Thanks for your input on PsypressUK. I totally agree that the separation of state and religion is vital – the French state model is a very good example and it’s a shame that the UK can’t adopt a similar perspective. Though, with the Head of State also being the Head of the Church of England, then this is very unlikely to happen; fortunately it’s a pretty defunct system anyway! The various religious attitudes toward certain rituals, which you mentioned, have no place in religion anyway I believe. The law taking exception to child abuse, genital mutilation etc.. is really cleaning the areas that religion really has no place in dictating about. Spirituality is, in my opinion, an inward affair and any action that is dogmatic and authoritative over others is inherently flawed.

Rob

The same can be said of people of different spiritualities and religions, that they have to obide the law like everyone else, without comandeering spirituality through policy. I would personally be just as terrified if the bible-thumping theocrats took power, than if the “away with all gods, abolish religion” freaks took political power and started arresting my parents for putting a nativity scene on their front lawn.

Mixing private values, such as that in spirituality, and the law is a scary and dangerous thing. The reason serperation of church and state is good is not only because it is supposed to make it so that a theocracy couldn’t take over, but also because it means that people should be protected from having their right to share thoughts and organize violated. That’s all that religion is, organizing to preach and share thoughts in order to make sure that everyone clearly understands the founder’s message. Several religions in the past have been dragged into state affairs, but you could technically make a religion about anything. As a matter of fact, I should make a religion about music theory right now!

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog; this I appreciate. I’d also like to extend my apologies, as far as it was never my intention to cause offense to anybody. I will however, try to respectively defend what I wrote.

I assume from the points you’ve made, (like mentioning Burning Times) that you’re of a pagan persuasion – and feminist, I will touch on this later – always a pleasure to speak with someone whose own conceptual framework is close to my own (regardless, I think, of what this current difference of opinion entails.) It means that perhaps we’ll be able to come to a mutual understanding – a smiling agree to disagree, at least I hope.

Right; that’s enough idle chit-chat.

In the strictest chemical sense, perhaps you are right that cannabis is not a psychedelic; though I’d be interested to know which classification system your using to come to that decision. Your experience in using it really means squat in this discursive sense. I could find you people, smoking longer, who would claim the opposite from their experiences. This is to subjective a means; merely boiling down to a difference of opinion.

Cannabis, like any drug, is what you make of it. By this, I don’t mean just your social view of it, I also mean the make-up of your own psychological and physiological make-up and in how that interacts with the experience. This is one reason Leary thought they should be legalised; in order that if they are taken it can be done responsibly and under guidance. At this juncture I might also point out that you criticized me for romanticising the image of the toker; you then proceeded to stereo-type the gangster image. Hypocrisy comes back three-fold, believe me. You continue then to perpetuate the image of the young, morose, life-less toker. I agree this is awful. That is why we need responsible guidance; as a drug it has many other wonderful experiences, which if one is truly experienced, one can engage with.

My post is exactly propaganda – this I can’t deny and nor would I want too – but by your logic anything other than fiction (barely though!) and scientific journals is propaganda. Ergo, if you want to avoid it, you should all but stop reading. Don’t paint people to thickly with your broad brush; it can dirty those you love as well.

I totally agree with you when you say that culture is f**ked up because of the mechanistic system. In fact, if you re-read the blog, you’ll see there is an accord. The patriarchal question is a little tougher though because I think we’re just gonna have totally different foundations in our beliefs. Let me explain mine in the hope you don’t think I’m just another programmed, chauvinist pig. It is a patriarchal system, I agree. The system is screwed, I agree. Where do we differ? You want a matriarchal led system, whereas I believe any system which alienates individuals from one another (which extreme forms of feminism/matriarchalism does) are in fact some of the key devices in a problematic social structure. To swing from one extreme to the other, and forget midway that we are all parts of the same universe, seems naïve.

I feel the main reason for your anger was perhaps because of the spiritual discourse of the piece. I defended Leary because he called for people to take a look at their lives, the internal journal, the state-of-being. You’ve disregarded this, which I’m a little hurt by because I thought that was perhaps something, judging from what I can in your reply, that you’d be in tune with. The picture you’ve painted of Leary is the one given to us by the f**ked up society; yet you persist in acquiescing with it, regardless of your personal views of that system.

In writing this piece, I wanted to try and remind people that they don’t have to blindly follow the external governs of their lives. There is a freedom of internality that each and everyone can tap into and, by doing so, can touch upon the greater mystery of the Universe. My apologies Juliano, but I think you missed the vital message of the piece and merely vented some of your own frustrations with society. Peace and love.

PS. There are many audiences and you cannot speak to them all.

Cannabis is really the desperate tokin everyday to self-medicate rather than take the dreaded toxic pharma-srink meds for ‘mental illness’

I have BEEN/seen the young and not so young doing tokin sesssions and rollin spliff after freakin spliff. And if ther’s a lull of spliffs the mood going down, and then when someone is rollin the mood goes up–ad nauseum
Tokin in typical western consumerist mentality has become a commodity and means of E S C A P E from the fukin hell of this civilization!

Your post is a kind of propaganda. You ASSUME you talk for me, and others when you claim that we now do NOT want to explore the spiritual deep but rather be political. BS—politics and the psiritual are not separate. It is only this fucked up mechanistic culture that splits it.
Of COURSE people want to explore the deep. That is why there is violence, and ‘mental illness’ and apathy and sheer bordeom and misery precisely because we cant, or if we DO it is donwplayed as ‘passe’ or reduced to chemicals, or delusion, and escape. Ie., there is no CONTEXT because many of us are not hip to what has happened mythologically. Ie., the patriarchal myth is basically propaganda which manipulates, and the current myth is that everything is meaningless, and dead

Tim Leary, although he had some good insights is not the best role model. He began preahcing that Earth was just a stepping stone to the stars-=-in typical patriarchal fashion, and that we could ‘imprint’ ourselves like machines beahaviourism+LSD…………..We rather neem to look closer at Feminism. may women are afraid to join this discussion. Know why? Cause of the Burning Times is why!!!