Like a lot of similar "conspiracy" material it is sometimes hard to see any clarity in sides. Rather a game among the privileged while the population remains pawns in the game. It is interesting that while people like Leary, Lilly, and Grof began amongst class and government hierarchies, their experiences with psychedelics could not help but lead them into a life and transmission of radical freedom - or did it. Self-interest and trickster-guruism are always just around the corner. Fun and games is certainly a superior vibration to war games. But I am not sure how much really changed spiritually. There is a certain narcissistic nihilism involved in the "culture of freedom" which has spawned the hippy, slacker, hipster art and indie rock cultures of today.
I recently read what I felt was a good description of the effect of drugs by a spiritual practitioner, mystic, and scientist. Drugs don't add anything - they cancel out the lower vibrations on the scale temporarily so that one only experiences the higher ones. My own addition to this is that drugs and practices can alter the semiotic-somatic filters which screen out the infinite multiple real (or "God"). The problem is that when they wear off that taste of elevated joy and consciousness is gone followed by an often deeper depression, disappointment or entrenchment in linear cause-effect, matter-energy space-time existence. Those moments cannot produce lasting change if one returns to the same filters held in place by the cultural symbolic order.
Which is why I see the political-economic institutions and cultural-linguistic media as the prime block to further development and healing. I am a communist of old old fashioned sort. The young Marx's experience of alienation in the industrial exchange of work and consumption was nothing but the natural development of the spiritual principles of christianity and buddhism. This could never be mandated through enforced state socialism but must develop from the individual experiences like those of the post-sixties generation toward new forms of groups - the communities of radical sovereignty based on nonjudgmental unconditional love, individual desires, and the impossibility of the gift.
Posted by scott at September 11, 2004 05:40 PM | TrackBack