We are stardust, we are golden. We are billion year old carbon. And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden —Joni Mitchell Every young person has the divine right to their own visions. Rites of Passage have been the birthright of young people since the dawn of time. Nearly all tribal cultures provide their young with an opportunity to seek their own vision and enter into adulthood with a spiritual connection to the Universe. Western Civilization is unique in its denial of such Rites. Vision quests are not considered the proper pursuit of our young. Initiation into adulthood comes without any real ceremony or spiritual training. Young people are brainwashed and forced to conform by compulsory education, graduated, and then dumped into boring lives in the hive. Fifteen years later, numbed by hive religion, hive sex, and hive drugs, they find themselves in the final stages of terminal adulthood. Dead men and women in a dead world, chained to monthly payments and struggling to put something away for retirement. When you use visionary plants or potions, you temporarily suspend the conditioned responses that society and parents have programmed into your brain. What's left is essentially what's hard wired into your brain, and direct sensory input, without interpretations and value judgments. So when you undergo a visionary experience, what you are really doing is blowing your socially conditioned, 20th century, hive mind and allowing your brain to, literally, come to its senses. In other words, your brain begins to directly access raw sensory input, opening up a floodgate unfiltered, uncensored neural signals. The result is, what Aldous Huxley calls opening the “doors of perception.” In the higher consciousness that occurs regularly in visionary experiences, one sees the intelligence of Nature, which operates in complete harmony, without effort or waste. The sun belts out photons of intelligence we call sunlight. That sunlight is captured by plants and is trapped in the excited electron orbits of carbon based molecules. We humans eat the plants, exhale carbon dioxide and release the stored sunlight into our consciousness. A visionary Rite of Passage marks the transition from our brains being imprisoned by the social conditioning of the hive to a new awakening that we belong to a higher universal power. One is literally, born again, not of man, but of the universal or cosmic mind. Call it God, Jesus, Buddha, The Force, The Tao, The Void, The Clear Light, Cosmic Consciousness, or whatever you please but as one begins to operate as an open channel, without ego, one's consciousness begins, more and more, to reflect the harmony and effortlessness of Nature. One becomes in tune with Nature, making the passage from social hypnosis to cosmic consciousness. It is this Rite of Passage for which young people yearn and which they cannot be denied. Young people understand this. The older, successful, respected, well educated, professional, famous, and rich do not. Nothing is more addictive than material success and nothing is more lethal to addictions than the mind blowing visionary experience. Hence, in a materialistic culture, such as ours, those who are addicted to power and possessions make the mere possession of visionary plants and potions a crime. Young people understand this as well. What they do not often understand is that using visionary plants and potions is not considered, anywhere in the Bible, to be a sin. Jesus speaks, with great clarity to this issue when he admonishes the scribes (government officials) and Pharisees (clerics):
In other words, Jesus was telling these officials to stop pretending to be holy when all they can think about is controlling the behavior of others. And just to drive home the point, Jesus then says:
The use of visionary plants and potions is not a sin, nor is it some kind of delinquent behavior. If anyone is guilty of delinquency, it is our government and their gun toting drug agents These are the bullies who, in their puritanical zeal to enforce their hive morality, trash the Bill of Rights, kick down doors, seize private property and drag innocent young vision seekers off to jail, where they are brutalized and sodomized by the criminal injustice system. Young people understand this and learn to live outside of the law. They learn to talk about such matters with great discretion and must be ever vigilant for narks and government snitches. Young people learn to distrust their government and its leaders—with good reason, because young people are the ones who use drugs and the War on Drugs has become a war against the young. Sure, crack cocaine is terrible. So was bathtub gin. Putting all our young people in prison is no answer. The real problem is Prohibition. When alcohol was illegal, gangsters prospered. Now we are in the midst of a new Prohibition and gangsters, drive by shootings and bathtub drugs have reappeared. “When you use visionary plants or potions, you temporarily suspend the conditioned responses that society and parents have programmed into your brain. What's left is essentially what's hard wired into your brain, and direct sensory input, without interpretations and value judgments.” When we prohibit young people from visionary quests, we force them to turn to darker alternatives and harder, ever more addictive drugs. When we prohibit the legal use of hallucinogens, we drive it underground and create a lucrative growth industry for gangsters and violent criminals. Only when our society openly recognizes the right of young people to get high and seek visionary experiences will we begin to rid ourselves of our drug problems. Only when we take the profit out of selling poison and encourage the sacramental use of visionary plants and potions, will our appetite for destructive, mind numbing drugs finally be quenched. The hive teaches that drugs not approved for use cause insanity. Just one puff of marijuana can cause “reefer madness.” Anyone who uses LSD seven times can be declared legally insane. Or so we are told. But which is the greater insanity, the botanically induced visionary experience or the destruction of our planet by the toxic and wasteful practices of a society that condemns the visionary experience? Which is a worse hallucination, the mind-blowing vistas of hallucinogens or the paranoia of the DEA, CIA, and FBI? Which is a clearer sign of brain damage, turned on visionaries preaching peace and harmony with the planet, or a police state that leads the world in sting operations, surveillance, seizures, arrests, and prisons? Which is the world that we want to live in, a society that encourages visionary experiences, or a society that is number one in homicides, suicides, and ecocide. “Only when we take the profit out of selling poison and encourage the sacramental use of visionary plants and potions, will our appetite for destructive, mind numbing drugs finally be quenched.” Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like if our society openly recognized and supported the right of young people to get high and seek visionary experiences. Only those who steal or harm others could be arrested. Police would go back to the business of protecting life and property. Prisons would go back to the business of rehabilitating violent and dangerous people. Real criminals, unable to traffic in drugs, would be hard pressed to earn a living. Like America did after the repeal of Prohibition, we would return to a genuine respect for the law and our democratic form of government. Young and old would no longer be at war. The Bill of Rights would be restored. Age and wisdom would be held in high esteem and the flower of youth would be blessed with the fragrance of joy and true liberation. Our young would soar like eagles: Proud, strong, brave and free. Last Updated:
Thursday, June 08, 1995  |