SubscribeTube: I'm not coating your walls with tar and filling your lungs with 3-4 Benzopyrine from my cigarette, I'm clearing your ceremonial space of negative energies.Yeah, I don't get why these wanna-be shamans don't just cut away the trappings. I guess the clients who see them want such silliness? Or think it necessary? Me, I think the whole point is that it cuts away your illusory notions of the forms of spiritual understanding, a kind of an internal Protestant reformation. Taking away one secular church and then replacing it with "fire altars" and "clearing energies" is not actually helping.
languagehat: We should make that an automatic Jaded MeFite template:Jeez, what crawled up your behind this morning? The point I was making is that this article is the usual piece on DMT that makes its rounds, where the author rarely actually takes the stuff, reports on it in a banal sense, and offers no new perspective- no new legal status, no new angle, etc. At least with the National Geographic piece in the "Previously", the author tried it and reported on their experiences.
Mitrovarr: Aren't these pretty much the same exact claims that were made about LSD, peyote, psilocybin, and ecstasy when they were introduced? OMG, they'll connect you with divinity! Make you one with the universe! Change your life!That's a logical fallacy: even if the same claims were made in the past, that doesn't explicitly disprove the claims made about ayahuasca.
Mitrovarr: but after all of these previous claims of higher enlightenment or grand cosmic knowledge that failed to produce any kind of actual proven discovery or external signs of enlightenment in the users, I'm more than a little skeptical.Emphasis mine- I find it very odd that you say that, it sounds very materialistic. Why, exactly, would you suppose that enlightment comes with neon lights and blaring heavenly trumpets? Must enlightenment display itself by an otherworldly glow or aura, so that all around you could bask in your enlightenment? Is enlightnment like driving a really fancy car, so that all your neighbors will watch you go by and whistle quietly to themselves, saying "Wow... there goes Bob and MAN is he enlightened!"
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.As for the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, here's a starting point. To quote:
According to one study conducted in 1962, 65 per cent of the alcoholics in the experiment stopped drinking for at least a year-and-a-half (the duration of the study) after taking one dose of LSD. The controlled trial also concluded that less than 25 per cent of alcoholics quit drinking for the same period after receiving group therapy, and less than 12 per cent quit in response to traditional psychotherapy techniques commonly used at that time.
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“It brings your awareness to a place where it’s understood that you are connected to everything on Earth,” he says. “If everyone had a chance to do ayahuasca, the entire reality would shift and we would be living in peace.”
Dude.......
Wait, what were we talking about?
posted by nasreddin at 10:43 AM on February 3, 2008 [1 favorite]