‘Maybe we never left Eden after all. Maybe it was a kind of self-enforced exile’ -Simon G. Powell
Entheogens are substances which enhance our perception of the inherent intelligence in nature, its external-internal continuum. In the documentary Manna and the associated book The Psilocybin Solution Simon Powell discusses psilocybin’s potential to reawaken our ecological mind.
Entheogens may be a risky path for a very few people whose social, cognitive and technological conditioning is so extremely out of equilibrium with their natural self, deeply impoverished, so that when it is broken down they can become entirely lost or fractured and never become reintegrated as a person. The very small number of cases of enduring psychotic illness associated with cannabis or LSD underlines this risk. But it is such a small risk compared with the amazingly mind-body healing and spiritually educational experiences that entheogens offer. For most people entheogens are a path to self-nature rediscovery.
Psilocybin is one of the keys to the Doors of Perception. Once through this portal protecting the interconnected planet seems a fundamental concern greater than protecting our own self. If there ever was a strong and fast way of disconnecting people from the problem and reconnecting them with the solution, this is it. The sustainable development blue pill. I used to argue this case for ecological cognition – the ecocybermind – on my earlier blog United States of Consciousness and I will in due course repost some of those articles here. But in the meantime I will pose a few rhetorical questions from there for you to consider:
Why is it that cannabis appears to interfere with classroom learning and yet appears to be associated with supreme performance of learning juggling and other complex cerebellum processes or emotionally related behaviour? What is the difference between learning rules and classical systems, and learning things that can come more naturally or more environmentally driven? And why do authoritarians so like those former and abhor those latter? Why are ‘drugs so dangerous for society’?
Powell however, thankfully does not do this social critique but instead simply explains and illustrates the relationship between entheogens and self-organising systems so well, go and view/read his works:
Simon G. Powell’s documentary Manna
His book The Psilocybin Solution
Forthcoming on self-organising intelligence of nature Darwins Unfinished Business
My commentary (expanded) on the discussion on YouTube:Manna about critiquing science:
I make the distinction between science and perception of self-organising systems as follows:
Science (and human thought to date) has been based on classical principles of ordering concepts and knowledge about the universe in a very simplistic linear way. I call this classical thinking.
From the new physics (and perhaps from Capra onwards) we have started to see the world as a more complex chaos continuum which cannot fit the classically rigid paradigm. I call this ecological thinking.
There is a psychological analogy/explanation for this which I have worked on in looking at neural network simulations of levels of functional consciousness. We have two brains – the old brain which works along self-organising environmentally driven processes (ecological), and the new brain which tries to categorise and apply other simplistic orders of concept to the world (classical). And of course these two perceptual-cognitive paths are deeply interconnected – to assume they are two and distinct would be an example of classical thinking!
Science is still ordered and encultured within a classical rule-based context. This is the problem we have with science – it is an abstracted reducted simplification of reality and should not be used to generate predictions as confidently as it currently is. I speak as a scientist.
