Intriguing - it could work. The trouble is everyone would need to do it at the same time. It is that weird paradox - somehow it is so damn easy and obvious and yet it also feels impossible. You capture that oscillation beautifully!
I think what underpins this discussion is intent and circumstance. I'm partially crippled by the influence of my environment, that being a capitalist society, even though my conscious values are anything but aligned to that philosophy (I think greed is as much a rotten philosophy as it is a cult). Reordering my worldview to be coherent whilst existing within that system faces the challenge of cognitive dissonance as so many of my actions continue to support the status quo. There's no template for existing in a collapsing civilization that's taking the biosphere with it. So, with the intention of analysis and reshaping a worldview to be less in conflict and more empowering it might well be that the same neurophysiology that enables alcoholics (but notably those wishing to become sober, if you look at the research papers) to overcome their addictions through psychedelic therapy may well be helpful for people grappling with the issues Andy raises in his essays. Perhaps it will help the sleeper awaken.
Hmm. I have abused my share of hallucinogenics and legal highs in a previous life when I had zero consciousness of much apart from feeding my addictions. After many hard won years of recovery I would be highly resistant to any notion of trying those things again. I am however completely on board with your other ideas about the direction we must take and just crazy enough to take the leap mushy-free.
Damn you put it so well Andy, the minds and hearts of people can be opened and shifted thru mushy’s ... so we’re not facing down ‘uncomfortable truths’ but instead, opening up to liberating and exciting realisations ... some community scaffolding if that’s the hip term to let us all know we’re in on it as a team.
The reality ? Small is Beautiful - EF Schumacher etc. NZ has a lotta land, the ability for peep’s to move rurally into small walkable collectives, grow our own food, find shelter and patch the climate tirades that’ll hit us, floods n droughts etc. what a challenge - the ultimate Real reality show. Factor out electricity, diesel supply chains, Pak n’ Save etc, and factor in all hands on deck in small rural collectives. This will require the rural communities and the banks that own them
to share their land, barns/outbuildings with urban refugees. Cos they’ll be heading that way Grapes of Wrath styles. If our rural communities don’t share their spaces/land/waterways, then it’ll simply be a game of numbers. There might be a bit of MadMax in there. I’m currently travelling Mexico Andy, there’s a bit of MadMax everywhere here, it’s the norm ... safe little NZ will get used to the maybeness of uncertainty with some practice.
This will likely Freak People Out, so some element of softening the new narratives via mushrooms ? Fck yeah, they are one of life’s most incisive learning tools and you detail the provenance and history in your blog.
My thoughts are humans are well capable when our arses are on the line ... what we could do w/out is an atrophied state of shock with our communities locked into old paradigms and their fearful narratives.
You are right, these narratives we live and love are false gods and they have been for hundreds of vainglorious yrs.
Time is tight, I know it, you know it, lotsa peep’s instinctively feel it but it’s scary. Let’s start communities of spore spreaders so mushy’s become the NewWeed ™
Let the re-education unfold and see if we can work through the next 50 yrs of change and challenge.
I am interested in addiction. In my opinion, addiction to anything generally makes things worse.
I had a colleague who was a chronic alcoholic for 25 years. He said, "the problem with alcohol is that it works”. It made him feel better. And, for that 25 years, he was a dynamo of social change. He improved the lives of hundreds of people, and he was funny, interesting, helpful and kind.
But despite the positive benefits - that "it worked” - he was meantime dying from alcoholism. Eventually, he lost his health, partner, family, home and then his job. Then he went to AA, got his shit together and never touched another drop. He’s in his 80s now and has been sober for over 20 years. He's doing well and still writing, which is his craft. Despite the temporary benefits of his addiction, it caught up with him in the end - and then took everything that he was connected to down with him. Usual story.
I have read a lot of the research on psychedelics and have colleagues who are deeply involved in them in a sustainability context. And there’s no doubt that, like any self-transcendent experience, they can be deeply transformative. But they are also deeply addictive. That’s one of the major differences between drugs and well-crafted experiences of wild nature, the latter don’t have any negative side-effects (they can do, but they don’t have to).
I totally agree with your cult-analysis of industrialism. And I think one of the reasons it has become a cult is because it is addictive. As Jung said, "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.” Addiction is, according to Jung, the outcome of a misdirected thirst for spiritual fulfilment.
In some cultural contexts, of course, narcotics are used as part of healthy spiritual practices. But they are usually taken by a representative (eg. shaman) who imbibes them on the community’s behalf. Most of the others are in supporting roles (holding the hair out of the puke, drumming, that kind of thing) - and are largely sober. Also, one of the reasons alcohol and drug abuse is so rampant in contemporary indigenous communities is that the social structures that hold this traditional proxy process in place are destroyed by colonialism. People then attempt to maintain their spiritual life by going it alone, on anything they can find that helps them out of ordinary consciousness and enforced individualism.
I think psychedelics in a western cultural context are another proxy for spiritual fulfilment. But such fulfillment doesn’t have to come with either addiction or the self-destruction that addiction reliably defaults to, without, in my experience, exception. Psychedelics also offer a very seductive solution: we can all get fucked out of our heads ... and save the planet at the same time. Awesome! The love child of Greta Thunberg and Shaun Ryder. I suppose the upside is that while the planet burns most of us will be too busy admiring the purple-winged-sparkle-badger-dragon flying over the fluorescent-yellow-magic-table forest to give a shit.
Maybe we need contemporary shamans to protect the masses from a descent into mindless addiction. Maybe a lack of shamans is why Manchester in the 90s did not lead to world peace.
Or maybe we just need to find healthy ways to find spiritual fulfilment - which will naturally deliver an ecologically viable future if that fulfilment is reached through an ecological frame of reference.
Thanks again, I think sustainabile is revolutionary.
Intriguing - it could work. The trouble is everyone would need to do it at the same time. It is that weird paradox - somehow it is so damn easy and obvious and yet it also feels impossible. You capture that oscillation beautifully!
I think what underpins this discussion is intent and circumstance. I'm partially crippled by the influence of my environment, that being a capitalist society, even though my conscious values are anything but aligned to that philosophy (I think greed is as much a rotten philosophy as it is a cult). Reordering my worldview to be coherent whilst existing within that system faces the challenge of cognitive dissonance as so many of my actions continue to support the status quo. There's no template for existing in a collapsing civilization that's taking the biosphere with it. So, with the intention of analysis and reshaping a worldview to be less in conflict and more empowering it might well be that the same neurophysiology that enables alcoholics (but notably those wishing to become sober, if you look at the research papers) to overcome their addictions through psychedelic therapy may well be helpful for people grappling with the issues Andy raises in his essays. Perhaps it will help the sleeper awaken.
Hmm. I have abused my share of hallucinogenics and legal highs in a previous life when I had zero consciousness of much apart from feeding my addictions. After many hard won years of recovery I would be highly resistant to any notion of trying those things again. I am however completely on board with your other ideas about the direction we must take and just crazy enough to take the leap mushy-free.
Damn you put it so well Andy, the minds and hearts of people can be opened and shifted thru mushy’s ... so we’re not facing down ‘uncomfortable truths’ but instead, opening up to liberating and exciting realisations ... some community scaffolding if that’s the hip term to let us all know we’re in on it as a team.
The reality ? Small is Beautiful - EF Schumacher etc. NZ has a lotta land, the ability for peep’s to move rurally into small walkable collectives, grow our own food, find shelter and patch the climate tirades that’ll hit us, floods n droughts etc. what a challenge - the ultimate Real reality show. Factor out electricity, diesel supply chains, Pak n’ Save etc, and factor in all hands on deck in small rural collectives. This will require the rural communities and the banks that own them
to share their land, barns/outbuildings with urban refugees. Cos they’ll be heading that way Grapes of Wrath styles. If our rural communities don’t share their spaces/land/waterways, then it’ll simply be a game of numbers. There might be a bit of MadMax in there. I’m currently travelling Mexico Andy, there’s a bit of MadMax everywhere here, it’s the norm ... safe little NZ will get used to the maybeness of uncertainty with some practice.
This will likely Freak People Out, so some element of softening the new narratives via mushrooms ? Fck yeah, they are one of life’s most incisive learning tools and you detail the provenance and history in your blog.
My thoughts are humans are well capable when our arses are on the line ... what we could do w/out is an atrophied state of shock with our communities locked into old paradigms and their fearful narratives.
You are right, these narratives we live and love are false gods and they have been for hundreds of vainglorious yrs.
Time is tight, I know it, you know it, lotsa peep’s instinctively feel it but it’s scary. Let’s start communities of spore spreaders so mushy’s become the NewWeed ™
Let the re-education unfold and see if we can work through the next 50 yrs of change and challenge.
This is really excellent. Thank you Andy!
I am interested in addiction. In my opinion, addiction to anything generally makes things worse.
I had a colleague who was a chronic alcoholic for 25 years. He said, "the problem with alcohol is that it works”. It made him feel better. And, for that 25 years, he was a dynamo of social change. He improved the lives of hundreds of people, and he was funny, interesting, helpful and kind.
But despite the positive benefits - that "it worked” - he was meantime dying from alcoholism. Eventually, he lost his health, partner, family, home and then his job. Then he went to AA, got his shit together and never touched another drop. He’s in his 80s now and has been sober for over 20 years. He's doing well and still writing, which is his craft. Despite the temporary benefits of his addiction, it caught up with him in the end - and then took everything that he was connected to down with him. Usual story.
I have read a lot of the research on psychedelics and have colleagues who are deeply involved in them in a sustainability context. And there’s no doubt that, like any self-transcendent experience, they can be deeply transformative. But they are also deeply addictive. That’s one of the major differences between drugs and well-crafted experiences of wild nature, the latter don’t have any negative side-effects (they can do, but they don’t have to).
I totally agree with your cult-analysis of industrialism. And I think one of the reasons it has become a cult is because it is addictive. As Jung said, "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.” Addiction is, according to Jung, the outcome of a misdirected thirst for spiritual fulfilment.
In some cultural contexts, of course, narcotics are used as part of healthy spiritual practices. But they are usually taken by a representative (eg. shaman) who imbibes them on the community’s behalf. Most of the others are in supporting roles (holding the hair out of the puke, drumming, that kind of thing) - and are largely sober. Also, one of the reasons alcohol and drug abuse is so rampant in contemporary indigenous communities is that the social structures that hold this traditional proxy process in place are destroyed by colonialism. People then attempt to maintain their spiritual life by going it alone, on anything they can find that helps them out of ordinary consciousness and enforced individualism.
I think psychedelics in a western cultural context are another proxy for spiritual fulfilment. But such fulfillment doesn’t have to come with either addiction or the self-destruction that addiction reliably defaults to, without, in my experience, exception. Psychedelics also offer a very seductive solution: we can all get fucked out of our heads ... and save the planet at the same time. Awesome! The love child of Greta Thunberg and Shaun Ryder. I suppose the upside is that while the planet burns most of us will be too busy admiring the purple-winged-sparkle-badger-dragon flying over the fluorescent-yellow-magic-table forest to give a shit.
Maybe we need contemporary shamans to protect the masses from a descent into mindless addiction. Maybe a lack of shamans is why Manchester in the 90s did not lead to world peace.
Or maybe we just need to find healthy ways to find spiritual fulfilment - which will naturally deliver an ecologically viable future if that fulfilment is reached through an ecological frame of reference.
Thanks again, I think sustainabile is revolutionary.
Excellent Andy