When McKenna talked about the pre-historic humans having orgies, and hunting on mushrooms he described a state we can never experience. We will always fear. The culture we've been raised in is so deeply imprinted, that i can't completely dissolve, even if we get away from it. There is no complete unlearning. It clashes with psychedelics so hard, that we must fear everytime we go into the experience. I guess for pre-historic people, it was just like flipping a switch.

Boom, the light is on.

The light which feeds and nourishes.

Today we have to work through all this crap and no wonder many people think in terms of psychotherapy when it comes to psychedelics. But it is really annoying, that mushrooms, ayahuasca and the likes first have to heal a whole bunch of people before there can be real ideas injected into their consciousness. Like the idea of constant, extatic wellbeing for instance. Something we would be afraid of. Our culture is so perverted, that we'd think of extreme joy as unnatural and something that needs to be stopped at all costs.

Look at all the miserable people! They're just doing what they were build to do - yet there is no reward! Except death perhaps. It is a joke, really...and the more you think about it, the more it becomes clear that our daily struggle is to get rid of the fog of confusion. In most cases, it's even the struggle to remember oneself THAT there is confusion...that's how deep the confusion runs.

I'm pretty sure a good few people on here enjoy psychedelics despite the society we are apart of. Be the change you want to see.

This is a main reason why I left the city after a year living there, and got as far form it as I can currently afford to be. The cities are holes IMO.. cancerous cesspools of psychopathic energy. Get as far away as you can.

I need nature close by and I need plants and greenspace. These sterile concrete slabs make me anxious and paranoid.

Try to find just a shred of the old ways and embrace that. If you can bring back 10% of it into your life it is better than none. The new ways are the trails laid out by the psychopathology of the current human conciousness.

What I don't like is the apathy. The new age idiots who think we should just love and forgive everything because we are all one. We are not all one. We are all relatives. There is a difference. You don't have to fret and suffer in despair all day over it, but too often people point the finger and call you negative fopr speaking the truth. Hey, it is what it is..look around at the world humanity is creating. It is the living dead in 3d color.

I don't love deforestation. I don't love cultural or ecological genocide. I don't love racism. I don't love war. I don't love capitalism. I don't love the economy and I don't love the governments and corperations of this world that hold the truth and the solutions over the heads of the public.

Call me a pessimist if you like. I have been called worse. I am highly skeptical of where the majority of humans are going. I don't believe that we are going to get through this together. I think it is possible that a lot of people are going to fall too hard to get back up. I would like to believe in these new age ideas where if I just sit here and idealize all day long and ignore the real problems that they will disappear due to my mental manifestations. Not that I don't believe in manifestations but come on..

I can respect that many people are just ignorant, or trying to pay the rent and feed they're families..we all do that to some degree. Not everyone is equal in this respect though. Some people really just are complete psychopaths, much farther gone than others.

BTW, I still enjoy psychedelic medicines

I know what you're saying obliguhl and I agree to a large extent, but I try to look at it more like - since we know this we should work harder to alleviate this climate of idiocy surrounding psychedelics in hopes that future generations will be able to enjoy their reward unfettered by ingrained fear and dis-information.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
-Greek Proverb

Awwwwww man I feel ya.. Cities are everything Jamie says and then some these days (imo also)..

I live 12 miles out of one and had to go there for the first time in 4 years twice this week as part of a relocated job role (mentioned about my first time in an apple store in another thread today lol). Even at this I am really seeking a way to be even more in the countryside and away from the festering society I see before me.

(melodrama time) A truly false and synthetic culture is being force fed into a mass of stunningly docile and willing minds that in turn homogenize themselves further away from anything real while claiming to express individuality. While some think more and more people are awaking I feel it is folly to claim any critical mass anytime soon, people need to be torn from their smartphones and social networks and plunged into chaos before the light will flick on. Even then many will be akin to rabbits in headlights. Really does seem like nothing more than a massive deck of cards that everyone is piling onto. This of course can bring a great amount of turmoil to those who see through it, seek to escape it and find themselves all but stuck where they are (myself included I am not ashamed to admit). I know enough to know I am not alone. I see enough to know there are people who are better equipped to deal with this, I can only hope this is something I myself achieve soon enough. (end melodrama)

I have lived in much nicer out the way places before in my life and really do feel that the more time you spend away from cities the less fear and other forms of increased stimulus response tend to manifest. Trick I think is to ensure while you are out in the boonies you still maintain contact with people.

Isolation for even semi-extended periods of time can get pretty hardcore for some personalities.

I am not eve close to isolated(cant afford it) though I wouldn't mind it at least for a time. I value community though..real community. Not the crap we call "community" today. I tried to get involved in community affairs dealing with the use of greenspace and environmentally sensitive areas of old growth here and there is no community aspect. It is just a top down political load of formal bullshit.

Humans are not meant to be isolated creatures beyond a certain extent IMO..it is just that most people seem so totally insane in modern times that those of us who are like minded need to get as far away from the insanity as possible. It would be nice for the like minded among us to be able to gather together and drop out of this economic plane crash and build something better, and that is inevitably what needs to take place.

Im only about 35-40 minutes out of the city by car..and I am almost out of the suburbs now too. I am right on the edge of the suburbs now in an area overlooking rural farmland and the ocean, and 5 minutes from a protected rainforest preserve of about 20 square miles, and some smaller protected areas nearby. This is what keeps me more sane than I would otherwise be. I still feel like I am surrounded by typically clueless people..just far less of them and I have much more room to breath.

I thoroughly and wholeheartedly - and respectfully - disagree.

I think one of the uses of psychedelics is that it taps into a very primal fear, even terror, and that your "pre-historic" humans rolled the dice of terror/bliss the same way and for the same reasons we do. Were I a researcher and were funds available for this kind of research, I would be looking into whether psychedelics trigger the fight or flight mechanisms in humans and what areas of the brain they illuminate and suppress. I would expect they would be very old and primary parts of the brain that would be ignited and more recent and "human" ones that would go "dark".

I don't think the fear and apprehension we experience before the consumption of entheogens nor the terror we are sometimes subjected to during the experience is in any way related to culture or environment - the specific content, yes, but not the tweaking of instinctual fear, or the surging of bliss from the depths of our psyche for that matter. I think that the taking of psychedelics is what put ancient cultures in touch with their spiritual worlds, and that the experience of abject terror and ecstatic bliss on entheogens is what gave rise to the rather universal notions of hell and heaven. To believe that fear of them is a modern notion and a result of a decaying, materialist society is, in my opinion, sort of missing the point.

Cheers,
JBArk

It's true our generation and probably quite a few after us will not be able to experience the pure teachings of entheogens without having to break down centuries of psychologic walls and clean out all that shit that has built up over time, but you can choose to view this in a positive light. I mean ya, it would be great to be on the receiving end, but right now we are making small steps wether you can see it or not, and we have the unique opportunity to be the revolutionaries that people down the road will look back on and respect for enduring persecution and still standing up for whats right. To me that is sort of awesome in it's own twisted way.

It's like the respect we have for people of the past, they had to go to great lengths for some of the very things we take for granted. When you actually take the time to look back in time and realize what people have struggled through, it really makes you appreciate them and they become sort of iconic in your mind as hero's. I think that is something we can be proud of even though we don't get to enjoy it for ourselves. It gives us another reason to fight for the birthright of all mankind and pushes us away from selfishness.

We are the martyrs, we may or may not be remembered but I believe there is something out there that will appreciate what we have done.

I agree with Jbark that prehistoric peoples most certainly did experience some sort of fear during the use of psychedelics, but I think that the conditioning of society definitely plays a big role in a different kind of fear today. The fear that one will be persecuted for his or her use, the fear of being called crazy instead of being respected by society for having a special piece of knowledge imparted to you, also the fear that one is participating in the decay of the environment on a massive level. I think that prehistoric man felt fear of the power of psychs and the spiritual world, but we also have to face the fear of ourselves which I think is probably much greater than what they had to deal with.

I am really liking the idea of mulling this over in my mind for a while. Heaven and hell as archetypes of Entheogenic experiences

I do feel that modern day 'us' has a lot more BS in the layers that comprise our psyche and this can potentially lead to a lot more layers of apprehension, as well as lead to a growing desire to exist in a less 'synthetic' reality. I guess a large part of that is environment based though.

Can't imagine every trip taken by our earlier selves were all rosy either.. Still, the purpose and intent must have been a lot purer and better guided (as evident in some of the remaining traces of such cultures).

DMT to many out there these days will always be seen as just another drug and we mostly I feel would wager on the negative stigma that attaches being fairly constant among circles not "in the know".

I am sure that more primitive mode of us had a better consensual mindstate regarding the use of such things, even among non-practitioners around the fire.

Just some thoughts

EDIT: Nice words Wax

the concepts of heaven and hell are not exactly universal. To say that is not really correct from my understanding. Even the common idea of hell is not traditionally a Christian idea. It is a more modern fabrication.

I don't really know of worldviews that comprise of the typical heaven and hell outside of Abrahamic religions. There is other ideas like underworlds and many variations on that and similar themes etc..but it is not the same as what we would call "hell".

I was using heaven and hell as symbols, or concepts that do actually occur in pretty much every religious or folkloric tradition, with a few notable exceptions (wicca being one).

Here are a few outside of the judeo-christian and abrahamic traditions:

-Anglo-saxon, dutch, german, norse, danish, norwegian and swedish pagan traditions (from which the word "hell" is derived and re-appropriated to christianity)

-the Helheim of the vikings

-buddhism, including tibetan

-the egyptian cult of Osiris

-the underworld of the cultures of mesopotamia

-the greek Hades and tartarus

-the Ulfern of the celts

-the anaon of the bretons

-the finnish Tuonela

-the indian Kalichi or hindu and jain Naraka

-the asian Gimokodan

-African hells of Hetggwauge and Kuzimu and many others

-the Mictlan of the aztecs

-The inuit's Adlivun

-many chinese folk beliefs (even Taoism when influenced by these traditions)

- the hell of the zoroastrians

-the mayan Xibalba

...

And many, many more. Maybe not "universal", but about as close as you can get.

Cheers,

JBArk

"Anglo-saxon, dutch, german, norse, danish, norwegian and swedish pagan traditions (from which the word "hell" is derived and re-appropriated to christianity)"

There is no counterpart for the modern Abrahamic concept of a hell in norse mythology. Helheim is not the same thing at all..reguardless of the term "hel" being part of the word. This dicotemy just does not exist in norse culture. I have spent time studying norse culture extensily..reading the eddas, studying the cosmology of ygdrassil, the runes and the concept of the orlog and wyrd..I am norse. For Christianity to be able to map over top of Norse mythology with it's moralizing dicotemy you will have to find something about norse culture that parallels that moralizing structure that eventually gives way into a similar dicotemy. I don't see it. Norse culture is extremely complex and even to understand seemingly simple concepts like the orlog you have to go far beyond that level of dicotemy.

If you really study these cultures you find that the ideas of an underworld are not really the same as ideas of "hell".

I don't even know where to begin with this but in Norse cosmology there is 9 worlds. Not a dicotmey between 2 polarities..so how you can even begin to claim there was such a thing compared to the Christian idea of a heaven and hell I don't really understand. It is just a totally different cosmology.

That list above sounds a bit like anthropological overreaching and overgeneralizing that results in a homogenized cultural picture far too often that is never really accurate.

If you study greek mythology for instance, Persephone, the daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, becomes queen of the underworld. She is adbucted by Hades, king of the underworld. Demeter makes a deal with Hades and gets him to let Persephone to return, but she has to come back to the underworld with him for half the year. Persephone is often worshipped as a fertility goddess. Both her and Demeter are associated with the harvest etc.

The mythology plays out in a very practical way. Demeter returns from the underworld every spring and fertility comes back to the land..crops grow, there is bounty again etc..and she is taken back to the underworld for winter. Pagans don't see winter as evil though.

This mythology of the fertility goddess's abduction to the underworld relates to the seasons. It is inherently a pagan paradigm and has NOTHING to do with the Christian dicotemy that exists between heaven and hell. This same story basically can be found in Mesopotamian mythology. It goes way back. Whatever chritainity took from paganism, it has been wildy distorted. We all know this. Trying to map one over the other is not productive.

Pagans did not see winter as the same thing as "hell"..Even the frozen Helheim..the land of ice was not the same thing..

The christianized idea of hell was fabricated pretty late, to manipulate people with fear based religious ideology. It is not even a Christian concept. Until you can move beyond that paradigm, trying to understand all these other cultural ideas is going to be really difficult. You have to stop seeing this through a christainized lense.

Now, I am not saying people did not fear aspects of the underworld or whatever counterpart might have(or not) existed. I just don't think you can claim that these things arise from the same basic paradigm of "heaven and hell" we see in modern Abrahamic cults. This to me is a gross simplification and commodification. We can just agree to disagree here.

Now, that said..what Obliguhl is talking about is way way before any of that. We are talking Mesopotamia and onward here..thats late Neolithic. What obligul is talking about(in Europe/East anyway, this cant map so easily onto the Americas) is back into the mid to late paleolithic era..maybe early paleolithic and possibly into the early Neolithic. Two different eras where the lifestyle of homo sapiens differed vastly.

There is some evidence that might suggest that our brains have actually gotten smaller since the paleolithic..and has been shrinking sinse then..and there is also a growing body of researchers who believe that we have become more left brain dominant and right brain supressed. The left hemisphere is where the fear response lives. With a higher level of right brain consciousness we don't experience these emotions in the same way. They don't dominate. Sometimes fear is a good thing. I am not suggesting that we never experienced fear, but I don't think we were as pathologically afraid, angry, depressed or stressed out as we obviously are today..and there is mounting evidence to support that.

I do think that we experience all kinds of irrational left brain emotions on a daily basis now. I call them irrational because there is no natural triggers. The trigger is out lifestyle itself. If you study the way cortisol effects the brain, in a sort of feedback loop that gets harder and harder to break it becomes even more clear that we are slowly damaging our brains due to our lifestyle, which encompasses a number of factors.

The christian notion of a place we go to pay for our heinous sins and burn for all of eternity is unique only in its details. An afterlife to be feared where the bad - or unvalourous - go, i beg to differ with you, is rather common. This dichotomy, as you refer to it, actually does exist in Norse mythology, as does the idea of helheim being a place to fear (which was my main point):

"Helheim ("house of Hel" ) is one of the nine worlds of Norse mythology. It is ruled by Hel, the monstrous daughter of the trickster god Loki and his wife Angrboda.
This cold, dark and misty abode of the dead is located in the world of Niflheim, on the lowest level of the Norse universe. No one can ever leave this place, because of the impassable river Gjoll that flows from the spring Hvergelmir and encircles Helheim. Once they enter Helheim, not even the gods can leave. Those who die of old age or disease, and those not killed in battle, go to Helheim while those who die bravely on the battlefield go to Valhalla.
The entrance to Helheim is guarded by Garm, a monstrous hound, and Modgud. The giant Hraesvelg ("corpse eater" ) sits at the edge of the world, overlooking Helheim. In the form of an eagle with flapping wings he makes the wind blow."

(from Encyclopedia Mythica )

"Monstrous", "cold, dark and misty", "no one can ever leave", "guarded", "monstrous hound", "The giant", "corpse eater" ... sounds pretty hellish and fearsome to me! I am quite sure it was the stuff of nightmares for infant vikings tucked into their little norse beds.



This is why I mentioned both Hades and Tartarus in the list above. Tartarus, according to wikipedia was a "a deep, gloomy part of hades used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked." Sound familiar?



I agree to an extent, but I was careful to say I was using the notion of heaven and hell very loosely as concepts of good and evil, reward and punishment (but not exclusively), and of hell as a place to be feared that may just have its origins cross culturally in the use of entheogens. I think it is a reasonable assertion given what many accept as fact regarding the inception of religious tradition (the original impetus being the introduction, use and veneration of psychedelic plants) and the rather numerous examples through the ages of these traditions employing the archetypes of places or states analogous (though not identical) to our concepts of heaven and hell, from the christian tradition or not.

I know I am hitting on your area of expertise, and being no anthropologist I am treading carefully, and I will, of course, be the first to admit that my theorizing is more playing with ideas that intrigue me and "seem" true rather that from strict academic doctrine, but ya gotta admit there's somethin' to this, no?

Cheers,

JBArk

Ehm...

I love cities and I even love tripping in cities.

I can only enjoy nature at certain times of year because of mosquitos.

The only fear I have from society in regards to tripping is that I need to make sure I'm in a place where people understand what is happening to me. By my specification that's not too difficult to acheive.

The real fear is that of the other side of oblivion.

While I believe that somewhere in mans early historical psychedelic
Explorations existing cultures must have made it easier to explore
Altered states. of course we know the opposite is also true .
it's a vast subject but from my own personal experience
Trying to integrate and function in western society while also exploring
The outer shamanic realms is no easy task. The present industrial corporate
Culture does not easily support psychedelic work. It's set up to ensure everyone
Is a producing efficient law abiding citizen that must keep in the lines.
My point is unless your living far away off the radar it's not easy to do.

It's very interesting to be doing something that western
Culture has know use or tolerance for at all. The pressure is
Sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle.

It's an interesting question to wonder if early mushroom munching man
Had an easier time of it than us . I think it must have been just as scary and intense for them.

Smaller does not mean anything in regards to emotional processing. The extent of folding is a more accurate indicator of a "change", not size.

The fear response is a complicated loop that involves both hemispheres (amygdala are bilateral, and they are both active during a fear response). A change between the balances of the two hemispheres due to lifestyle would not be expressed organically/anatomically, especially in the span of a few thousand years.

Just being pedantic, mostly because I agree with your predicament.



Definitely not living as we should be, but you can't say that there are no "natural" triggers. A boss shouting at you, and you getting stressed over the fear of being fired and bankrupt, is as stressful as a tribe not accepting you and casting you out with no social life. And even if the term "lifestyle" should be considered natural, I agree wholeheartedly that these persistent, repetitive, and negative events in one's life in the city (capitalist especially) must be totally detrimental to one's worldview, and subsequently to their enjoyment of psychedelics.

P.S. fear is always a good and positive thing. Panic, which is predominant in our modern society, is not.

Nope, i disagree.
I enjoy the fact that i am braking taboos and don't give a ssshh*t about the society and its twisted, fubar'd laws.

I think that it is the ego death we suffer with the most. While Terrence talked about orgiastic cultures, the culture itself then is an ego dissolving habitat. So when they would venture into the void it would be as a group consciousness, "here we go". Where as we tend to think, here I go. And Terence talked a lot about how he disliked doing psychedelics with other people and I believe this is a creation of western society. The need to be alone and in the dark, almost as if there should be no proof of it. Then we can finally let go of our ego. Where as they would all let go in a group and do whatever together, who cared? But we can't do that in the western world. When you get a group of people on psychedelics in the same room for a long time the energy shifts very much. Everyone is so open and everyone is also just as insightful. But there is also an air of guard in the room, because its almost like we are all giving away our deepest secrets, who we are! Its sad to me that its like this, but its how we work being brought up in this era. There is a reason Jesus says that prayer should be done alone in the dark, in a closet.