Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Heretic by Tim Doody (Amazing Read Concerning LSD Use)
This is a very long but amazing read.
---snip---
What happened to Dorothy Fadiman that morning? How about Francis Crick and the people with cancer in the anxiety studies? Staunch materialists might argue that exogenous, psychotropic molecules had simply transformed their three pounds of gelatinous gray head muscle into funhouses for a few hours. But Ms. Fadiman, Crick, and most study volunteers say something quite different—that the psychedelics they ingested acted as a sort of antenna, allowing them to receive rather profound transmissions that they couldn’t typically access during their ordinary states of consciousness. Such a claim is not without precedent.
Ever since people first altered their surroundings with celestially aligned rocks, they’ve also been altering their inner landscapes. Though Albert Hofmann’s 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, they’ve 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 control—the 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, they’d 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-giving—the very symptoms that plague many Westerners, according to Fadiman (and, certainly, quite a few others).
Ever since people first altered their surroundings with celestially aligned rocks, they’ve also been altering their inner landscapes. Though Albert Hofmann’s 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, they’ve 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 control—the 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, they’d 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-giving—the very symptoms that plague many Westerners, according to Fadiman (and, certainly, quite a few others).
---snip---
Source: The Morning News
21 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's early, or I may be stupid, but I don't get the reference.
Thanks! 
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. 
