The Heretic by Tim Doody (Amazing Read Concerning LSD Use)
This is a very long but amazing read.
---snip---
Ever since people first altered their surroundings with celestially aligned rocks, theyve also been altering their inner landscapes. Though Albert Hofmanns recipe is entirely modern, tribes and other pre-industrial societies from Australia to Mesopotamia have long been mixing the medicine into brews, snuffs, and powders. In rituals, often of a collective nature, theyve ingested these substances and then sung, drummed, and channeled to access insights, archetypal beings, and alternate realities. While these societies are as eclectic as orchids, they share at least one characteristic: Their rituals have served as an axis mundi, a psychic compass that simultaneously situates and provides direction to both individual and community. As a result, matter and consciousness are experienced as entwined, purposeful, and sacred.
On stage and page, Fadiman has argued that, in marked contrast, most members of post-industrial societies perceive themselves as happenstance cogs in a clockwork universe, and consequently, exhibit a profound and increasingly dangerous alienation. The dissociation of self is so fundamental that bioregions are sub-divided into tract housing, resources into quarterly earnings, and people into one-percenters and the rest. For Fadiman at least, even traditional Western therapy, which seeks to re-align a sick individual to this worldview, must necessarily end in a cul-de-sac.
Marlene Dobkin de Rios, a medical anthropologist, has argued that there is a strong correlation between centralized power and psychedelic prohibition as authoritarian leaders have perennially associated these substances with insurrectionary tendencies. Indeed, whether in 17th-century Europe or 19th-century America, even as proponents of church and state enclosed communal lands and subjugated the inhabitants therein, they especially targeted those deemed most resistant to ideological controlthe shamans, witches, magi, occultists, and others who concocted, imbibed, and distributed psychedelic substances, and believed themselves to be in an ongoing discourse with land, non-human species, and spirits.
The !Kung (tongue-click then kung) is one of the psychedelically-augmented, anarchistic societies that had survived these purges well into contemporary times. A nomadic people, theyd harmonized with the austere rhythms of the Kalahari Desert for thousands of years. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived with them during the 1950s, writes that the !Kung recognized an illness called Star Sickness, which could overcome members of the community with a force not unlike gravity and cause profound disorientation. Unable to situate themselves in the cosmos in a meaningful way, the afflicted displayed jealousy, hostility, and a marked incapacity for gift-givingthe very symptoms that plague many Westerners, according to Fadiman (and, certainly, quite a few others).
---snip---
Source: The Morning News
longship
(40,416 posts)Brain antennas???
"Star sickness", a force not unlike gravity?
What the hell?
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)Then you'll understand the context.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)It's early, or I may be stupid, but I don't get the reference.
Thanks!
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Sorry, I am often too elliptic.
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)I appreciate the clarification.
I don't know what orbit I'm in.
truth2power
(8,219 posts)Reminded me of a book i read a long time ago. "The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the the Bicameral Mind". I swear, one to the most interesting books I've ever read.
It's about the Biblical fall as being a fall into consciousness. Don't know if that makes any sense.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)I keep coming back to it, like he was really on to something, yet I never felt it was quite right.
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)I actually think I've heard of it ... but now, I'll mark it to read.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)A "downer" in other words.
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)... meaning depression, or behaving outside the norms of their society. That their antidote were the psychedelics to "cure" those afflicted with "star sickness."
Perhaps, I read that wrong.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Isolation would work too, I think, separateness, that sort of idea.
When I was young, i lived in a small farm community where everybody knew each other. I remember that feeling. I remember the feeling of loss when we moved to Los Angeles and I found that nobody cared any more, that I was now an outsider. That was plenty depressing.
An isolated human in the wild is most likely a short-lived human too, isolated humans are not normal humans. Yet that is more or less the modern ideal, our social affiliations mostly distant and abstract, and becoming more so. We have only begun to explore the emotional ground this opens up, and it is full of pitfalls and contradictions.
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)... we got more alone.
eShirl
(18,494 posts)Thanks for posting.
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)It's quite long, but yes, in order to really get the context of the article, you have to read the whole thing.
I'm glad you liked it.
jollyreaper2112
(1,941 posts)And it gets to how centralized power of any kind helps to subvert the natural human connections we instinctually work from. Echoes the arguments of Graber with Debt the first 5000 years.
It takes a government or a religion or a corporation, on the big scale, to sever our ties of kinship and rationalize what we instinctively know is wrong. Kick a man out of his home because the bank sold his mortgage? It's not me saying so, it's the law. Blame it. The free market said I had to sell poison to children, otherwise our ipo might fail. It wasn't my idea! I was only following orders.
And these power structures are jealously guarded by those who sit at their heads. They will tolerate no threat.
Shit, look at pot. It grows wild but damn you if you smoke it. But we will put it in a pill that won't get you high and charge $40 a hit. And the British made the Indians buy salt from them. It took gahndi to take them to the sea and make salt for themselves.
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)You have some good insights on the centralization of power which does atomize all of us.
Hestia
(3,818 posts)I bought the book that it was based on - What a Long Strange Trip it's Been. Peter Coyote is really frank and candid about his years in SF during the days of Haight-Asbury (sp?) and the Summer of Love.
Why TPTB hate the thought of psychedelics is that it/they promote Group Thought & Consciousness. Psychedelics help kick start a new through process in a society. Look at LSD with Owlsey Townsend (do I have his name right?) giving acid away to thousands of people at concerts. Look at how easy it was to get people together to protest the Vietnam War, Women's Rights, Minority Rights, etc. It and They changed society (and Cheney and Nixon HATED it! which is why pot is denigrated to this day).
What changed about it all is that Owlsey Townsend was busted and the CIA started bringing in heroin and speed to SF. People were there for the drugs not about change so everyone left.
It was happening again with the Raves and Ecstasy - had to nip that in the bud too - but there has been changes in society now for both good and ill.
I wonder if there will be a new psychedelic that people will use to kick start a new change. Psychedelics makes it easier to get more people on the same page than anything else. Something to think about...
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)From drugs that expand the mind to drugs that lull you to apathy (heroin).
Myrina
(12,296 posts)He's spent time in South America learning about Ayahuasca. Similar message & conclusions.
VERY interesting.