Thursday 8 September 2016

Beware the consciousness merchants





Was reading Stripping the Gurus which gives a great exposé of Jiddu Krishnamurti.  What is it about people that they feel this need to change consciousness? Ie,  these gurus -nearly always men- offer the promise that they have changed their  own consciousness to a more blissful state, and that if you follow them, buy  their books, go to their talks, and apply what they say, you TOO will have what  they claim to have. So the formula goes like this:

They have, you lack, 
you want  what you think they have

Of course this is how cults work also, and religions (which are really just  larger cults, with branched-off cults), for the promise of some end result where  your consciousness will be changed 'purified', 'in the wink of an eye',  'redeemed' etc etc etc and you will gain 'immortality'. There meaning being  living for ever and ever and everrrr

This want for a change of consciousness is a big reason people take drugs, which  includes alcohol (in our culture it is often never admitted alcohol is a drug.  And thus people who drink will swear they don't do drugs). It is a desire to  escape one's present sense of consciousness which feels uncomfortable, bored,  and can  give exceeding pain. This maybe because of thoughts about troubles in the past,  present, and future, feeling numb, hurt, and so on.

So in this scenario it can be quite easy and lucrative for certain people to  exploit this boredom and  pain and urgent need to change consciousness, especially when the  promise is that this change can be permanent and even for all time.

It is now becoming clear thanks to researchers like John Allegro (The Sacred  Mushroom and the Cross), and Mike Crowley (The Secret Drugs of Buddhism), that  mythical 'gods' were really metaphors for consciousness-changing psychedelic  vegetation. 'Dionysos', 'Siva', 'Krishna', 'Indra', 'Quetzalcoatl', 'Jesus', etc are really  personified psychedelic mushrooms including concoctions made of shrooms and also  possibly other psychoactive plants and recipes. Hence the very basis of mythos  begins with the induced changes of consciousness inspired with psychedelics, and  other types of consciousness changing plants and concoctions!

Even in the secular corporate world which wages a war on such drug,  it simultaneously makes its  own drugs it pays millions to push which promise to treat chemical imbalances--ie, change consciousness, so that you will fit into its  conveyor-belt productive-consumerist oppressive hellhole --which it is for the majority of us.

So, what if we grasp that all these mythologies of the past with their complex  stories, many of which induce deep ingrained guilt, that the basis of all are  about psychedelic vegetation that when ingested helps to change consciousness from the  usually ordinary state to one that can be extraordinarily ecstatic? How does  this help us understand about the exploitation of our consciousness by those who  promise non-ending consciousness bliss or the 'normalcy' that every law-abiding educated upwardly-aspiring citizen should have?

I recently watched a documentary about this female therapist who was asked to  help violent children. The programme showed these young  per-adolescent children, seeming to be totally out of control. and violent. Usually in the way of things  in this culture the child would be targeted immediately as being to blame, and  then drugged, but this therapist as well as observing the child also observed and questioned the parent  (in the two episodes I saw  there was a single parent responsible for the kid) about their past relationship with their parents, and it was found that because they  had suffered trauma from their parents, this was affecting how they were  bringing up their own child, and thus exacerbating the child's troubled and often violent behaviour!  But really the problem for us does not just stop with damaged parents , but  involves the wider community, and the very culture, and 'world'---the corporate  world--- which is being imposed on more and more people worldwide.

It is notable that gurus, and those who swore they weren't gurus, as did J  Krishnamurti, and cults, and major religions, and secular society--they all are  against and forbid the taking of psychedelics! I think this shared proscription against consciousness-changing psychedelics  exposes their underlying  shared patriarchal authoritarianism which demands  consciousness be managed and controlled according to the rules of whatever story  is being pushed and regime has been established.

“If you are nothing more than a biological machine, then what you think doesn’t  matter. There is no you. Confirming this, deciding this, is the technocrat’s wet  dream.” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Consciousness really, in its natural state, is not a static thing, but it is  twisty and turny, always changing, moods, emotions, feelings, thoughts~~~a  continuous stream which reflects also what is happening out there surrounding  it. There are extreme states such as negativity, and positivity, and notice that  cults such as the New Age cults always accentuate the 'positive' and blame you if  you dare show any 'negativity', like questioning their bullshit, or the culture.  They rather want to implant in you a  suggestion of a static state where must always have a  'positive' consciousness.

Same is so for the bliss-merchants, the gurus, who promise a static reality of  all-the-time-bliss. And of course the traditional religions which promise heaven and eternal life, as well as Eastern beliefs like Buddhism promising Nirvana after escaping 'ordinary consciousness', the physical body, and the whole natural world.

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