"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." --The Rig Veda, 1500 BCE 1
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing." --Pihkal, 1991 2
"I felt that the experience continued for many days, and I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."
"Excellent feelings, tremendous opening of insight and understanding, a real awakening."
"I learned a great deal about myself and my inner workings."
"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing." 9
Here is a quote from the Rig Veda10: "They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture."
Here is a quote from Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin11: "I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."
Do you not see that the Drug War is the outlawing of religion? It insists that there is nothing religious about ecstasy and inspiration. Surely this should be a topic of concern on a site called 'vedanet.'
Paul Johnson never mentions the Drug War -- which represents the unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines. It means placing the government in charge of your pain relief. Paul Johnson never mentions "drugs, " except in the context of misuse and abuse. But then the media saw to it that he never saw positive depictions of drug use. Drug prohibition destroyed the rule of law in Latin America and turned inner-cities into shooting galleries, meanwhile destroying the 1st and 4th Amendments, all during the time period of which Johnson wrote. Yet, Paul was a conservative. He either thought that these outcomes were good things -- or else he was in complete denial about the downsides of prohibition: aggressive denial, even, insofar as the Drug Warrior seeks to impose his jaundiced view of Mother Nature's medicines on the entire world.
The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
Michael Pollan is the Leona Helmsley of the Drug War. He uses outlawed drugs freely while failing to support the re-legalization of Mother Nature. Drug laws are apparently for the little people.
This is why America is creeping toward authoritarianism -- because of the prohibitionists' ability to get away with everything by blaming "drugs."
The goal of rehab should not be to get people off of all drugs, it should be to teach them to be in control of their drug use and to use drugs wisely for beneficial purposes.
America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
Scientists are so used to ignoring "drugs" that they don't even realize they're doing it. Yet almost all books about consciousness and depression (etc.) are nonsense these days because they ignore what drugs could tell us about those topics.
The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.
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