Psychedelics lend themselves to creating and destroying cultural containers. I have difficulty imagining a cultural container psychedelics couldn’t melt. (save cultural containers that proscribe their use —I wonder if this is how placebo sacraments came to dominate).
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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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My desired container is simple: 1. Recognition that people in the grips of a mystical experience are in a precious and vulnerable state analogous to childhood, and 2. A taboo on introducing violence, ads, new beliefs, and new partners to people in that state.
End of conversation
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My point is that culture and ethnicity of origin doesn’t seem to me to modulate suggestibility much. I think happy-clappy evangelical traditions and LDS are good models here: bathing people in divine acceptance enables you to sell people on crazy bullshit on every continent.
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