I can't stop thinking about the fact that there are some South American tribes that partake in ayahuasca, yet still propagate violence to no end. I also can't stop thinking about the fact that some religions of our ancestors partook in both psychedelics and human sacrifice. If love requires you to tear open your fellow man's chest and pull out his heart as an offer to the gods, is it still love?

There are laws?

edit- What I should have written was; Love is a choice, not a law.

Well I would argue that psychedelics do not always promote love.. what they do consistently seem to do is magnify certain aspects of people - those aspects are not always loving..

Love did not require the Aztec people to tear out the hearts of their fellow man - delusion did. Psychedelics no doubt served to magnify delusion in that instance.. Or perhaps even was catalyst to the delusion..

I relate to what you are saying though.. based on my experiences and those of most people I know they seem to promote "presence" of being (which I like to think love flows quite naturally from) and creativity.. unfortunately in some cases creativity is put towards figuring out more heinous ways of killing each other!

Good point, Don't always trust this DMT shit... It might do you in, start tearing out the hearts of your co-workers etc.

Psychedelics do not promote love n'or hate. They guide you through an experience and what you make of that journey is your own responsibility.

There's a belief among certain segments of the psychedelic-using population that mere exposure to these drugs automatically makes you a 'good' person. As if all the world's problems would be solved if we all ate mushrooms in a field somewhere.

I think this is pretty clearly untrue - the world is full of psychedelic users who go on and on about how enlightened they are etc. etc. but still don't actually live their lives in accordance with the values they claim to profess. The hypocrisy of the person who talks endlessly about about how small their ego is never fails to astound.

Personally, I think the psychedelic movement should be working to distance itself from this notion that use is an intrinsically moral and/or spiritual thing and take a more evidence-based approach.

Blessings
~ND

Yes. Well, maybe it ís sort of a law, in the sense that love, or at least empathy is a kind of dominant trait in humans. It definately is the much prefered choice. If you look at how easy it actually is to destroy, or to resort to violence to get what you want, to lie and cheat, or to live like a parasite...then it's either a miracle that we still exist as a species and have highly organised society's, or it demonstrates that empathy is deeply engrained in our genes.
But if empathy or love would be a sort of automatism, if it wouldn't have an element of choice in it, then i guess it wouldn't be love.

Keep in mind the Aztecs sacrificed so many because of what the entity Montezuma was in daily communication with through psychedelics told him to.

Moral of the story is activate your Merkaba before you enter hyperspace and you won't be susceptible to those kinds of suggestions.

It has been my experience that there are no laws. Love is the mission and you are free to choose which side you're on.

There are also many warrior philosophies that perfectly marry martial skill with universal love and compassion. Shaolin, the Bushido code of the samurai, the unwritten code of honor used by the Vikings. It's something I struggled with for a long time as a life long practitioner and plant ally enthusiast. Why am I practicing how to kill and maim people if we're all one?

I found the solution while researching Bushido. The samurai were strict Buddhists who trained daily to perfect their skills. They found a place of balance within nature by making the observation that not only is violence a regular occurrence but basically it's unavoidable. What is needed if one is to survive and carry on a lifestyle of compassion is the ability to quickly dispatch your opponent with as little suffering on their part as possible, which requires and immense amount of training and skill.

If any of you know any real martial artists then you know that their skills grow in proportion to how little they actually want to fight. Masters will pretty much never be in a fight but every kid with 6 months of training wants to test themselves.

I feel like I've gotten insanely off track here. The point here is that love is not the law, but it is worth defending and it's a simple fact that there are those out there it needs defending from.

"Love is not enough" by Nine Inch Nails fits pretty well here I think

The Aztecs believed in the sun god Huitzilopochtli (sp?) and would partake in mass human sacrifice with the belief that it will please their sun god and the light will continue to come. These people aren't savages, they just truly believed that human sacrifice was necessary for life.

All the Aztec weapons were designed to capture, not kill.

Say you were an Aztec. You had a spouse and a kid, and you loved them with all our heart. If you believed in the sun gods thirst for blood, wouldn't you do anything to protect your loved ones? You gotta think from their perspective. They believed their lives depended on it. I'm sure there were plenty of Aztecs that were non believers, just like today.

are you kidding me bodhi? that double sided obsidian axe/sword they used that could decapitate a horse was not intended for capturing anything.

I highly suggest anyone interested in this field check out Graham Hancocks "War God"

I would be interested to know to just what extent psilocybin mushroom useage influenced their belief system.. if Moctezuma was in fact in daily communication with the "gods" through that means it would suggest they played a pretty big part in the horror that permeated through those times..

Does anybody know how far back human sacrifice was practiced in Mesoamerica? Reason I ask is that I remember Graham Hancock mentioning a very literal interpretation on the aztec's behalf of an ancient notion of sacrifice by distant predecessors? Fundamentalism would explain a lot..

I had a feeling from your posts you'd read War God.. I too am a big fan

Is partisan love still love?

Two machines are machining somewhere in space and time.

One machine says to the other.

"Hey. There's something coming"

The other replies "What is it?"

"Can't tell from here, what do you think it is?"

"I don't know, it's either new to us or not new to us."

Machine 1 "I love new things!"
Machine 2 "I love not new things!"
Machine 1 "Everything is new, how can you love something that is not?"
Machine 2 "Easy! I just do. What if we both love new things, when something not new comes - we both not love it."
Machine 1 "So, it's not new isn't it? We should both not love it if we both love new things."
Machine 2 "Would you ever love a not new thing?"
Machine 1 "No."
Machine 2 "Would you not love me if I loved not new things?"
Machine 1 "No."


Through hard machine work and dedication, the machines machined the something that was coming.

Machine 2 "I hate that you love new things."
Machine 1 "I love that you hate new things."

"Given the importance of human sacrifice in Nahua cultures, their warfare styles (particularly those of the Aztec and Maya) placed a premium on the capture of enemy warriors for live sacrifice; advancement into the elite cuāuhocēlōtl warrior societies of the Aztec, for example, required taking 20 live captives from the battlefield. The macuahuitl thus shows several features designed to make it a useful tool for capturing prisoners: fitting spaced instead of contiguous blades (as seen in many codex illustrations) would intentionally limit the wound depth from a single blow, and the heavy wooden construction allows weakened opponents to be easily clubbed unconscious with the flat side of the weapon. The art of disabling opponents using an un-bladed macuahuitl as a sparring club was taught from a young age in the Aztec Tēlpochcalli schools."

"There were two main objectives in Aztec warfare. The first objective was political: the subjugation of enemy city states (Altepetl) in order to exact tribute and expand Aztec political hegemony. The second objective was religious and socioeconomic: the taking of captives to be sacrificed in religious ceremonies. These dual objectives also influenced the kind of warfare practiced by the Aztecs. Most warfare was primarily political and was driven by the expectations of the Aztec nobility for the Tlahtoāni [t͡ɬaʔtoˈaːni] to provide economic growth through expansion and the expectation of the commoners to have a chance of moving up in society through successful warfare. The first action of a ruler elect was always to stage a military campaign which served the dual purpose of showing his ability as a warrior and thus make it clear to subject polities that his rule would be as tough on any rebellious conduct as that of his predecessor, and to provide abundant captives for his coronation ceremony.[1] A failed coronation campaign was seen as an extremely bad omen for the rule of a Tlatoani and could lead to rebellions of city states subjected by earlier rulers and to the Aztec nobility distrusting his ability to rule — this was the case for Tizoc who was poisoned by the Aztec nobles after several failed military campaigns."

Is partisan hate still hate?

The answer to both is yes.

From Wikipedia:



So why does one culture (the Aztecs and their sacrifices) propagate violence from the use of psilocybin, and why does another culture (Hinduism and their ahimsa) propagate peace from the use of psilocybin?

Why were the Aztecs delusional, and why are Hindus not delusional?

Can it be claimed that Hindus are delusional, and the Aztecs were not delusional?

If you crave the violent lash of a dominatrix's whip, are you committing a vice against ahimsa, a vice against yourself?

If you are a dominatrix and you refuse to whip your slave who demands you to do so, are you upholding the virtue of ahimsa, or are you committing a vice against ahimsa because you are giving him pain in the form of pleasure? Would ahimsa then be fulfilled if you gave him pleasure in the form of pain?

here's another factor to consider Bodhi, level of technological advancement.

So far as I know there are no examples of "advanced" cultures (I'm speaking loosely about bronze age tech and forward) that engaged in sacrifice. This is almost certainly due to the effectiveness of metal weapons vs those of stone age weapons. the Aztecs didn't use obsidian and wood because they masterfully engineered the perfect weapon for taking prisoners, it was just the best they could do. It isn't really that hard to disable a man wearing no armor, which the Aztecs didn't. Human sacrifice also probably started as a post battle ritual due to the large number of the opposing force that would have simply been incapacitated or injured instead of outright killed.

In such a case a mass butchering (with some small ritual so those involved could retain some semblance of humanity to themselves at least) could be argued to be merciful. These would have made sure the conquered land stayed conquered and was probably later moved to wherever power was centralized once that began to happen. But the advent of weapons that don't break on contact and simply remove limbs instead of breaking them lead to higher casualties and more intact POWs (People would either die or surrender) which eliminates the need for mass killings and therefore barbarizes those leaders associated with it.

The fact is that the Aztecs weapons were absolutely ineffective against armored opponents (especially cavalry) and that's just one of many reasons they were unable to withstand the European onslaught.

I do appreciate your viewpoint and input and am not an expert in these matters by any means.

Maybe those aztecs where just a sort of nazi's avant la lettre. You could try to justify their savage behaviour by saying that they genuinely believed that they had to butcher their own childeren to please some sun-god. But in that case their 'sin' just lies in having such demonic beliefs in the first place. I don't believe that god or spongebob wants me to kill anyone, and i don't think anybody else on the DMT-nexus has such beliefs either.

And why wouldn't we in that case not also forgive someone like anders breivik for the mass-murder he committed? He genuinely believed that he was a templar who had to protect europe against muslims. And the nazi's or KKK-members believed that they where doing the right thing as well. And tony blair, in spite of the chaos he helped unleashing, still believes that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

You could ofcourse say that maybe the aztecs lived in such a different time, in a culture so fundamentally different from ours, that we can't realy Judge. But that's a bit of a self-defeating sort of cultural-relativism, because if killing isn't a universal 'no', then, how could something a lot more innocent like passing judgements on other cultures be wrong? Passing judgements on dead people is a lot less damaging to anyone than killing infants.

(I have not read the other posts yet, I simply wanted to respond to the initial post first, so I apologize if any of this was already said)

a culture can have advanced spiritual concepts and still engage in barbaric practices, because spirituality and proper spiritual conduct is never the forefront or driving influance of any culture, generally a societies cultural customs and politics will trump their spiritual practice...

all cultures are imperfect, even modern cultures, I think it's the job of the individual to examine and question there own culture:



as for sacrificing humans, you must understand, these people actually believed that this appeased the gods, they did it so crops would grow, or so the sun would come up each morning, and they actually believed this...these ancient cultures did not have institutions such as science, their understanding of the nature of existance was completely different from our own, now, this doesn't mean their actions were acceptable, but you must understand how they viewed existance.

This may offer some insight into the psychology behind human sacrifice:


...ok, here's the main point though:

Love is not the law.

Our existance is a "Coincidentia oppositorum", a union of opposites, opposite forces define each other, rather than negate each other, and it's a constant struggle between opposite forces which drives our existance, to have love you must have hate, to know hot you must have cold, and so on...

-eg