Once in a while the universe delivers a message in a way that's hard to dismiss. If you don't get it the first time, it comes at you again and again in various forms until you pay attention.
About two weeks ago I attended a short talk and book signing by Ralph Metzner, one of those psychedelic pioneers who, along with Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary, launched those early experiments with LSD at Harvard in the early sixties and got themselves sometimes deified and often demonized for it (not to mention fired). The book was an account of those years in the sixties in which the alchemical cat was let out of the bag and the collective we know as western civilization would never be quite the same. I knew many of these stories and many of these pictures having lived through that magical time. I got to tell Ralph my 'Ralph' story (ask me sometime) and it was a kind of nostalgic closing of a circle that began for me in 1967 when I began my first experiments with radical mind expansion via hallucinogens.
Two days ago I watched a movie called Ram Dass: Fierce Grace, recommended to me by one of my Zen Buddhist teachers. It offers another view of the collective journey that began in those Harvard experiments which led so many of us into a spiritual quest that still frames and characterizes our lives.
Between these events I found myself in conversations with several people in which I found myself recounting in detail many of my own experiences and revelations of those days.
All of this in the midst of watching what I've become convinced is the final collapse of American democracy and the inexorable conversion of the nation into a third-world culture, half populated by corporatized zombies incapable of solving its problems or of caring for its people.
Then, today the message came across for the third time, this time on the front page of the New York Times in one of the most amazing articles I've read in the mainstream press for the past 40 years. It's an article about recent experiments that are being conducted all around the country and the world using hallucinogenic chemicals like psilocybin to treat psychological disorders and to explore the nature of the brain/mind. Reading about this stuff after these long dark ages in the 'newspaper of record' is like turning a page on the whole culture. The article features a number of accounts of people who have taken the journey in recent times, to help them face death or depression, to fight obsessive disorders, to battle addictions, or just to explore the mind. Their accounts upon returning and re-integrating into the consensual world are universally positive.
My favorite paragraphs:
"The subjects' reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences...that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these "unitive" experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage...This feeling that we're all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity. (my emphasis) On the other hand, universal love isn't always adaptive, either."
The article is a mind blower, as much in what it suggests as in what it says. The fact that it appears where it does indicates that there is considerable cultural ferment driving these ideas, which are certainly not new but have been suppressed for far too long.
For me the message was finally delivered almost as if it were a voice speaking:
Here is the secret. You've been flailing within your denials for the past half century and look where it has gotten you. You thought you could make it illegal to seek the keys where they lay in plain view. You tried to revise your history in order to forget, so that you could move on just as before. You've spent these decades waging cultural wars against those who refuse to forget and you've managed to keep the machinery of humanity's disease mostly on the tracks generating what you call wealth, but have made yourselves and the rest of the world sicker in the process. The consequences of your resistance have blown up in your faces, and will continue to do so with more and more violence the longer you resist.
Nevertheless, those who haven't forgotten have been busy all of this time. We've reshaped your culture from beneath, changing the way that you see, the way you tell and hear stories, the way you communicate to one another. We've designed your software, altered your music, surrounded you with the images and artifacts of our world. We've created and perfected whole new languages based on images rather than abstractions. The world your children have grown up in is more like ours than the one made up of your ancient greed and insecurities.
Your time to change is short and growing shorter. The current battles in your body politic are testing whether you are willing to let go of your identification with what you own and join the human family fully, offering your knowledge, strength and "natural enthusiasms" to help get us all where we need to be in order to survive. Your political struggles mirror this personal trial as it pits those who would share the common wealth against those who view personal property and ownership as the highest virtue to be protected. By confusing the principle of democracy with the values of capitalism you've brought both to the edge of failure.
Change comes at the individual level as a change in the way a person views the world and others. Every act you do is both a political act and an act of conscience. Only when you awake to this can you free yourself and others from the pain and paranoia that governs so many of your lives. The tools are here. Use them.
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