I've been reading this thread "Cantona has a plan to kill of the banks". Liked it a lot, wrote a reply, but it didn't quite fit into the original topic, so I posted it here instead.
Some relevant quotes:
Steely wrote:The corruption we see in power right now stems from men, and like all things mortal, it too shall die.
Steely wrote:So we completely demolish the current system over night, now what? Corruption, hate, and greed don't magically disappear like that, and any new system rectified in place of the old is as easily corrupted as the last. And based on the history of human civilization so far, will be turned against its people just as the current system or any in the past has.
It's the people that need to change in order for the things we create to finally work the way they were meant to.
Any type of government - whether it be communism, capitalism, or a dictatorship - could easily bring us into a world without wars and poverty if the greed running it all is dealt with.
corpus callosum wrote:It's so good to see that there are some people out there who have seen the inequity that exists with the fractional reserve banking system and fiat money but it seems to me that all measures being employed today to rectify this financial crisis don't seem to regard the system as inherently dysfunctional and simply seek to get back to the 'good old days' of the early 2000s' boom-time.
Unless these root causes are explored the occurrence of the next financial cock-up is just a matter of time....
Autodidactic wrote:The solution is informing people to what is really going on.
1664 wrote:I see a lot of people especially in psy communities who rage against money and capitalism without understanding a great deal about it, or offering any realistic alternative. How would we "be more advanced than we are right now" without capitalism? Unless by advanced you mean in some way other than the usual measures of wealth, health and technological improvement etc?
To introduce my stance on this subject, let me share an excerpt from Stanislav Grof's book LSD Psychotherapy. He's writing about what happens to patients when they go through a true death/rebirth experience in the course of a psychedelic session:
Stanislav Grof wrote:The shattering confrontation with these alarming aspects of existence and deep realization of the vulnerability and impermanence of humans as biological creatures has two important consequences. The first of these is a profound emotional and philosophical crisis that forces individuals to question seriously the meaning of existence and their values in life. They come to realize through these experiences, not intellectually but on a deep, almost cellular level, that no matter what they do, they cannot escape the inevitable. They will have to leave this world, bereft of everything that they have achieved and accumulated. This process of ontological crisis is usually associated with a definite crystallization of basic values. Worldly ambitions, competitive drives, and cravings for status, power, fame, prestige and possessions tend to fade away when viewed against the background of the mandatory ending of each human drama in biological annihilation.
The other important consequence of this shocking encounter with the phenomenon of death is the opening of areas of religious and spiritual experience that seem to be an intrinsic part of the human personality and are independent of the individual's cultural and religious background and programming. The only way to resolve the existentialist dilemma described above is through transcendence. The individual has to find reference points that are beyond the narrow boundaries of his or her perishable physical shrine and the limitations of the individual life span. It would appear that everybody who experiences these levels develops convincing insights into the utmost relevance of the spiritual dimension in the universal scheme of things. Even positivistically oriented scientists, hard-core materialists, skeptics and cynics, uncompromising atheists and antireligious crusaders such as Marxist philosophers and politicians, suddenly become interested in the spiritual quest after they confront these levels in themselves.
Why I'm citing this is that I believe the root of the problems discussed in that other thread is of a spiritual nature. What needs to be changed is the human mind, and any technological fix that is employed without first enlightening the doer will only make the situation worse. I see no possibility in solving these problems on the current level of evolution; we - as a race - must collectively jump to the next level, where we get to know and listen to that inner guidance and wisdom which lets us steer things in a way that is in harmony with the needs of the cosmos and all of humanity.
Shamanism - and its western cousin psychedelic psychotherapy - are technologies that have the capability to lead us back to our roots, to reawaken this hidden knowledge. The hippies have also dreamt of this, but (a) they went to the extremes because of lacking experience and ideological inflation (like the idea of pouring LSD into water reserves) and (b) they didn't have good technology (I mean scientific psychedelic technology), so their results were ad-hoc and not repeatable. I see the past 50+ years as a process during which we have slowly come to terms with psychedelics and found out how to integrate them into society in a non-disruptive way (see the work of MAPS as a salient example).
I'm now working on a translation of this book (Stan Grof's LSD psychotherapy) to Hungarian, because I feel that the time is finally right: there is a chance that in my country a therapeutic team - first on a really small scale - could start working with LSD or other psychedelics in a legal, supported way. I have this secret hope, that some of these people (all psychiatrists) would experience an epiphany during their sessions: they would come out as spiritual warriors, who had a peek into that other, coming world and can sense the immense possibilities inherent in the use of psychedelic drugs for world transformation. I'm dreaming of people who are firmly established in the old world order, while at the same time completely converted soul-wise to the new one. These people would act as bridges: they could bring forth soul change in a massive - but still responsible - way, without throwing away the old system and thereby recklessly endangering the lives of millions of people.
I feel that the issue of using psychedelic drugs for inner transformation could become a
very hot topic very fast, if this kind of practice got official acknowledgment and support from the government and the traditional scientific establishment.