Psychoactives, Anyone?

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two main enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did."
                       1994 quote from former Nixon policy advisor John Ehrlichman, quoted by Dan Baum at Harper's.

OK, so that's it. One of the roots of the 'War on Drugs' is a lie told by people who knew they were lying. Not actually surprising. But just consider how many people's lives have been messed up as a result of that lie. The deliberate telling of massive porkies to an increasingly unconvinced public reaches its apotheosis on the other side of the Atlantic with the 'Psychoactive Substances Bill' navigated in by Mrs Pork Pie herself, Teresa May. Actually the implementation of the Bill, originally scheduled for April 6th, has been delayed (for how long, nobody seems to know), as I suppose that someone's woken up to the fact that it may well be quite a difficult stunt to pull off, unless all the escape routes are anticipated and plugged up. And, believe me, there sure is a bucketload of 'em....

In the meantime, here is a pic of our Great Leader on holiday with his goodly wife. They are seen happily imbibing, er, a psychoactive substance. For those with little knowledge of psychoactives, I shall explain that they are ingesting a beer, or lager, possibly called a cerveza where they are in the photo. This beverage contains, in relatively mild form, a psychoactive substance called alcohol. This drug is taken all round the world, very often in the company of friends, or at special alcohol parties or alcohol clubs. It is also taken alone, or at home.

Many people are able to take this drug pretty regularly without experiencing obvious serious problems. There are, however, enormous numbers of users whose lives are deleteriously affected or completely destroyed as a result of doing this drug. It can lead to uncontrollable mood swings, in many people increasing their tendencies towards violence. They may attack strangers for no apparent reason whatever, without any memory of the event afterwards. Consumption of this drug leads to great overloading of emergency services at hospitals, particularly during weekends and at holiday times. Alcohol is highly addictive for some people, destroying their careers, marriages, and everything else as a result. The physical health of many people is seriously affected by this drug. In particular, many premature deaths occur as a result of irreparable damage to the liver.

Now onto another psychoactive, or group of psychoactives. Psychedelic-type substances, by definition, will all be criminalised in this new wonder-law laid out by our Great Leader and  his Henchwoman-in--Chief, Ms May. Over the past 55 years, one or more of these psychedelic-type substances has been implicated in the following: drastic reductions in reoffending by serious criminals; assisting people to overcome post-traumatic stress; helping people to shed addiction to properly harmful substances such as alcohol and heroin; alleviating or preventing cluster headaches and migraines; speeding up a variety of psychotherapeutic processes; reducing stress and anxiety in terminally-ill patients. Not to mention the spiritual benefits and life-affirming experiences testified to by thousands of respectful and generally law-abiding people. These are just a few that come to mind, all evidence-based, built upon the careful and responsible use of these psychedelic-type substances.

Fortunately, there will be exemptions from the Bill. Not for psychedelics, but for alcohol, so our Great Leader and others of his ilk can continue to go on jolly holidays and get merry. As for our psychedelics, not enough research has been carried out to prove that they have therapeutic or medical value. Thus speak the Wise Ones. And why hasn't more research been carried out? - well, er, because the substances are illegal.

The great thing about the Psychoactive Substances Bill is that it is so patently ludicrous that it shows to all but the walking dead the true nature of our governemnts and their laws. They are not for our benefit, but to exert control over what the rest of us plebs do, don't do, think, feel, etc. In fact, finally unable to defend the indefensible, they have in recent years given up on the 'health of the populace' line for drug laws, instead resorting to some vague notions about 'historical and cultural factors'. Maybe I have been unfair; maybe we should take this element into consideration. Historical and cultural factors. OK. But we'll need to do a bit more tweaking to do it properly. Firstly, we shall need to deport all Muslims from the UK, since they fit in to the scheme neither historically nor culturally. This is, after all, historically and culturally a Christian country. Then we'll have to get rid of all those same-sex relationships, which are neither historical nor cultural. And what about women enjoying the privilege of voting? How far are we going back in our historic and cultural considerations?

So absolutely barmy is this Bill that it might show how desperate the Dark Controllers have become. Extreme situations lead to extreme measures, extreme 'solutions'. We can only hope that this is the case. Are Dave and Sam having a drink in the last chance saloon?



  

Teachers and Trippers: from Edinburgh with love

Pale Green Vortex Man foresakes the mountain regions and heads to the Big City. It happens increasingly rarely, and for ever briefer periods of time. Last week saw him make one of these occasional forays south - all the Big Cities are south if you live in the Scottish Highlands - in order to attend a special event.

It's a familiar pattern. After about an hour and a half, around Blair Atholl, I wonder whether I have made a mistake. I experience the urge to get off at the next station stop and go straight home. Then we hit the Lowlands, and I feel clumsily out of place. Demeter, Ceres, the agriculture deities, have well and truly deserted me. The Fife coast, the great sea, revives my spirits. Then we hit the Big City, the great capital, Edinburgh.

Forty seconds off the train and I'm already suffering mild culture shock. Now I remember what it is about the Big City: vast numbers of people moving around at great speed and with great apparent intent. The problem is that I've completely lost track of what the very important thing they are clearly involved in is. Funny, really. I did, after all, spend almost three decades of my life in and around a far bigger city, Whittington's dream, London.

I make the cardinal error of wandering into a department store. OK, Princes Street is not the ideal place in Edinburgh for me at the best of times. People have the habit of nearly knocking me to the ground, as they move around in a kind of unconscious trance, fixated solely on the clothing hanging on the stand over there. In a few hour's time, I will be considering civilisation, its origins and future. I don't see much evidence of it around here just now.

'Psychedelics and Civilisation': the talk by Graham Hancock. One of the few events seductive enough to entice me down to Big City life. It's dark by the time I venture out from my room in search of the venue. Grand Sheraton Hotel: sounds pretty posh to me. So it transpires. There is a statement here, however, and an intention. No more hiding apologetically behind a bush, a bit like Eve and Adam naked and shameful before God. No. The idea is that the discussion - psychedelics and civilisation - needs to come out into the mainstream. The time has arrived, hallelujah. Just so, just so.

I arrive just slightly early. The conference room where the talk is due to take place is on the vast side. As one of the earlier ones there, I find a seat near the front and watch. People keep coming in.... and coming..... and coming. It's extraordinary. By the time Graham gets off his seat and onto the stage, the auditorium is practically full.

Five hundred tickets were sold for the event - a sell-out. Nowhere had I expected such a number to turn up to a talk overtly concerned with psychedelic substances and, in this case, their more-significant-than-normally-recognised role in the unfolding of human civilisation. For me, it was a remarkably heartening experience just to see all these folk. Even if the talk hadn't taken place, the trip to the Big City would have been worth it.

Fortunately, the talk did take place. Graham Hancock is a well-known figure in the worlds of ancient (and by ancient, I mean ancient) civilisation research and, more recently, the role of psychedelics in human life past and present. His book 'Supernatural' is a great and important read regarding psychedelics and multi-dimensional consciousness from a historical and pre-historical perspective. It is one of the most important works on my bookshelf. Graham is also a first-class speaker, and his talk led us through vast worlds of time, space, and personal experience. If and when it turns up on Youtube or elsewhere, it will form an outstanding introduction to the topic for someone getting interested, or just an inspiring synthesis for those already familiar with this rich and varied landscape of untold (well, not quite any more) perspectives on the human project.

Graham elucidated a wide range of themes. Here are just a few:

The use of psychedelics has been extremely widespread in times and places past. More and more evidence emerges by the day that points in this direction: much of humanity's sense of the sacred has been promoted by its psychedelic experiences. The times we live in, where psychedelics have been demonised and are heavily criminalised, are anomalous. The one and only reason for this state of affairs is that LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, mushrooms and the rest are inherently challenging to the control of the status quo.  As Graham sweetly put it, they make you question stuff. And this, above all else, is anathema to a system based upon negative false premises, and upon people just doing what they are told to do.

He described one of my favourite analogies, and one which has appeared on Pale Green Vortex before. How the brain is not (in my view, cannot be) the source of consciousness. Instead it is more like a television set, a receiver, which just normally happens to be tuned to one channel only - 'channel normal'. But we can be far more completely human if we extend the range of channels we pick up. We discover the remote control that got lost behind the cushions on the sofa.

Graham also ventured lovingly into the worldview of the Gnostics. I don't know why this always resonates with me so deeply - maybe it's the resonance of truth. But he fearlessly put forth the Gnostic notions (highly heretical to orthodox Christianity) of the fall of Sophia, the demiurge, who has created a world of error, and the nefarious dealings of the archons. He also explained how polarity as it exists in our world is there as a teaching device, a hugely important but rarely known realisation, one which enables us to make far more sense of the crazy and sometimes nasty world we inhabit.

April 19th is national 'Coming Out' Day, when psychedelic people are encouraged to tell someone about their personal experience of these substances and their potential benefits. One of the more sensible things about psychedelics was said by Dr Rick Strassman. Known sometimes as Mr DMT, as a result of the officially-approved studies he did into DMT during the 1990s, he was also a serious practicing Buddhist, affiliated with a particular Buddhist group in the USA. He suggested that some users of psychedelics would benefit greatly from taking up some Buddhist meditation, developing personal discipline from the practice of ethics etc. General thumbs-up for the goodly doctor. He went on to say, however, that similarly some practitioners of Buddhism could benefit from a small number of carefully organised and controlled psychedelic trips, particularly those who had been soldiering away for years on their meditation cushion with limited higher dimensional success. Fierce disapproval came the way of Strassman from the direction of his fellow Buddhists for saying such a thing; it was an event which eventually led to his own parting ways with this particular group. 'Holiness wins out over Truth' is the succinct way he summed things up. It's a good story for reflection by those who are committed to following rational, tolerant, open-minded Buddhism, I think.

Saturday morning came, and I was out early. This is sometimes the best time to experience the Big City, before it properly wakes up. I was strolling on the way to the train station when the penny dropped, making a loud clunking sound on the Edinburgh pavement as it did so. All my life I have viewed myself as the weird one, the great minority, the anomaly, the outsider. Suddenly I realised it isn't like that at all. I am actually the normal one, as indeed were most of the attendants of Graham Hancock's talk. We do what human beings have tried to do for most of their time on Earth. We endeavour to embrace our humanness, our divinity and to more fully realise that sacredness in our daily lives. We live, however, within an aberration, the socio-economic-political structure of modern times. This is not 'normal', neither is it typical of the human story. It is a relatively recent devolution in the way that humankind goes about its affairs. This is one of the more profound implications of the 'deep ancestry' work of Graham Hancock and others. It changes the name of the game, and it changes the way that I feel about my own endeavours in life. Walk on....

The Psychedelic Society: check it out. The Psychedelic Society of Edinburgh was formed a mere year ago, but succeeded in getting five hundred people to this big event in the Big City. I think that's fantastic. Don't you?



      



      



      

In Praise of Richard Dawkins

Aaaaargh...... surely not.....

Note: I held fire on completing and posting this piece when I heard that Richard Dawkins had recently suffered a stroke. I don't like to hit people when they are down, even if they're never going to read what's been written about them. Anyhow, he is on the mend, it would seem, a process I hope may continue. And this piece has been finished.

'Any model we make does not describe the universe. It describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.' Robert Anton Wilson. A very important quote, readers. Very important.

On his occasional appearances in Pale Green Vortex, Richard Dawkins has got a rough ride. He is, in my view, a leading exponent of 'scientism' as opposed to what I might consider the genuine scientific method. Science, as I understand it, is the open-ended and open-minded investigation of the natural and physical world. Scientism, however, is an ideology, a belief system. It states that a phenomenon is real, or is to be taken seriously, only if it can be verified through the means currently available to scientists. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. It is closely aligned to philosophical materialism and, by confounding and attempting to coalesce 'scientism' with 'science', intends to convert the populace to a materialist, reductionist view of the world. It is a dogma defended and promulgated enthusiastically and viciously by its band of believers. In common with other dogmas, it is poison.

Homeopathy I have found to be a classic litmus test of the scientistic mindset. Homeopathy doesn't work because I cannot see how it works. How many times have I heard this protest, especially from those who consider themselves learned, rational beings? The homeopathic substance is diluted to such a degree that it doesn't exist, according to our view of the world at least: this is the gist. Let's just examine this for a moment. The doubters are saying this: I don't understand it, therefore it doesn't exist. Is this scientific, rational? I think not. It assumes that we humans have attained the apex of understanding, we know everything there is to know, and there are no surprises around the corner any longer. I suppose this has been the stance taken by the ignorant throughout the ages, always to be proved wrong. The enlightened, properly scientific approach is this: hmm, homeopathy. Seems a bit strange to me. But there are many who claim its efficacy. Maybe there's something in it. Let's put it on the back burner for now.

Homeopathy can work because I know it works. I have personally experienced its beneficial effects in the same way that I have experienced the effects of antibiotics. Anybody who says that my experience isn't real because it doesn't fit in with their own view of how the world works is not going to get much time from me.

Richard Dawkins is also to be taken to task for the shabby way he has treated Rupert Sheldrake on more than one occasion in the past. Sheldrake, I submit, is a more rational, scientific man by far. But even in the case of Dawkins with his jihad-like campaign of (not very) rational humanistic materialism, life is not all black-and-white. I propose three ways in which he is to get the thumbs-up.

Firstly, Dawkins has given us a very useful word: 'meme'. The word has even appeared on Pale Green Vortex. My dictionary informs me that 'meme' is 'a behavioural or cultural trait that is passed on by other than genetic means e.g. by imitation.' And Dawkins came up with it in 1976.

More centrally, Richard Dawkins has stood firm in his criticism of monotheistic religions, particularly Islam. As I have mentioned before, it is one of the modern world's great mysteries. On the one hand, the official story tells us that the modern era of fear and control was brought into being by a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims hijacking some planes and crashing them into highly prestigious sites in the USA. The official story also tells us that all over the Near and Middle East, and in north-east Africa, different factions of Islam are blasting each other to pieces in an orgy of hatred, this giving rise to a vast number of refugees fleeing the horror and trying to elbow their way into Europe. Yet, despite all this, we criticise Islam at our peril. It's not a good thing to do. It's fine to take a potshot at a white European simply wanting to protect her or his own culture; but to say something critical of Islam - steady on, there.

So Richard Dawkins has defied the monster of political correctness and ploughed his furrow regardless. For this, he is to be applauded, I feel. Belief-based religion; faith based upon blind belief ; religion based on a book, be it a Bible or a Koran: what a low level for the divine human experiment to have fallen to. I am considerably less charitable to Christianity in its various forms than my oft-times inspiration Neil Kramer. Words of wisdom may be encoded in the Bible; Christianity may have acted as a cover for mystics of times past, in order to escape persecution. Nevertheless, I feel we would be better off without both these pesky religions and their pesky books.

I am reminded of the songs I had to sing at primary school. 'Jesus loves me this I know/ 'Cos the Bible tells me so.' Believe in the book, little children, believe in the book. They like to get you young - they do it with the new religion of global warming nowadays. Another song:'Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war/ With the cross of Jesus, going on before'. Ah yes, the God of love, love, love. Going to war in the cause of love. Even at the age of eight, I was not taken in by this nonsense. Why should I believe in the words of this book any more than in the words of 'Noddy goes on holiday'? Nobody ever pointed out to me why, probably because they couldn't.

The third reason to say 'thanks' to our venerable pseudo-scientist concerns an incident that happened in his youth. Whatever one might think of some of his viewpoints, Richard Dawkins is to be praised for saying what he thinks without being cowed by the looming spectre of political correctness. In 2013 he related an incident that took place while a pupil at boarding school. One of the masters 'put a hand inside my shorts', as he did with several of Dawkins's schoolboy friends. Our jolly atheist's conclusion was that, although the experience was unpleasant and embarrassing, 'I don't think he did any of us lasting harm.'

A number of people, especially connected with anti-abuse agencies, expressed their outrage at Dawkins's comments: giving the wrong message, condoning abuse, 'evil is evil' etc. Er, hang on a minute. Dawkins was merely expressing his personal experience. The truth is the truth, and that's that. I don't think he was putting forth a particular programme or agenda, simply saying what happened and how he felt it affected him. Following on from that, I gain the impression that he would have liked some kind of dialogue on the topic. Pedophilia: such an emotional word that discussion becomes impossible. But is a rock start having his rock'n roll way with a fifteen-year-old girl fan after a concert the same as some of the acts committed by Jimmy Savile? Without condoning the former, I would say 'no'. But much of the mainstream media treats all and sundry as the same, and encourages all variety of pedophile to be viewed identically. The hysteria and histrionics stirred up by the word 'pedophile' prevents a reasoned view. My problem is that, whenever I see hysteria and histrionics acting as agents of confusion, I think it's deliberate - there's something else going on there.....

So, Richard Dawkins: a man with whom I am at variance over many things. Nevertheless, may he continue to speak up. Speak up. Speak up.