"I find the contemporary psychedelic movement’s insistence on purely scientific validation complicit in this blindness. To make psychedelics palatable for the mainstream, the community has deliberately suppressed the occult, psychic, paranormal and supernatural dimensions of these experiences—an omission both Thompson and myself believe to be a serious error."
I feel like this highlights something I've been trying to make sense of for a while now, which is the alt-right's embrace (and monetization) of psychedelics for "healing". They approach them as treatment-directed pharmaceuticals rather than as portals to the divine. No ego death, no atonement, just a $5,000 permit to cry, puke into a bucket, and spiritually bypass a lifetime of moral bankruptcy. And while this isn't at all limited to the alt-right, I just can't square the "love-unity-oneness" message of these substances with their hateful politics.
I know this seems like a tangent, but I think it directly ties in to the limits of the medical model of psychedelics. We use these substances to fill that god-shaped hole in our psyches with some kind of meaning or better model of the universe and our place in it, but by doing so we replace that gaping uncertainty of "that which is beyond us" with something that we can comprehend but is essentially false.
Daniel have you read/experienced Finnegans Wake?? Joyce said in Ulysses, “History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” FW is also structured after Giambattista Vico’s cyclic theory of history. It will only become more relevant in this hypnopompic moment. We are as cells in the sleeper/dreamer’s body.
I so hope you will. I met him in the '70's and visited Lindisfarne then. Already he was preparing for this moment ("Darkness and Scattered Light"), comparing it to the coming dark ages.
"I find the contemporary psychedelic movement’s insistence on purely scientific validation complicit in this blindness. To make psychedelics palatable for the mainstream, the community has deliberately suppressed the occult, psychic, paranormal and supernatural dimensions of these experiences—an omission both Thompson and myself believe to be a serious error."
I feel like this highlights something I've been trying to make sense of for a while now, which is the alt-right's embrace (and monetization) of psychedelics for "healing". They approach them as treatment-directed pharmaceuticals rather than as portals to the divine. No ego death, no atonement, just a $5,000 permit to cry, puke into a bucket, and spiritually bypass a lifetime of moral bankruptcy. And while this isn't at all limited to the alt-right, I just can't square the "love-unity-oneness" message of these substances with their hateful politics.
I know this seems like a tangent, but I think it directly ties in to the limits of the medical model of psychedelics. We use these substances to fill that god-shaped hole in our psyches with some kind of meaning or better model of the universe and our place in it, but by doing so we replace that gaping uncertainty of "that which is beyond us" with something that we can comprehend but is essentially false.
Well said
Daniel have you read/experienced Finnegans Wake?? Joyce said in Ulysses, “History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” FW is also structured after Giambattista Vico’s cyclic theory of history. It will only become more relevant in this hypnopompic moment. We are as cells in the sleeper/dreamer’s body.
I’ve tried! Also listening to it read out loud is a good way to engage with it.
Daniel, you be publishing this, or recording it?
Not sure yet
I so hope you will. I met him in the '70's and visited Lindisfarne then. Already he was preparing for this moment ("Darkness and Scattered Light"), comparing it to the coming dark ages.