At 10/31/09 06:25 AM, Snake-Arsenic wrote:
others and even get an unhealthy dose of post traumatic disorders.
never done that during a "bad trip"
Part of the Western impulse has been to subjugate all other cultural styles to our own, and this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting other cultures. Native American culture, the multiple ethnicities of European culture have been replaced by the mega-culture Nouveau Europa - whatever that means - cultures are melted down in the belly of the Western scientific beast and become structural members in an ever expanding edifice of Western scientism. However, the psychedelic experience is apparently a bite too large too swallow. They arrived on the Western agenda only about 100 years ago when German chemists brought peyote to Berlin, extracted mescaline and for the next 50 years very little happened. Mescaline did not spawn a craze or influence a large number of intellectuals. Then in the 40s LSD was discovered, in the 50s DMT and psilocybin were discovered and in 1966 all of these things were made illegal, so there was no opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things before they were decided to be too hot to handle. Not only were they unavailable to normal people but also taken off the agenda of scientific research. In the Middle Ages the Church forbid dissections and medical students would steal bodies of war victims and executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology, where that spirit of scientific courage has gone I don't know but there's very little left. Now they feed at the trough of corporate research budgets and government-approved grants, actually pursuing truth or attempting to understand phenomenon in an unbiased fashion divorced from its commercial, social and political dimensions is unheard of.
If you look at thousands of these psychedelic experiences you see that they dissolve boundaries - between you and your past, you and your unconscious that you don't look at, you and your partner, you and the feminine if you're masculine and vice versa, you and the world - all the boundaries we put up to prevent us from feeling our circumstance. Boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society, governments and institutions become automatically become very nervous. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them - the church and the state, the poor and the wealthy, the black and the white, the male and the female, the young and the old, the gay and the straight, the living and the dead, the foreign and the familiar - all of these categorical divisions allow a kind of thinking completely cockamamie. Reality is in fact a seamless, unspeakable something and we understand that to perceive it separately is a necessary adjunct to the act of understanding but it is not the end of the program of understanding. The particulate data has to be recombined in a paradigm - a seamless overview of what is happening. The drugs that Western society has traditionally favored are those which maintain boundaries or promote mindless repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the slave-driven agricultural project, in the corporate office - this is why every labor contract on this planet contains a provision that all workers are allowed to use drugs twice a day at designated times, but that drug shall be caffeine. This is because the last three hours of the workday are utterly unproductive unless you goose everybody with coffee so they can go back to the cubicle and mindlessly tap away. Our society is an alcohol, red meat, sugar and tobacco culture - all of these are forms of speed, basically.
There's a lot of tension between the great exploring soul and the assembly line citizen. The citizen is defined by obligation and the boundaries that define the next citizen. The grand exploring soul is marginalized as an eccentric or if necessary more marginalized as mad in some way, as madness up until the point of physical violence means you are behaving in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable thus there is something wrong with you. I think of history as a mass psychedelic experiment and the drug is technology. As technology gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind, the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory. For the past 100 years, boundary dissolution has been underway at every level of Western civilization. As the collectivity of our humanness becomes an intellectual legacy for all of us, there is a dissolving of boundaries of race, status, class, language and the whole of the 20th century has seen a massive acceleration of this. More and more of these membranes are disappearing and what is emerging then is a more and more psychedelic experience, meaning a sense of acceleration of information flow, of rising ambiguity about what it all means, everything seems to carry both a good and detrimental facet, the connectedness of everything is increasing and I will argue that this is a general tendency of the time and space in which we are embedded and we ourselves are a reflection of this. Where is life carrying us? Is it carrying us toward extinction so that the rest of nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief or is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition? If you look back at the history of life, every advance happens suddenly, unpredictably, and in a very short period of time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdnhiMiN mw&fmt=18
funny since wikipedia makes it sound wonderful, like in the summary, even moreso in earlier versions
