People've been saying this since the 1960s. But instead of an Aquarian Age, we've suffered the most self-absorbed, grasping generation ever born, the boomers, and they've taken a wrecking ball to near all American institutions (a few for the better). Predict more of the same.https://twitter.com/iamjustincscott/status/1057070077722484736 …
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we've created a society where people are ready, willing, and able to ingest mass produced products, ideas, and ethoi. we flood their sensory inputs with these suggestions "buy this. do this. believe this." and grant them the illusion of choice by having a "market" of suggestions.
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few are prepared to decide for themselves what the contents of their consciousness might mean, or what it ought to be. a taste of liberation, though it only lasts for a single afternoon, is more than many are capable of dealing with.
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I don’t buy that the suggestibility under psychedelics is a western cultural artifact: its also seen and relied upon in Andean and Bwiti shamanic practice.
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very curious which specific suggestions Westerners are vulnerable to vs. Andean or Bwiti people. my intuition is that there is very little overlap in those sets.
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Plenty of westerners go into a jungle and come out believing implausible Andean and Bwiti claims. Or take DMT and believe they were talking to aliens. I know some of them personally —grounded people who acquired very niche beliefs. Same can happen w/o drugs, too -see Evangelicals
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that's called belief tourism. often, we find what we're looking for.
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you're right, though, to point out that hard skepticism crumbles in the scouring light of the psychedelic experience. a cultural container ought to modulate what beliefs a person retains afterwards though.
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Westerner takes on a Bwiti mytheme after being exposed to it by a Bwiti shaman. The mytheme is a reality in Bwiti culture and the psychedelic experience allows the Westerner to, for just one day, feel like they're immersed in it. It re-enchants the world.
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what mythemes should Westerners use in our own cultural container for psychedelics? I find the traditional Judaeo-Christian canon to be sorely lacking. A fully disenchanted corpse that I'd rather not reanimate. Where do we go from here?
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I love that question, and I don’t know. I suspect there is serviceable material in any belief system that can be mined, refined and operationalized —even Christianity, about which I’ve historically had a chip on my shoulder. The container I want is a few accepted rules, norms:
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