Category Archives: Spirituality

Inner Alchemy: A Bridge Between Worlds

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At Waking Times, Chris Bourne offers insights on the role of inner alchemy in the integration of an emerging “new world” and new paradigms to the reality of day-to-day life. He describes how the tactile, empathic, diplomatic aspect of the soul, by “intuiting and feeling the flow of ‘rightness’ in any given situation, yet molding and blending it into this material world”, can enable one to acknowledge and honor the subjective truth of others without compromising one’s integrity.

Inner alchemy, as Bourne defines it, is driven by spiritual awakening and resultant realization that our current world is out of balance with nature and out of synch with the natural flow of the universe. This leads to a compulsion to ‘be the change’ and involves “expressing your truth in every moment, not just with words, but in every physical, emotional and mental action that you take.” In other words, “Right Action”: action which is aligned with the universal flow. Among the indicators of “rightness” of one’s actions, he lists the following:

  • They confront, challenge and break down the ego within you and within others with whom you’re engaged.
  • Actions in rightness ultimately lead to an inner sense of expandedness, connection and openness, once you’ve broken through any tightness or resistance to expressing your truth.
  • When aligned with the flow, you tend to observe supportive synchronicity as the universe clicks into place around you.
  • When you’re in “Rightness”, it just feels right. It’s like being in love. No one can tell you if you’re in love. There’s no logic to it. You just know.
  • A choice made in rightness will feel like destiny.

Bourne describes the process of realignment towards right action as not so much about making specific choices (though it can lead to right choices) but finding and expressing lost aspects of one’s true nature or soul. This is easier said than done because it often puts one at odds with “the matrix”, a powerful social construct which influences and manipulates everything within it through the establishment and enforcement of rules, norms and beliefs, control of resources and isolation from the natural flow of life.

The struggle to manifest truth (working in opposition to social and economic pressure from the matrix to prevent the success of such efforts) can be aided by what Bourne calls “soul ray harmonics”, or frequencies of consciousness. On one side of the spectrum are “catalysts”, which are harmonics to “shake things up”: to change, unravel, unwind and metamorphosize. On the other side are “empaths” which he defines as “souls who can absolutely and unconditionally accept life as it is without judging. They can witness and feel the truth at the core of all behaviour – no matter how distorted – and not need to change it. They are that energy that helps play out a distortion so that others ultimately want to change, all of their own accord.” Knowing where one is on the spectrum can help to clarify and become aware of the nature of one’s interactions and the impact they have on others (which is necessary for one’s personal evolution).

The specific type of harmonic that Bourne feels is most useful for our current situation is what he calls “Ray 4”: the inner diplomat which empathises and influences,  accepts unconditionally but also catalyses, also known as the ‘Bridge between Worlds’. To help become better attuned to this harmonic or frequency, he offers the following guidelines:

  • Firstly acknowledge that you’re here to influence and change the nature of reality. You’re not supposed to be cooped up in a box. Even if people around you react with projection towards you, fear and anger, recognise it is their own distortion they’re activating – otherwise they’d be able to calmly accept you as you are. As you realise this in your mind, feel a waterfall of flowing calmness descend around your expression of truth.
  • Secondly, in order to facilitate the greatest amount of positive change, there needs to be open doorways through the density of the field, that may touch something deep within another. In other words, whilst we stand our ground, we must recognise and honour the truth in another. Even if you notice their’s is a lower vibrational truth, it is still their truth and real to them. If you’re given to influence, you won’t get anywhere by riding roughshod over them.
  • Catalysing and therefore unwinding means first working to recognise the ‘ancient light’ at the core of a distortion. So all actions have begun with an authentic exploration of reality by the soul. It’s just that the ego then distorted the purity. So first work to find the truth at the core of their distortion and honour this with them. Then help them see the higher truth. If you’ve done it accurately, they’ll be on your side and much more open to change.
  • Recognize that the stream will always find different pathways back to the ocean. If you try one approach and it doesn’t work or if you then feel disconnected because you couldn’t fully honour the flow, work not to judge yourself for it. Benevolence doesn’t blame you! Instead keep softening into the place you are now at, pausing to reconnect again.
  • Compromise but don’t ever compromise the soul. Yes it may seem like an impossible paradox. But it is not. How can you make your truth the most understandable, the most reasonable, the most tactile, the most accessible and without any extra energy? If you can do this, you’ll find you don’t have to compromise your truth. Increasingly you’ll be accepted.
  • Don’t tell others what you know to be their truth (this can be a big button pusher!). Instead work to facilitate an increase in realisation by asking an empowering question. One that is open ended, one that causes them to explore and feel for themselves.
  • Accept that sometimes you will be in a minority of one. It does not make your truth untruth. Know and accept when it is time to stand your ground, come what May. This will always test your level of trust in the divine. So be it. Take it as an opportunity to evolve and grow.

Bourne follows this with a reminder to question whether one’s actions are driven by the soul or ego and concludes with an inspiring message:

Whether we fully know it or not, we’re living in two worlds at the moment. The higher paradigm is to be found infusing this lower world, working to transform it. Those who are already carrying the light, will frequently find it challenging. The old world values are so used to living in the shadows and fear the light. There’s a clinging to the easy-to-understand, in-the-box expediency and soft comfort. There’s a strong dependence on the crutch of old behaviours.

Despite this, there comes a point where you simply cannot compromise your soul a moment longer. You realise the illusion and that the only real purpose of life is the expression of you. In mastering the Ray 4 Diplomat – an interwoven aspect of your soul – it means you can still be living and breathing the higher realm, whilst acting in this one. It means you can stay in the truth.

In so doing, not only does your awakened life become more manageable, you become a powerful facilitator.
You become a bridge between the worlds.

The Endarkenment Manifesto

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While it’s easy to understand arguments for a new Age of Enlightenment, a case can be made for Endarkenment as well. On this eve of Winter Solstice (an Endarkenment holiday) it seems appropriate to share the following manifesto and intro originally posted at Arthurmag.com in 2008:

From ARTHUR MAGAZINE No. 29 (May 2008): Peter Lamborn Wilson’s half-serious proposal for a political movement to uphold and propagate the ideals of Green Hermeticism. Wilson sometimes uses the pen name ‘Hakim Bey.’ He is the author of the Temporary Autonomous Zone concept and manifesto, which, for better or worse, was the original inspiration for the Burning Man festival..

THE ENDARKENMENT MANIFESTO

At least half the year belongs to Endarkenment. Enlightenment is only a special case of Endarkenment—and it has nights of its own.

**

During the day democracy waxes, indiscriminately illuminating all and sundry. But shadowless noon belongs to Pan. And night imposes a “radical aristocracy” in which things shine solely by their own luminescence, or not at all.

**

Obfuscatory, reactionary and superstitious, Endarkenment offers jobs for trolls and sylphs, witches and warlocks. Perhaps only superstition can re-enchant Nature. People who fear and desire nymphs and fauns will think twice before polluting streams or clear-cutting forests.

**

Electricity banished shadows—but shadows are “shades,” souls, the souls of light itself. Even divine light, when it loses its organic and secret darkness, becomes a form of pollution. In prison cells electric lights are never doused; light becomes oppression and source of disease.

**

Superstitions may be untrue but based on deeper truth—that earth is a living being. Science may be true, i.e. effective, while based on a deeper untruth—that matter is dead.

**

The peasants attacking Dr. Frankenstein’s tower with their torches and scythes were the shock troops of Endarkenment, our luddite militia. The original historical Luddites smashed mechanical looms, ancestors of the computer.

**

“Neolithic conservatism” (Paul Goodman’s definition of anarchism) positions itself outside the ponderous inevitability of separation and sameness. Every caveman a Prince Kropotkin, every cavewoman Mrs. Nietzsche. Our Phalanstery would be lit by candles and our Passions avowed via messenger pigeons and hot-air balloons.

**

Imagine what science might be like to day if the State and Kapital had never emerged. Romantic Science proposes an empiricism devoid of disastrous splits between consciousness and Nature; thus it prolongates Neolithic alchemy as if separation and alienation had never occurred: science for life not money, health not war, pleasure not efficiency; Novalis’s “poeticization of science.”

**

Of course technology itself is haunted—a ghost for every machine. The myth of Progress stars its own cast of ghouls and efreets. Consciously or unconsciously (what difference would it make?) we all know we live in techno-dystopia, but we accept it with the deterministic fatalism of beaten serfs, as if it were virtual Natural Law.

**

Technology mimics and thus belittles the miracles of magic. Rationalism has its own Popes and droning litanies, but the spell they cast is one of disenchantment. Or rather: all magic has migrated into money, all power into a technology of titanic totality, a violence against life that stuns and disheartens.

**

Hence the universal fear/desire for the End of the World (or for some world anyway). For the poor Christian Moslem Jewish saps duped by fundamentalist nihilism the Last Day is both horrorshow and Rapture, just as for secular Yuppies global warming is a symbol of terror and meaninglessness and simultaneously a rapturous vision of post-Catastrophe Hobbit-like local-sustainable solar-powered gemutlichkeit. Thus the technopathocracy comes equipped with its own built-in escape-valve fantasy: the Ragnarok of technology itself and the sudden catastrophic restoration of meaning. In fact Capital can capitalize on its own huge unpopularity by commoditizing hope for its End. That’s what the smug shits call a win/win situation.

**

Winter Solstice (Chaos Day in Chinese folklore) is one of Endarkenment’s official holidays, along with Samhain or Halloween, Winter’s first day.

**

Endarkenment stands socially for the Cro-Magnon or “Atlantaean” complex—anarchist because prior to the State—for horticulture and gathering against agriculture and industry—for the right to hunt as against the usurpation of commons by lord or State. Electricity and internal combustion should be turned off along with all States and corporations and their cult of Mammon and Moloch.

**

Despite our ultimate aim we’re willing to step back bit by bit. We might be willing to accept steam power or hydraulics. The last agreeable year for us was 1941, the ideal is about 10,000 BC, but we’re not purists. Endarkenment is a form of impurism, of mixture and shadow.

**

Endarkenment envisages a medicine advanced as it might have been if money and the State had never appeared, medicine for earth, animals and humans, based on Nature, not on promethean technology. Endarkenment is not impressed by medicine that prolongs “life span” by adding several years in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes and glued to daytime TV, all at the expense of every penny ever saved by the patient (lit. “sufferer”) plus huge debts for children and heirs. We’re not impressed by gene therapy and plastic surgery for obscene superrich post humans. We prefer an empirical extension of “medieval superstitions” of Old Wives and herbalists, a rectified Paracelsan peoples’ medicine as proposed by Ivan Illich in his book on demedicalization of society. (Illich as Catholic anarchist we consider an Endarkenment saint of some sort.) (Endarkenment is somewhat like “Tory anarchism,” a phrase I’ve seen used earliest in Max Beehbohm and most lately by John Mitchell.) (Other saints: William Blake, William Morris, A.K. Coomaraswamy, John Cowper Powys, Marie Laveau, King Farouk…)

**

Politically Endarkenment proposes anarcho-monarchism, in effect somewhat like Scandinavian monarcho-socialism but more radical, with highly symbolic but powerless monarchs and lots of good ritual, combined with Proudhonian anarcho-federalism and Mutualism. Georges Sorel (author of Reflections on Violence) had some anarcho-monarchist disciples in the Cercle Proudhon (1910-1914) with whom we feel a certain affinity. Endarkenment favors most separatisms and secessions; many small states are better than a few big ones. We’re especially interested in the break-up of the American Empire.

**

Endarkenment also feels some critical admiration for Col. Qadhaffi’s Green Book, and for the Bonnot Gang (Stirnerite Nietzschean bank robbers). In Islamdom it favors “medieval accretions” like sufism and Ismailism against all crypto-modernist hyperorthodoxy and politics of resentment. We also admire the martyred Iranian Shiite/Sufi socialist Ali Shariati, who was praised by Massignon and Foucault.

**

Culturally Endarkenment aims at extreme neo-Romanticism and will therefore be accused of fascism by its enemies on the Left. The answer to this is that (1) we’re anarchists and federalists adamantly opposed to all authoritarian centralisms whether Left or Right. (2) We favor all races, we love both difference and solidarity, not sameness and separation. (3) We reject the myth of Progress and technology—all cultural Futurism—all plans no matter their ideological origin—all uniformity—all conformity whether to organized religion or secular rationalism with its market democracy and endless war.

**

Endarkenists “believe in magic” and so must wage their guerrilla through magic rather than compete with the State’s monopoly of techno-violence. Giordano Bruno’s Image Magic is our secret weapon. Projective hieroglyphic hermeneutics. Action at a distance through manipulation of symbols carried out dramaturgically via acts of Poetic Terrorism, surrealist sabotage, Bakunin’s “creative destruction”—but also destructive creativity, invention of hermetico-critical objects, heiroglyphic projections of word/image “spells”—by which more is meant (always) than mere “political art”—rather a magical art with actual dire or beneficial results. Our enemies on the Right might call this political pornography and they’d be (as usual) right. Porn has a measurable physiopsychological effect. We’re looking for something like it, definitely, only bigger, and more like Artaud than Brecht—but not to be mistaken for “Absolute Art” or any other platonic purism—rather an empirical strategic “situationist” art, outside all mass media, truly underground, as befits Endarkenment, like a loosely structured “rhizomatic” Tong or freemasonic conspiracy.

**

The Dark has its own lights or “photisms” as Henry Corbin called them, literally as entoptic/hypnagogic phosphene-like phenomena, and figuratively (or imaginally) as Paracelsan Nature spirits, or in Blakean terms, inner lights. Enlightenment has its shadows, Endarkenment has its Illuminati; and there are no ideas but in persons (in theologic terms, angels). According to legend the Byzantines were busy discussing “the sex of angels” while the Ottomans were besieging the walls of Constantinople. Was this the height of Endarkenment? We share that obsession.

Jan. 1, 2008

Nick Margerrison on Revolutionary Self-Help

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Last week Nick Margerrison posted a follow-up to his inspiring essay, The Global Awakening published last year on Disinfo.com. In Improve Yourself First, he reminds us of the importance of inner development as a means to avoid violent revolutions which replace one form of tyranny with another. He also makes the connection between today’s internet-based self-improvement movement and how printed culture facilitated the age of enlightenment. In his words: “the most important revolutionary aspect of the printed page: it allowed people to learn how to improve themselves and change the way they thought. This is the driving force behind any meaningful long term social change ever experienced in any society“. For these reasons, authoritarians love censorship, controlling what people think and controlling how to think.

Based on trends he has observed, he writes “the entire notion of a hierarchical dictatorship is coming apart” in part because “leaders lead by controlling information and the communications revolution makes this impossible.” Furthermore, “victory in the oncoming ‘war on information’ is beyond their power, no matter how hard they try, just like the ‘war on drugs’. The Western World’s massive financial difficulties limit their ambitions for now but make no mistake, the internet is causing them to lose their grip on reality.”

As an antidote, he encourages the practice of questioning ideas requiring others to follow orders and suggestions (even his own). In other words, thinking critically and independently, which an uncensored internet facilitates. The true path for a revolution in Margerrison’s view begins with self improvement and learning “not what to think but how to think…The biggest most important changes that you can make to your world are the ones you can make right now to yourself and the way you think.” In his long-term view, the more people who take up the challenge of self improvement, the less unlikely the wider changes needed in society will be. By making such personal efforts in myriad ways, “we might well all move in different directions but the definition of the word “revolution” will move away from something which involves violence and brings long term suffering.”

Facing Death

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Jasun Horsley at Omni Reboot recently shared a number of intriguing insights on the topic of death and how it relates to science fiction, culture and transhumanism. He outlines how science fiction, whether utopia or dystopia, are scientific versions of a belief in a spiritual afterlife since they can soothe awareness of mortality and make us feel better about the present.

Horsley cites the work of Sheldon Solomon which shows how culture is a means of denying death via the manufacturing of extensions of the self and the body, including values which are carried by artifacts we create (ie. books, IPods, spaceships, etc.). The technology we create is meant to improve our lives and bring us closer to the utopia of sci-fi fantasies, but more often than not contributes to a dystopian reality. In his opinion, this happens because we’re unconscious of whatever it is within us causing the problems we’re trying to solve. We’re making things worse the more we try and improve them. A classic metaphor for this is Shelley’s Frankenstein which describes how the inability to accept death and the drive to “play God” creates a tragic monster.

According to Horsley, transhumanism is the religion of the (imagined) future, which most of us are already followers of, whether aware of it or not. For those not familiar with transhumanism (also known as extropianism), he provides an accurate and succinct definition in the following excerpt:

Transhumanism is a scientistic movement based on the belief that who (and what) we are can be divorced from biology. In its more extreme camps, Transhumanism divorces human existence from the psyche by suggesting that:

• At least some of the elements of consciousness can be converted to digital information.

• This data will be self-aware.

• It will be a continuation of the biologically-based awareness which it copied.

Horsley is skeptical of this view because it ignores the importance of the unconscious. In his words:

“Who we are” is not a mind-body system but a psyche-body system. We aren’t meat vessels with an internal stream of mental data running through them and animating them. The vast majority of our total “psychosoma” system functions at an unconscious level.

What he sees as a potentially more productive and fulfilling approach is the acceptance of death. Because it’s such an uncharted path (for the majority of us) it’s difficult to imagine the social impact such a paradigm shift would have, but he asks the following speculative questions which encourages further exploration:

Time is supposed to bestow wisdom on human beings. But can there be wisdom without acceptance of death?

How would both our fantasies and our culture be transformed if, instead of conquering death, we learned to accept it?

If death anxiety fuels human progress, maybe accepting death would not only be the end of fantasy, but the end of the fantasy we call “history”?

What it would be the beginning of, however, is anybody’s guess.

On a related note, rest in peace Nelson Mandela.

“Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.” – Mandela (1996)

At the Point of No Return

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By Julian Rose for Waking Times

The wrong people are in charge… that’s pretty obvious. But what is not so obvious is how they got there? And once having found an open gate, why have we left them to graze the best pastures while we grovel around in the barren fallow?

A very strange phenomenon…

This World is run by those of whom the great majority have absolutely no qualifications to be at the helm of anything – not even a small rowing boat. Yet, somehow or other, there they are perched in their palaces, surveying their empires – while simultaneously engaging in the systematic degradation of planet Earth.

Doesn’t matter whether they are generals, headmasters, corporate executives, CEOs of banks, media moguls, ministers or prime ministers, or just about any big bosses – they have the distinction of all acting in unison. While by contrast, the great majority of intelligent and able bodied citizens of this planet, only manage to act – or react – in sporadic and discordant bursts; if at all.

The current controlling masters – and it hasn’t changed much over many centuries – have a commonality of intent: to extract the last ounces of profit and prestige from any and all assets and opportunities that fall into their grasp.

Yet even that isn’t enough for some of them. Profits get a bit boring when they come in the tens of millions year after year, and one has occupied the prime suite at Claridges for the past six months. No, there always needs to be just one more thing that can be ‘owned’ and brought under control, so as to satisfy the false agrandissement that is part and parcel of an endless, and ultimately fruitless, attempt to become omnipotent and untouchable by ordinary mortals.

Such is the aphrodisiac called ‘power’.

Time and again, those who suffer most from a sense of being inwardly dispossessed are the very  ones to seek, as compensation, the maximum level of outer possessiveness. And this is the mechanism whereby the wrong people get to be in charge.

Ironically, many who do not suffer such delusional power urges are quite happy to just tick along fulfilling their aspirations and daily needs as best they can. Yet in doing so, they unwittingly allow the magalomaniacs a direct route to the seats of power.

Those who are secure enough in themselves to take a responsible attitude towards the life around them seldom come forward to take-on positions of authority and civil responsibility. Their preference is to leave it to others – and in too many cases these ‘others’ often harbour barely disguised ulterior motives.

Yet we look on, aghast, as our world is torn apart by duelling crooks and madmen, each more desperate than the other for the top job in the race for planetary ecocide. Each more desperate than the other to fill any power vacuum that might emerge. Each more desperate than the other to hold a cosh over the disinterested daily workers who struggle on, trying not to notice how bad it’s gotten.

Where do you belong in this mad scrum?

The wrong people are in charge and the right people don’t want to bother themselves unduly to do anything about it. That just about sums-up the dire state of our post industrial ‘civilisation’. Something has to give…

The question is what?

Will a critical mass of the 99% finally act to bring back some genuine self autonomy through wresting control from the 1%?

Or will the 1% finally complete their annihilation job, trashing our planetary assets and crushing our human propensities once and for all? That is the question.

But none of us are free to sit back and play at second guessing the outcome. We are all in there. We are part of the pack. Our every move, whether we see it or not, is either promoting or resisting the despot’s master plan. There is no such thing as being ‘in between’ in this game. The fence you once sat on is broken. The wires are hanging limp. There is no no-man’s-land left to hide in.

At some point soon, those who are fit to lead must take over from those who are unfit. It may be a bloodless coup – or it may be a bloody insurrection. One way or another, the shift has to happen.

Forget about Divine intervention. There will be no Divine intervention unless and until there is a very visible human determination already out of the starting blocks and heading for the finishing line. Only then is it possible that higher energies will join the race to bring justice back to this battered World.

We are approaching the point of no return. If we don’t respond to the myriad calls for help that are echoing around this World at an ever-increased velocity each day, then we will be condemning ourselves – and those who call upon us – to being forever stranded upon a desolate and barren shore.

That help starts with helping each other to break free from our learned and self-induced state of fear and pacifism. A combination that pretty much guarantees an unwillingness to act. An unwillingness to act even when presented with the choice of participating in a mass genocide or opposing it.

This unwillingness is giving voice to the notion that ‘no action’ is the spiritual choice of the knowing. That to retire into a cul-de-sac of meditation and inward-looking self examination can ‘change the world’ by dint of a shifted value focus. Can serve to hermetically seal the self away from the trials and tribulations of the outer world and thereby help avoid any confrontation with that which demands a full and spontaneous response.

Confrontation, in this view, is a negative, reactionary manifestation that undermines ‘peace’ and the supposed tranquility of a chimeric world, which takes over from rational observations and becomes the new reality. A ‘virtual reality’.

This is a deeply flawed and dangerous ethos. For it splits in half that which is whole and sets the two halves in opposition to each other.

We are ‘of nature’ not above or outside it. We go forth and we return. That is the Tao. Universal forces all dance to this tune. Breath, ocean waves, cycles of birth and death, growth and decay, all is in motion and at rest, all the time. There is no contradiction.

Outward action and inward contemplation are two halves of one whole. They are synonymous. One should move between the two constantly and joyously.

“When injustice become law, resistance becomes duty”

Well, injustice has become law – yet resistance remains doggedly muted, and the search for an escape route remains the preferred option.

Cultivate spirit, wisdom and deep awareness – yes. Yet not as an alternative to toppling our oppressors from their corporate thrones, but as part of it.

Don’t be fooled. There is a war on. We are all called to the front. Just as the white corpuscles of our bodies are fighting off attempts by the pathogens to take hold – all the time. We should be doing the same – all the time.

Everyday we should be conjuring-up and putting into affect actions to end the draconian government/corporate dictatorship that continues to herd great swathes of humanity ever faster towards a sheer and genocidal cliff.

We can have no ‘peace’ until the criminals at the master control consulate are ejected from their padded leather chairs and are forced to confront the true price of their obscene power games.

Peace and enlightenment, at the individual level, are only possible if we are engaged in this battle. The battle to rid both ourselves and this planet of that which seeks to dominate and destroy the true well-spring of life.

The road to victory also requires the wise and aware to form a council of responsible oversight to step-in to the void once the despots are dethroned. That is an essential ingredient of any uprising determined to manifest genuine justice.

The lessons of history teach that fickle rebellion simply replaces one bunch of power predators with another. That is no longer an option; we are now at the point of no return. This time we have to get it right.

Footnote: some may see this as being at odds with my essay “Reverse Engineering the Illuminati Mind Set,” I don’t believe it is. The action I speak of here does not eclipse the need to draw deeply upon compassion. However, to exercise compassion one needs to be in a position of strength, not slavery.

About the Author

Julian is a committed international activist, writer, farmer and actor. He is an early pioneer of UK organic farming methods and is currently involved in the front line of efforts to keep Poland free from genetically modified organisms. Julian is President of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. His book Changing Course for Life can be purchased on www.changingcourseforlife.info. His latest book In Defence of Life – a Radical Reworking of Green Wisdom is available at Amazon or can be requested on http://www.julianrose.info/

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

In Defense of Cognitive Liberty

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Though the Drug War’s disproportionately harmful effects on the poor and people of color seem to have been one of its major functions from the start, it has also been a war against cognitive liberty for everyone. On the DoseNation podcast, chemist Casey William Hardison shares an inspiring personal account of how psychedelics transformed his life for the better, and how he successfully fought a system which imprisoned him for pursuing his passion:

If the state was truly concerned for the health and safety of drug users, they would do more to give accurate information to the public and make treatment of addictions accessible (including addictions to alcohol, cigarettes, and pharmaceutical drugs). Instead, the state seems particularly concerned about drugs which can potentially lead to an expansion of consciousness. But why is cognitive liberty such a threat? Terence McKenna shares his thoughts on the revolutionary potential of the psychedelic movement in this excerpt of a speech delivered at the Esalen Institute in 1989:

The provisional model (psychedelic/open-ended partnership) way of doing things is the only style that can perhaps seize the controls of this sinking submarine and get it back to the surface so that we can figure out what should be done. If we continue as we have, then we’re doomed. And the judgement of some higher power on that will be: “They didn’t even struggle. They went to the boxcars with their suitcases and they didn’t even struggle.” This is too nightmarish to contemplate. We’re talking about the fate of a whole planet.

Why are people so polite? Why are they so patient? Why are they so forgiving of gangsterism and betrayal? It’s very difficult to understand. I believe it’s because the dominator culture is increasingly more and more sophisticated in its perfection of subliminal mechanisms of control. And I don’t mean anything grandiose and paranoid. I just mean that through press releases and soundbites and the enforced idiocy of television, the drama of a dying world has been turned into a soap opera for most people. And they don’t understand that it’s their story and that they will eat it in the final act if somewhere between here and the final act they don’t stand up on their hind legs and howl.

So this whole effort to bring the psychedelic experience back into prominence is an effort to empower individuals and to get them to see that we are bled of our authenticity by vampirish institutions that will never of their own accord leave us alone. There must be a moment when the machinery and the working of the machinery become so odious that people are willing to strive forward and throw sand on the track and force a reevaluation of the situation. And it’s not done through organizing. It’s not done through vanguard parties or cadres of intellectual elites. It’s done through just walking away from all of that. Claiming your identity, claiming your vision, your being, your intuition, and then acting from that without regret. Cleanly, without regret.

While I think the value of organizing should not be underestimated, he speaks eloquently for cognitive empowerment and inner transformation as a path towards cultural and systemic change.

Listen to the full speech at the Psychedelic Salon podcast:

 

More info on why drug prohibition does nothing to curb drug use and addiction and actually increases societal harm: