[A-List] #83, issue 1

[Todd Boyle]

At 08:01 AM 8/1/2010, Suzanne de Kuyper wrote:
>Once a list to a forum for the discussion and debate perchance  of
>theoretical isssues raised by Karl Marx and by the thinkers he
>inspired it today seemed a forum for the discussion of
>anti-inflammatory drugs and medicines.  Even Ecstacy recommended.
>Ecstacy is wildly dangerous.   In all its forms, but the chemical one
>can kill you, easy. S.

The work is to lift people somehow, from their voluntary servitude
to the economic and political system. This work can be accelerated
by different approaches most effective for various types of mentality.
People can be stuck at various ideological points, but quite often
they're unreachable on rational or ideological points because of
various emotional or unconscious stages they're at.

Some remarkable movements have sprung out of faith communities,
for example.. MLK,  Desmond Tutu, etc. for better or worse.

The psychedelic drugs have been life-altering and consciousness-altering
for millions of people.  In many cases they have been harmful.
(Art Linkletter's child jumped out a window, etc.)  I argue, they also
offer tremendous potential, and these potentials will not be realized
until there is a more enlightened approach (which is blocked by religious
ideology more than anything else)

It happens, I was a drug abuser in the early 1970s and spent time on
a locked ward after a period of malnutrition, using speed, etc.
and somehow got myself into a period of paranoid psychosis,
my body weight was below 100 pounds.  My parents had me
committed which was easy, in those days.  The immediate judgment
from outside would include my case as an example of negative or
harmful effects.   However, I also had direct experience of transcendent
and sacred things, during this period (and during one other brief period,
some years later in meditation...  was also preceded by a couple
of experiments with ecstasy. )

These experiences were priceless and healing. My teen years were
a chaotic mess. So I'll just tell ya, psychedelic drugs are a gift of
nature that may even be essential for a lot of people to make
progress in their development.   Without them, you would see wasted
lives.

It happened, in 1973, the VA was full of thousands of Vietnam vets at the time,
being herded by the VA in mass processing and warehousing operations
with their apparatus of psych wards.  Ya had to see this.

One of the shrinks gave me a book, Thomas Szasz, Ideology or Insanity
which explicitly examined the social construct of "mental illness" as
actually motivated by the usual goals of oppressing vulnerable people,
stealing their stuff, etc.    (This is not to deny the reality of the mind,
the existence of dire mental conditions, or psychology itself!!  Just the
usual corruption that creeps into every human institution. )

Another author I found many years later Lionel Corbett has it figured out.
for example, http://www.pacifica.edu/innercontent-m.aspx?id=1530
I filmed him in 2006 at CG Jung, Seattle and I may upload a clip of
that remarkable lecture.   Spirituality is real, and does not automatically
manifest in the Judeao-Christian template but in other authentic paranormal
experiences -- Which upwards of 20 to 30% of the population have had..

These are recognized by countless earlier authors Otto, in The Sacred,
Jung's writings on the numinous, and William James who said these
experiences were ineffable, noetic, passive in that, your will is in abeyance.
and self-authenticating, you don't need a 2nd opinion from anybody, 
whether it was real.

Another brilliant observer, of course was Bill Hicks, his "gifts of 
forgiveness"
following eating 4 dried grams, apparently mushrooms.
<http://blip.tv/file/3888210>http://blip.tv/file/3888210

I have no way to determine whether my numinous experiences would
have happened absent psychedelic drugs but I don't think so. I also have
no way to *prove* to you, what my life would have been without them.
But I know I would have been ignorant of the inner self, and a typical,
helpless passenger on the Titanic of mass-culture.

TOdd
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 4723 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/attachments/20100801/9631bb0b/attachment.txt>