Can We Break the Spell?

An evil enchantment has taken over the land. How do we awaken from it?

I still believe a great value of psychedelics lies in their capacity to decondition and deprogram us from the ideologies and value systems we accept as natural. This is especially effective during people’s initial experiences.

I remember the first time I took mushrooms in college. I was a city kid who knew little outside of Manhattan. Suddenly I understood the profound wisdom of nature compared to the foolishness of human-made things. Our rectangular buildings and cars made from hunks of metal seemed ridiculous. I realized “money” — which my society believed to be important and essential — was a grim human creation designed to keep everyone toiling in an endless prison.

Inspired by fungal sentience, I saw how we humans were alienated from the world, cut off from the present moment. We had constructed this brutal civilization to avoid the raw intensity of reality, the sublime profundity of nature. Post-industrial society was a spell we had cast on ourselves. That first journey was one of the most crucial experiences of my life.

I remember this now because the shift into Trumpocalypse — combined with the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence with all of its nefarious implications for surveillance and behavioral modification, plus the acceleration of global warming — gives me, at times, a woozy, Kafka-esque, Beckett-ian, everything-is-already-utterly-doomed-and-lost feeling that I find hard to shake. I feel we are on the verge of locking ourselves into a prison and throwing away the key.

A handful of billionaires — psychopaths and control freaks — dominate our planet. They possess an insatiable lust for power, a greed for wealth. Somehow they didn’t receive enough love when they were children. They got trapped in a tragically limited perspective on the nature of reality. They don’t even know they are suffering, suffocated by their rationality, skepticism, and narcissism. They demand we experience this interminable dead-end ego-trip with them. Through their media channels, social networks, and governments, they force the whole world to celebrate them in their deprived condition as they hasten the destruction of all life on Earth.

Instead of continuing to build up massive stores of capital and gaming the system for their benefit, these blowhards could be using their intellect and resources, right now, to liberate all of us — our human family — from domination by the money system, from control by obsolete ideologies, and from the desperate drive to consume beyond the finite limits of the planet. It isn’t difficult to understand. They would have so much more fun.

Yet somehow, “we” — the others, the non-billionaires — are equally to blame. We have failed to come together as one unified being. We failed to understand and explain the situation clearly enough to those suffering from confusion. We failed to work, wholeheartedly, for one another’s liberation. We canceled, judged, mistrusted each other instead of helping our brothers and sisters to heal when they erred. We forgot to build the new world that is still waiting for us. Instead, we got caught in their traps: The billionaires’ sticky webs of distraction and deception, parasitically consuming our life, time, and attention.

Are we ready to break out of this? Confronting the end of everything, will we do something?