The Psychedelic Experience
or
The Fight Unites for Futant Rights!
...
To fathom hell
Or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic!
...Or just tread the same ground you always have.
What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one?s eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, and so forth and so on.
In the context of ninety percent of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas; this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery. What shamans are, I believe, are people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on.
Shamanism is what this experience has been called in the past, but the language is still image-codified in our Western mind as shamans as witch-doctors, those who dance rain dances and do other forms of 'heathen' priest-craft. Shamanism is not a religion, but a set of techniques, and the principle technique is the use of psychedelic or entheogenic plants.
The method of entering these states have little or nothing to do with the catalyzed realm of imagination accessed, be it through fasting, meditation, chanting mantras, saying prayers, shaking a rattle, drumming, or listening to electronic music. The experience is not in the method or the medium, but in the moment of being.
A devoted Hindu yogi master, after taking 5 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time said, "I now know why they call yoga a spiritual 'practice'."
This is the real thing! There is nothing else like it. The shamanic experience is available to everyone, and is a human birthright. But those who self-select to return to these realms, and makes the journeying a fundamental part of their existence through systems of disciplines and exercises, to activate parts of the minds and spirit we might never normally use; throughout history these people have been called shamans.
There is a vast difference between those people who have taken psychedelic plants, or entheogens, and those in the world who haven't. There is still quite a disparity in those who have taken small amounts of a psychedelic every once in a while, and have a visionary experience, and say, "Oh, groovy man, Visions!" and goes back to their normal routines, and the shaman who emphasizes an impeccability of an intense observation and attention to detail in the psychedelic state, the domain of the Gaian ideas, and to bring these ideas back to ordinary social space in a form of an art, for the good of the community.
There are many paths of Shamanism, most of which will cross and fuse at some point in time for those who walk on it. There is the Healer, the basis of the craft; to heal not only you own and family and friends' bodies, but the cultural body, and the dis-ease therein.
There are then, the Artists, Writers, and Craftspeople, who communicate the dreams to others using various mediums to share and express the visions and make models to follow.
Tied in to all are the Seers, the Prophets, and Visionaries. They point the way.
Next are the Explorers, and Adventurers, who are not content with only studying the finger that points, but to travel into the unknown wilderness to seek the bodily truth of the vision. With fluidity, and flexibility, they co-create the paths in the environment for creative play towards a unfolding potential for everyone's participation is maximized.
The Warrior, the rarest of the rare: It is the task of the Warriors to defend themselves at all times against the prevailing malevolent forces in both human and spirit forms. Highly disciplined practices of ordeal, and self-infliction of ordeal; pushing the limits of endurance and pain. This is to extend the limits of tolerance and to steel oneself for ongoing combat. It is gaining power to protect yourself from the onslaught of the malicious Other; and, in turn, protect the benevolent others.
Each time the Warrior makes the cosmic journey for new gnosis, he goes with the knowledge he might not be coming back, such is the peril he (or she) faces in these realms, in the battle against forces of UnCreation and Oblivion.
We, in the United States of America, are in the middle of a "Drug War". The greatest danger of a democracy is electing in fascism. There is a minority fascist contingent in of our people who happen to hold high places in our government who seek control what foods and plants you put in your body. There are people who wish to use violent, repressive force against those whom wish to practice, freely, and in the open, their primary religious being. But forth instead by this dominator culture is bogus ideals to be consumed mindlessly, denying people of authentic felt experience.
The Drug War, is a money and control issue, who gets that power. If you deny and villify an experience such a ingesting sacred plants to a culture, and then feed them a consumer culture, and pharmaceutical variations of mind altering experience, the money and power goes into the hands of few people at the top of the corporate government merger. In this democracy, you vote with your dollar, and billions of dollars is being wasted on federally controlled alcohol and prescription drugs.
Imagine instead, being able to grow your own drugs, and in turn, create your own culture!
Have you ever been to a party, where people were dancing and interacting peacefully, having a great time, and uniformed people with guns come and force you to stop?
This is Fascism, this is Evil, and this MUST be fought!
In a culture where you are being told that smoking weed makes you a terrorist, on moral par with those who crash planes into buildings, the shamans of the future, or Futants, or the youth of today, are being toxified in an information propaganda war, where, for fear of persecution and violence must remain hidden, silent, and alienated.
We have a responsibility to create a space where these personalities can come into being safely, with communal support, and allowed to develop and flourish without fear of societal persecution.
This is also a war of words, against a language that can devolve and limit and confine. The Mental "Health" Industry is just another force that does not seek to heal peple experiencing mental pain, but to create another breed of consumers to their bogus pills and ideologies. They create catch-all terms such as bi-polar, and chemical imbalance, with could mean anything, stemming from any number of problems, and deduce with there greed to enslave the patients with mind and spirit numbing pharmaceuticals.
Schizophrenia: how does it relate to psychedelic state?
How many psychiatric residents acutally see an un-drugged schizo?
This is another calculated maligning of language to vilify someone acting slightly odd, has visions, or prophetic dreams. There is something in traditional societies called 'shamanic illness', a time of initiation where one passes through a series of internal ordeals before comeing out the other side. With guidance, and community support and understanding, this need not last more than a week or a month, or what have you. In modern context, when one exhibits these symptoms, you are immediatly drugged, and can state in a state of this illness for years.
From a modern Psychology text: "A typical schizophrenic world of twilight imagining, marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift in self-created values systems."
That?s it!!! Exactly!
We are terrified of madness; the Western mind is built on a house of cards. There are insane, and psychotic people out there, just they usually happen to be the ones in uniforms and government positions.
"LSD is psychedelic substances which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it."
We have no tradition of shamanism or dealing with altered states in the West.
Western minds are very queasy when first principles are questioned. Rare are the untreated mad, because we can't come to terms with that.
A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as a schizophrenic, but the shamans has thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society if you were to exhibit 'schizophrenic tendencies' you were immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told "you are special, your abilities are very central to the health of society. You will cure, you will prophesize, you will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions."
Contrast this with what someone exhibiting Schizophrenic activity in our society is told. "You don't fit in, you are becoming a problem, you don't pull your own weight, you are not of equal worth to the rest of us, you are sick, you have to go to the hospital, you have to be locked up, you are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society."
That treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable. Imagine if you were slightly odd and the solution were to lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad. That would drive anyone mad. If you have ever been in a madhouse it?s an environment calculated to make you crazy and keep you crazy. This would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional society.
Yes I know my enemies
They're the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise,
Conformity,
Assimilation,
Submission,
Ignorance,
Hypocrisy,
Brutality,
The Elite,
All of which are American dreams?
---Rage Against the Machine, Know Your Enemy
"There is a futant genetic caste wired for the role of evolutionary agent: one who foresees and helps fabricate the future." ---Timothy Leary, Ph.D.
Futants are not idiot savants nor are they usually raging rebels. To this time they have often, if not usually, been misunderstood, sometimes considered insane, persecuted, and cast out or even killed. It would be well that we finally recognize the genetic role, proclivities and potential contribution of futants. By recognizing their genetic role we will gain an evolutionary advantage in the form of a window into the future. This is not to say that the vision of the futant is always robust or balanced or even completely correct. Because the futant role is hardly recognized and often denied or even rejected and persecuted the futant often does not understand their status and the evolutionary context into which it fits. This, more than often, is usually a serious personal problem for the individual, from childhood interactions with parents through maturity, depending on several factors. The religious context in which the futant child is brought up, the political and social situations in which the individual finds themselves, the rejection by peers and academia as often happens, are usually all obstacles.
Different individuals of the futant type react to these negative elements with different strengths of personality, degree of intelligence and learning and sense of their role. Some break under the pressures while others persevere. We will come to acknowledge the futant evolutionary role and give context to it and support to the futant so they may understand themselves and their potential contribution. We need to integrate the futant role and unique contribution into the common consciousness and begin to respect and take advantage of it. True futants of high caliber can be the equivalent of the Japanese "national treasure". The problem of integration is not so much recognizing the futant role but bringing ourselves to listen to what we, sometimes for a number of somewhat less than lofty reasons, may be reluctant to hear.
They won't always be accurate or totally correct due to the novelty of their vision, their relative personal comprehension of it, the stability of their personal psychology or biology, or the social context in which they find themselves, but things will get much better in our time as they learn to recognize their genetic proclivities and are recognized for their worth. We should learn to listen and carefully consider what they have to offer and evaluate and integrate the vision and role of the futant into society as a valuable evolutionary asset.
So, what shamans, or Futants have to do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world.
My present to you, my art, Ergoat.com
Heh.
