, as a fellow activist, are some of my dearest possessions to this day and I miss him every day. I lost my father at age 13, and I met Jack when I was 21 or 22. Jack was like a father to me and taught me a lot just by being around him and seeing his passion and energy to inform and teach. The thing I think we had in common the most, besides a sense of humor, was our desire to change the world, and leave it in a better state than when we

arrived.
     In 1994, my girlfriend at the time, Ginger Greco, and I, visited Lamy, N.M., on the way back to California on Grateful Dead tour and stayed with William Lyne for two days while we shot a video interview for over four hours with the author of Space Aliens from the Pentagon. I had a high degree of interest in UFOs and Bill Lyne claimed that it was all a mind control plot by the Nazis and CIA to keep the “free energy” Nikola Tesla flying saucer project a secret. Whoa! I had to investigate this. I met Bill and got a signed first edition of Space Aliens from the Pentagon and had the opportunity to hold a German WWII flying saucer compass. That was exciting!
    In 1997, I built and launched a website called FreedomDomain.com which, for a while, was a pretty large website for conspiracy theories and truth research. There was a lot of research on secret societies, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the New World Order as well as all subjects of the weird and paranormal. I promoted information about alternative therapies including hemp and cannabis. Other subjects included mind and population control, sacred geometry, ancient and lost knowledge, secret symbolism, esoteric facts and stories, along with some of my personal writings on a variety of subjects which was usually just philosophical rants on strange subject matter. I have always been opposed to power monopolies and I’ve had a growing resentment toward the patriarchy which has led society into madness such as ecological destruction and war. Basically, I think I have made a life’s hobby and job of “subverting the dominant paradigm.” By 2011, I was getting over 10,000 hits per day on FreedomDomain.com, but I was also getting to the point where my mind was changing on various subjects and the site was just too big to change everything so I shut it down.

    I think one of my accomplishments at the time was making the listing of “Anti-Masons” on a main Freemasonry website, MasonicInfo.com, where they actually gave me my own special section and described my Hemp booth on Venice Beach:
    “Josh Bempechat – If you’re in Venice Beach, California, you can visit Josh’s ‘legalization of hemp/marijuana and political conspiracy’ stand.  Mr. Bempechat claims to have discovered the medicinal properties of marijuana at age 13 and since then has actively used it for – as he claims – “medical reasons.” He also states “HEMP / Cannabis Marijuana was outlawed directly by the Freemasons in this country <the United States> and internationally for the sole purpose of creating synthetic petrochemical and pharmaceutical alternatives that they could sell through multinational corporations they control, at highly inflated prices.” and he adds “BUT, when the FREEMASONS find it in their interest to get rid of something for profit and power, it doesn’t matter if GOD put it there, it won’t get in the way of business as usual for the FREEMASONS.” As of 2002, he was proud to note that he had been studying the sovereignty and redemptionist movements for some 7 years. We’re naturally curious as to how someone so involved with illegal drugs (he claims, on doctor’s orders but fails to say what medical condition necessitates this and the person he claims as his ‘doctor’ was disqualified as a court witness as being merely a shill for marijuana users) and who ekes out a living by selling brochures at a stand on a pier (apparently for the past several years) is able to uncover these hugely secret world conspiracies. His “Freedom Domain” website will tell you all about them though.”
    Well, not many people can ever reach that achievement in their lifetimes, so I have to congratulate myself for that one, at only 27-29 years old. It’s funny to me to look back on that now, because just as I claimed them to be opportunistic before, now look at US decriminalization and as I write this, prior to going to press, the House has passed a bill to completely legalize hemp and cannabis on the federal level. Freemason opportunists. Nothing ever changes. Now they can tax and attempt to regulate it, it’s one more notch on their “control belt.” I’ve always felt like someone needs to hold them accountable for all their negative actions, but, since those olden days of my slightly naive activist youth, I’ve learned about a lot of good things they have done, too, so if I’m going to hold them accountable for the negative, I should at least credit them for the positive. It’s the fair thing to do, and fair is square, even though they tried to paint me as a common drug dealer, when I was making legit money collecting signatures for other campaigns and selling books and t-shirts.
    In 1999, I went through a series of seven arrests for all kinds of charges related to my activism, and the police wanted me out of Los Angeles for good. None of those charges stuck, but it taught me that I really wanted to spend my life being sovereign and free and that mean dealing with courts and police as little as possible.

Next Page – Introduction

    In 2000, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began working closely with medical cannabis clubs as I began studying alchemy and cannabinoid science. In 2011, I released the first instructional DVD that taught people how to make “Amber Glass,” “Shatter” and “Winterized Wax,” called “Medicinal Alchemy,” for which I was interviewed by High Times Magazine in an article titled, Cleaning up Concentrates.
    In April 2008, I wrote a book titled The Politics of Pot: A Study of Facts and Fictions, which dealt with my activism and understanding of sovereignty, law and the inner workings of the system in relation to commerce and contract law, but I was informed by a psychic I trusted and consulted on occasion, this information is potentially dangerous to share at this time, but there will be a time in the future when a lot of people will know what you are talking about, and then it will be a good time to release it. I self-printed them and sold about 20 copies to friends, but that was it, for the time.
    That was the last exciting noteworthy event before 2015-2016 and my Near Death Experience.
    On Valentine’s Day of 2018, inspiration started flowing through and I penned a poem I titled “The Key to the Mysteries,” presented at the end of this book. This is a shamanic initiation of sorts. It’s a simple 127 cypher. Each word tells its own story, then in combination, going down the list, the entire story of the mushroom, is told, as conveyed in this book.
    It was all of these events in my life which shaped me in ways which led to the creation of this book.
   While I was finishing this book, I was inspired to take the knowledge I acquired writing this book, concerning professional research accumulation and organization and apply it to The Politics of Pot, so I went back and cleaned up the old book, and revised it, including all kinds of new information and now I’m getting ready to release it in the not too distant future.