The 4th Drive (aka My Big Drugs Post)
My intake of drugs is based solely on their potential to advance my consciousness. My preference is psychedelics, because they teach me so much about myself and the nature of reality.
The True Nature of Psychedelics
LSD is neither toxic nor addictive, and it has never killed anyone by overdose. Used with respect, it has enormous potential for advancing human consciousness. Psychedelics can also stimulate the "inborn faculty of visionary experience" that we all possess as children but lose as we mature.
Psychedelic drugs are easier to study by the methods of modern science than most other means of inducing altered states of consciousness since they have known chemical structures and can be administered repeatedly under uniform experimental conditions.
Outlawing Psychedelics
By outlawing psychedelics, we have cut ourselves off from the wellspring of our humanity. The desire for intoxication is basically "the fourth drive" after hunger, thirst, and sex.
Since the current drug laws target analogues of illegal substancess, this means that any chemical in our bodies that is molecularly similar to a scheduled drug is outlawed. In other words, each one of us... infants, blue-haired grannies, even the President (or Queen for you across the pond)-- has illegal substances coursing through our veins every minute of the day.
Carl Sagan Was A Total Stoner
Scientist Carl Sagan sometimes used marijuana to produce highly acclaimed scientific papers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Carl Sagan
"The devastating insight achieved when high are real insights. The illegality of marijuana is outrageous, and impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight so deperately needed in this increasinlgy mad and dangerous world."
Psychedelics as a Tool
There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, like a microscope, and sharpening with an internal instrument, such as one of these drugs.
If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an afrront to the dignity of the eye, and the telephone an affront to the dignity of the ear.
Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope ALONE gives knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his/her behavior and the whole system of his/her knowledge.
Drug Misuse
Drug misues is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to steo out in front of a moving car. You wouldn't call that a disease but... an error in judgment. When a bunch of people do it, it is a social error. A lifestyle. In this particular lifestyle the mottoe is: "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.
