~Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we dream, when we savour tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we fall in love, and it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can really claim to have understood and explained it completely. Theres no doubt its associated with the brain in some way but the nature of that association is far from clear. In particular how do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have experiences?...
We are, in other words, confronted by at least as much mystery as fact around the subject of consciousness and this being the case we should remember that what seems obvious and self-evident to one generation may not seem at all obvious or self-evident to the next. For hundreds of years it was obvious and self-evident to the greatest human minds that the sun moved around the earth one need only look to the sky, they said, to see the truth of this proposition. Indeed those who maintained the revolutionary view that the earth moved around the sun faced the Inquisition and death by burning at the stake. Yet as it turned out the revolutionaries were right and orthodoxy was terribly, ridiculously wrong.
The same may well prove to be true with the mystery of consciousness. Yes, it does seem obvious and self-evident that the brain produces it (the generator analogy), but this is a deduction from incomplete data and categorically NOT yet an established and irrefutable fact. New discoveries may force materialist science to rescind this theory in favour of something more like the TV analogy in which the brain comes to be understood as a transceiver rather than as a generator of consciousness and in which consciousness is recognized as fundamentally non-local in nature perhaps even as one of the basic driving forces of the universe. At the very least we should withhold judgment on this hard problem until more evidence is in and view with suspicion those who hold dogmatic and ideological views about the nature of consciousness.
Its at this point that the whole seemingly academic issue becomes intensely political and current because modern technological society idealises and is monopolistically focused on only one state of consciousness the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that makes us efficient producers and consumers of material goods and services. At the same time our society seeks to police and control a wide range of other altered states of consciousness on the basis of the unproven proposition that consciousness is generated by the brain.
I refer here to the so-called war on drugs which is really better understood as a war on consciousness and which maintains, supposedly in the interests of society, that we as adults do not have the right or maturity to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness and about the states of consciousness we wish to explore and embrace. This extraordinary imposition on adult cognitive liberty is justified by the idea that our brain activity, disturbed by drugs, will adversely impact our behaviour towards others. Yet anyone who pauses to think seriously for even a moment must realize that we already have adequate laws that govern adverse behaviour towards others and that the real purpose of the war on drugs must therefore be to bear down on consciousness itself...
There is a revolution in the making here, and what is at stake transcends the case for cognitive liberty as an essential and inalienable adult human right. If it turns out that the brain is not a generator but a transceiver of consciousness then we must consider some little-known scientific research that points to a seemingly outlandish possibility, namely that a particular category of illegal drugs, the hallucinogens such as LSD, DMT and psilocybin, may alter the receiver wavelength of the brain and allow us to gain contact with intelligent non-material entities, light beings, spirits, machine elves (as Terence McKenna called them) perhaps even the inhabitants of other dimensions. This possibility is regarded as plain fact by shamans in hunter-gatherer societies who for thousands of years have made use of visionary plants and fungi to enter and interact with what they construe as the spirit world. Intriguingly it was also specifically envisaged by Dr Rick Strassman, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, following his ground-breaking research with human volunteers and DMT carried out in the 1990s a project that produced findings with shattering implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. For further information on Strassmans revolutionary work see his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
~from: http://realitysandwich.com/180984/war_consciousness_0/
“Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”...“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” ~Terence McKenna
Replies
The War On Drugs is all about protecting the monopoly on the lucrative illegal drug market controlled by U.S. government elites. Some U.S. officials (notably Bill Clinton, whose brother was quoted as saying "my brother has a nose like a vacuum") violated Scarface rule #2, which is don't use your supply, while others are becoming too blatant about their activities (i.e. Bush Jr. and Obama turned their backs when the world told them to do something about the new opium farms in Afghanistan, since the Taliban would cut off your head if they caught you growing opium).
Al Capone made a ton of money during prohibition of alcohol, just like Clinton did with cocaine, and just like Bush Jr. and Obama did with Afghanistan opium.
no one needs drug induced stimulation to see...
~Of course 'need' & 'seeing' are relative to one's 'experience'... trust your own intuition, Pet... but pretending you have any idea what the rest of the tribe 'needs' is just foolish... as foolish as underestimating the role Entheogens have played in Humanities ongoing Awakening. ~InLight555
~Indeed, when we try to decode the veils of duality by only using the limited viewfinder of the 'five sense prison'... we can loose sight of the Multidimensional nature of this 'experience' we call 'reality'. There is far more in play than meets the 'mind or consciousness', of any 'individual'. To truly touch the Alchemical Gold, we have to willing to go deeper than what we can see, taste, touch, hear & feel. ~TemetNosce247
“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.” ~Terence McKenna