Bread or Freedom

I no longer need to use psychedelics, but I love what Terrence McKenna had to say about the liberating power of them. I don't encourage anyone to run out to take them because people react differently. Some have f*cked up their brains with so many designer drugs (Exstasy, LSD, crack cocaine, meth and so on), that to take a mind expanding compound which promises to open the doors of perception is often a near fatal proposition and sometimes can be a fatal one.

In AA I find far too many robotic people adhering to the program as though it were a religion of must do's and must not don'ts rather than a series of Steps towards a cosmic reality; i.e., God or the Heart of Compassion. In Dostoyevsky's, Brother Karamazov, my favorite chapter is the one where the Ivan relates to his naive younger brother, Alyosha, his take on the Grand Inquisitor meeting the Christ on his Second Coming. The Bishop gave a convincing argument that the Church did a good thing for humankind by taking away the Freedom Christ offered and that if Christ would have taken the option in the desert of "Choosing 'bread,' thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity --- to find someone to worship!"

Whether it is a man with a mustache on a white horse or a Lofty Idea, humankind is always chasing after the comfort of idolatry for a symbol over the freedom of being "in the now". Dostoyevsky tells me here that the spiritual path is not for wimps. The fact that governments almost universally pounce on anyone with the balls to step off the beaten path and prohibits natural psychedelics says more about oppression than any jail or mental institution. We cling to our politics and to our arbitrary boundaries with abstract walls to keep out the fear of the forest in the false security provided by social networks and material accumulation of I-phones, twitter, facebook, power and prestige. Next thing ya know governments will figure out how to ban sex!