Your Words Imprison You in a World of Swirling Mental “Bookmarks” of Reality, Keeping You Blind: The Fifth Prasad from the Planetmates (updated)

Your “Wordism” Is a Cave Prison: Planetmates Tell Us, Your Language Is an Aberration Causing You to Never Really Hear or Understand Each Other.

The Great Reveal from The Planetmates, The Fifth Prasad: Your “Wordism,” A Word Cave Prison

Planetmates Release The Fifth Prasad

PlanetMates tell us “Your Wordism–is an aberration causing you to never really hear or understand each other.”

This is highly reminiscent of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” imho. Especially, “your minds — suffused and distracted with a non-stop stream of non-sensical repetitions of word symbols – imprison and isolate you in a world of swirling mental “bookmarks” of reality, tagged to, but only dimly reflective of What’s Real, and keeping you blind to the wondrous reality itself in which other beings live in clarity of purpose and life meaning, and with direct intra- and interspecies and inter-entity communication.”

Koala is First Consciousness at The Fifth Prasad.

"[Your Wordism]...you misconstrue as a benefit in awareness, while actually it serves to cover up your lack of knowledge of your meaning or reason for being as well as the fear that abides with that."

The Fifth Prasad – A Word Cave Prison

Your Wordism, for example — while actually an aberration, a flaw in your reality perceptors, causing you to never really hear or understand each other, let alone other beings or forms of life energy— is touted as a supreme accomplishment! Whereas, your minds—suffused and distracted with a non-stop stream of non-sensical repetitions of word symbols— imprison and isolate you in a world of swirling mental “bookmarks” of reality, tagged to, but only dimly reflective of What’s Real, and keeping you blind to the wondrous reality itself in which other beings live in clarity of purpose and life meaning, and with direct intra- and interspecies and inter-entity communication. And this you misconstrue as a benefit in awareness, while actually it serves to cover up your lack of knowledge of your meaning or reason for being as well as the fear that abides with that.

Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema

What follows is a video of a reading of The Fifth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.

The Fifth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates – the audiocast

The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Fifth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=txcnckwqbr
Image of The Fifth Prasad, Of “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates

Paraphrase/ Elaboration of “The Fifth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema

For example, you tout your Wordism, your language and the symbolic nature of your thought, as such an accomplishment as to raise you above the rest of Nature. You do not see what we do: distracted and confused beings unable to see or hear what is before and around them. This aberration from all other life we see as a flaw in your reality perceptors, causing you to have only part of your mind in the here and now and the other part somewhere else in constant struggle with and juggling an incessant stream of word symbols.

Indeed, much of that is not even what you might call thinking, for thinking is at least a directed stream, a linear, sometimes logically ordered, procession of word symbols. Rather, much of what goes on in half of your mind at all times is bits and fragments of sounds, words, phrases that you experienced most recently. They are nonsensically arranged and provide a background noise for you, as obvious and present as the sounds of traffic and the activities of city life and just as easily forgotten to be there. It is on that backdrop that you attempt to think and you engage your meager efforts toward taking in new information from your surroundings, including that which comes to you from other beings, human and otherwise. It is this hodge podge of disconnected fragments of experience, mysteriously raised up out of the stream of your experience because of their resonance with painful aspects of your past, which you in your dreams try to fit together, thus creating even more bizarre concoctions of mind even while at rest.

You say some people suffer from an attention deficit, when indeed you all do. All the magnificence of life when experienced by us when it is singular, when it is One Reality, is broken up and diffracted by you — like a prism breaking up the pure light of the sun — into a myriad of pale reflections of what is initially sublime existence. Your minds run round, from one thing to another, like peripatetic squirrels, never appreciating or fully taking in any of the stops along the way. In comparison to us, you appear to be acting blindly, often inconsistently if not completely without reason.

So, your mind is split in this manner. Only part of your attention is directed to the matters at hand and the people and their communications directly before you in the present. That is another reason why it can be said that you do not exist in the present: You sense life passing by “below” you … “below” your self, which is raised high, immersed in concept and under constant assault from trivia, and word and sound “salad.”

So, it is that you are imprisoned within your distractions. Even the word symbols you use are mere bricks in the walls of your jail cells, for they block you off from the world outside rather than illuminate it. You are like someone reading the tags on all the “presents” before you but never opening any. You are isolated behind this wall of swirling “bookmarks” of reality, which tell you that a world outside exists, though you rarely enter it. And these labels of Reality — a Reality which in the process of labeling gets broken up into parts with its essence, fullness, or “soul,” if you will, removed — naturally are a distant reflection from What Is in actuality.

Were you able — and in those rare cases, when you are able — to see magnificent Reality as we do, you would be, or are, terrified and cover your eyes and fall down in the face of it, unless or until you became accustomed to it. Our Reality is wondrous and full: Present experience, even if it appears from the outside as if we are simply staring off into the distance or dozing, is so much more entrancing and filled with delight, in comparison to your own diluted experience. So we are endlessly engaged and interested. When we are not engaged in purposive behavior, simply being in physical form is so rich and enticing that we could not imagine leaving off it or wishing for it to end, not to mention deliberately making it end on our own.

Beyond that, we have communications between each other — within a particular species but also with other species as well as with other forms of life energy your insanity makes you unable to even know about — which are complex and fascinating. These interactions that we have, as you observe them, are the tip of the iceberg of what is actually happening for us. But then you mis-observe and miscalculate the depth and expansiveness of each other’s of your experiences just as much as you do ours. There again, you have that tendency to placing all else below you. Caught up in your “catalog” or your “table of contents” of life and not the actual “stuff” of it, you not only miss out on the full experience of your own life, as you place it “below” your purview, but you do the same to the experiences of others of your own kind, and below even that you mis-appreciate the experience of life of us planetmates.

Of course, like in everything else of your misunderstandings, you have a sense of your experience of life being different from other species … you sense you are not “into” the here-and-now as they are. But then you go on to deem that another aspect of your superiority to us. You evaluate that disconnection you have with Reality as a benefit or advance over others’ experience. Yes, that disconnection allows you the illusion of manipulating and controlling those items of your Reality, but you have no idea what a paltry substitute that feeling of power and control is for the experience of direct immersion in those items and connection to and participation with them … regardless whether those items are, in your categories, “living” or “non-living.”

Of course, you prefer this prison to anything else. For, as always, you have a sense that outside of its walls lies a harsh reality … a harsh awareness of yourself. Outside of it, indeed, does lie the actual experience and feeling of your life, including all its disconnections because of your running from your experience and the dissatisfactions and discomfort of your early life. The fear of that awareness motivates all your actions of mind and behavior. You do not know the bliss and wonder that is possible for you were you to let those disconnections be healed, those fragments become completions as they are wont to, and were to exist in silent awareness, to simply be, without all the noise of them. You do not know the feeling of being aware of your reason for just existing and the fullness of undiffracted clarity and purpose we planetmates exist in continuously. You do not know of this possibility of a plenitude of experience that would be possible to you in time, though a part of you does. For you express it in myths, telling you of this wonderful place, this Garden, this Eden, that once existed for you. Indeed, it did, at your very beginning for you and a very long time ago for you as a species. It did exist and so could again for you. But, because of your insanity and your fearful retreat into a dark cave of words, you do not know that and would, of course, fear that knowledge if you heard it.

Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Sixth Prasad — Ego as Opiate

Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Fourth Prasad: Origins of Ego

To Read the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt … on-line, free at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates

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Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Concocted Worlds: Fifties, Gen X, and Millennials and Drug Effects – Speed, Ecstacy

Culture War, Class War Chapter Four: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Concocted Worlds

Dawn of the Dead: Yuppies, “Me” Generation, Reagan, Matrix Manifesting, and Drug Effects – Speed

Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Concocted Worlds. America’s Values Were Reversed

Drugs and Generations

Drug Effects—Cocaine, Speed

Drugs in the amphetamine class are stimulants. This includes cocaine, methamphetamine, “meth,” “crystal,” crack cocaine, “crack,” speed, amphetamine, uppers, “whites,” and so on. They repress Pain extraordinarily well.

Building castles in the sky

They are euphoriants and cause one to have the feeling that one’s mental capacities are expanded. One feels that one can envision projects and outcomes precisely. So one expends oneself in organizing and preparing for great achievements, which rarely are embarked on.

Free from fear, reckless, overconfident, risk-taking

Since these drugs repress Pain, creating an amped state of mind more than normally able to fend off unwanted emotional material, they repress the normally present residue of fear, with its attendant caution in the face of activities outside of one’s comfort zone requiring forethought and anticipation. One does not feel constrained by normal fears or apprehensions, so one throws oneself into new activities with reckless abandon. One feels overly confident in one’s abilities and engages in all kinds of risk-taking—financially, sexually, interpersonally, legally. These activities have one embarking on dubious schemes which rarely pan out.

A land of light and darkness

Despite these negatives the corollary of this mental activity is that one’s ability to think and see more clearly on some issues is enhanced, just because one’s fears can pollute one’s perception and apprehension of things.

It is enlightening to remember that Sigmund Freud, among other notables in history, experimented with cocaine. At one point, Freud was heartily endorsing its use to his colleagues; he was waxing expansively about its benefits for mental life and clarity of consciousness. Of course, he changed his position on this later. No doubt his use led him to see its face of darkness as well.

Glimpses of clarity

Nonetheless, concerning the positive aspects of cocaine, it can be mentally enhancing partly because of its repression of fear. For fears, as mentioned, are both of the helpful-cautionary as well as the oppressive types. Being released from the oppressiveness of fears, being freed of the constraints of “fearful thinking,” can result in seeing one’s reality more clearly. Feeling fearless can lead one to acknowledging truths and realities normally defended against—thus being therapeutic even, getting a glimpse of reality outside of one’s fears.

Reckless

Being freed from normal caution, however, can lead one into reckless activities with consequences far beyond one’s ability to handle in either a normal, or drugged, state. It is no coincidence that these drugs have seen heavy usage by wartime participants—notable are their use by fighter pilots and by Vietnam warriors.

A land of empathy and insensitivity

Lastly, since these stimulants repress feelings, they can lead to insensitivity toward others. But since they can repress fear which blocks truer perception of and appreciation of others they can lead, paradoxically, to feelings of love toward others and a feeling of finally really seeing others and appreciating them for who they are, not simply in the way one has cast them (“pigeon-holed” them) to fit into one’s scripts, agendas, ego projects, or desires.

Matrix Manifesting

The Eighties

The Eighties saw an epidemic of use of cocaine. This was commonly attributed to Yuppies, which is the popular term for the Young Upwardly-mobile Professional character of this era and is contrasted with the idealistic, activist, and anti–Vietnam-War Yippies (Youth International Party, whose founder and most famous member was Abbie Hoffman).

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Reagan, Yuppy-Kay-Yo-Kay-Yay

Yuppies came in at the same time as Ronald Reagan into the White House and, indeed, exemplified much of what Reagan stood for. They were seen as greedy, over-achieving, materialistic, narcissistic, and societally and environmentally insensitive careerists.

“Love is all you need” turned into “Money is good!”

They were portrayed in film; one in particular that sought to delineate the attitudes of this character type was “Wall Street,” in which Charlie Sheen plays the role of the Yuppie, mentored by the Fifties Generation character, Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. Together they give a portrayal of complete self-centeredness and insensitivity to the ways their Machiavellian strategies harm others or the environment. They are driven solely by a value that “Money Is Good!”—a slogan completely the opposite of the previous generation — the Sixties Generation — whose attitudes were expressed in lyrics like “I don’t care too much for money; money can’t buy me love” and “Love is all you need”; who bought and lived by books with titles such as How to Live on Nothing, The Greening of America, and Back to Eden; and whose most famous slogan was “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out” (or it was sometimes said, “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out”—I’m not sure anyone in the generation knew which was the “proper” way to say it).

“Me Generation”

In any case, another term used for the Yuppie Generation was The “Me” Generation. Thus it was that from the late Sixties, early Seventies (the height of Vietnam-Era Youth’s influence on society and culture) to the late Seventies and most of the Eighties—within a period of a mere decade—the prevailing, media-amplified cultural values of our society swung, pendulum-like, a hundred-and-eighty degrees from where they had been.

The Big Lie About Yuppies Being Hippies: Matrix Manifesting, Class Warfare Against Sixties Activism

History of the Movement: The Continued Slandering of a Generation, So an Activist One Would Never Again Arise

Matrix manifest and The Big Lie

This change had a great deal to do with the efforts of the World-War-Two Generation—in total horror at the way their sons and daughters seemed to be reversing the values they had lived, and fought, for—to “take back” society. The WWII Generation did this by putting pressure, as well-to-do alumni, on universities and colleges across America to turn their curricula away from liberal arts and toward job-oriented curricula, and by using their positions of power in the media to influence the flow and content of the information to be fed to the mainstream public. For example, in the early Seventies, the WWII Generation’s money and power directed the press to declare that a “conservative backlash” was occurring in America, when in fact the opposite was occurring.

But eventually their “Big Lie” tactics won out so that people began to believe and then to create what they had been repeatedly told…the opposite view having, as part of the strategy, been censored in the media. [Footnote 1]

Thus, the Yuppies were the creation of the WWII Generation in their attempt to reverse the course of society that their own daughters and sons, as “Sixties Youth,” had put it on.

Scapegoating an Entire Generation

Coinciding with and supporting the strategy just described, and because the World-War-Two Generation during the Eighties were still in their Triumphant Phase—a psychohistorical term meaning they were at the stage of their life in late adulthood in which they had pretty much gained control of the reins of society—they furthered their cause by managing to plant a fantasy in the collective consciousness of American culture concerning the origins of Yuppies which persists to this day.

Designer generation

In obvious denial (again, their predominant defensive posture) of the fact that they had helped to “create” the Yuppies and so of the similarities between their own values and those of the Yuppies, as exemplified by the similarities between the (World-War-Two-era) Reagan-Bush political agenda and that of the Yuppies—who indeed helped elect Reagan and Bush—yet aware of the criticism that their very own values, taken to the Yuppie extremes, was generating in the independent press as well as the negative publicity there about the cocaine use of the Yuppies, the World-War-Two Generation saw an opportunity not only to defeat but also to “get back” at their opponents, the Sixties Generation, by ridiculing them.

In the predominant World-War-Two Generation fashion of scapegoating (the accompaniment of denial), which they had been directing from the outset at the Sixties Generation (who had of course incurred the wrath of the WWII Generation by opposing and confronting them on the Vietnam War in sometimes harsh and hostile ways), the Yuppies, with their cocaine use, were portrayed in the WWII-Generation-paid-for media as former Sixties hippies who had simply grown older but—consistent with their alleged “narcissism”—were still selfish, only now, materially so, thus the appellation, The “Me” Generation.

So the Vietnam-era or Sixties Generation began being denigrated in the press with the accusation, “The ‘Me’ Generation,” and Sixties values were also denigrated—the scapegoating of the Sixties Generation continuing—despite the fact that it was a different age group in society, the younger Yuppies, who were actually the ones triggering the attack.

Opposing Worlds

The hypocrisy of the charge becomes even more blatant when considering that the values of the Sixties Generation included such selfless acts as risking, sometimes incurring, violence and personal harm, jail time, and a lower standard of living for the sake of their idealistic beliefs in peace, environmental restoration and preservation, and selfless communitarian living, among others—none of which have any overlap with Yuppie careerism, consumerism, materialism, and individualistic greedy selfishness.

Despite the success in our society’s collective consciousness of the fantasy of Yuppies being former hippies—once it had been planted in the popular culture by the WWII Generation sitting comfortably in front of American society’s steering wheel—the truth is that these Yuppies were predominantly the generation that shadowed the Sixties generation, arising as youth in the aftermath of the Sixties cultural revolution.

Yuppies, Created by a Desperate WWII Generation, Had Fifties Generation Parents Marinated in War Fears

History of the Movement: The Truth and Lies About Yuppies and Their Fifties Generation Parents

Yuppies—Products of the WWII Generation’s Todo List

Their values become understandable, then, in that they were in secondary schools and universities during the Seventies when the “Conservative backlash” Big Lie was being promulgated. For as I’ve mentioned at that time universities were cutting back funding from courses in liberal arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, politics and government, and the like and were turning themselves into career-factories dedicated to producing compliant business persons, engineers, physicians, and scientists who were not being educated to think for themselves but how to achieve and make money in a culture the World-War-Two Generation was comfortable with.

Yuppies—Children of Fifties Generation Parents

The values of the Yuppies are understandable, furthermore, in that they were the sons and daughters of a generation between the World-War-Two and Baby-Boomer Generations, who are rarely talked about. It is often said that the World War Two Generation was followed by Boomers and that Generation X were the children of Boomers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The generation that followed the WWII Generation and the actual parents of Gen Xers were born 1925 t0 1945 and came to adulthood during the somnolent Fifties. So we might call this overlooked generation the Fifties Generation, or the Eisenhower-McCarthy Generation, or the Elvis Generation, or the Happy Days Generation…a more cumbersome but more accurate term for them would be the War-Born Generation. They have been called the Silent Generation, and this does say something about them.

They’ve been invisible but running things from behind the screen, since they took over conservatism and greed from the WWII Generation and upped the ante. They have been accurately represented by the Gekko character in the movie Wall Street, played by the Fifties Generation Michael Douglas (born 1944) whose protege, correctly enough, was played the by the yuppie-Generation Xer, Charlie Sheen (born 1965). [Footnote 2]

Not So “Happy Days”: The War-Born Generation—Fifties, Eisenhower Generation

The media tends to focus on the big trends and to ignore or miss the lesser ones. The way our recent history was portrayed, you would think that just because there was a huge number of babies born in the decade and a half after World-War-Two’s end—the much discussed Baby-Boomer Generation—that there were no babies born during the War…almost as if every man in America was overseas fighting or that, when home on leave or whatever, they simply would not or could not conceive!

Marinated in the Womb of War Fears

However, of course these ridiculous notions are not true, so there is a pre-Baby-boomer Generation who happened to be born during or shortly before WWII, i.e., between about 1925 and 1945. And the Yuppies were predominantly the sons and daughters of this—let us call it—Fifties Generation. Marinated in the womb with Great Depression and war fears and born around the time of the war, the Yuppies’ parents then had their formative adolescence and young adulthood during the Fifties.

Abandoned, overlooked, fearful, resentful, rooted in conservatism

So their beliefs are rooted in the cultural soil of Fifties conservatism, the Cold War, Elvis Presley, McCarthyism, Eisenhower, traditional religion, belief in the economic primacy of capitalism and the evil of communism, and the early “schmaltzy” rock and roll (e.g., “Teen Angel,” “Leader of the Pack,” etc.).

Their roots reaching deep into war fears–hot and cold, many would feel jealous and angry about the freedoms and openness of the generation immediately after them. They would, as well, heartily resent all the attention being showered on the much larger cohort of Baby-Boomers.

Yuppies, Fifties Nostalgia, Materialism

And it is the worldview of this Fifties Generation that was passed on to their children, the Yuppies. It is no coincidence that when these Gen X Yuppies were teens and young adults (mid-Seventies through the Eighties) we saw also a lengthy period of Fifties nostalgia alongside the caricaturizing and ridiculing of Sixties lifestyles, values, and beliefs. It is easy to see that the materialism the Fifties Generation members were nurtured in after World War II, as a reaction to the fear and uncertainties their parents had because of the Depression, the war, and The Bomb would be replicated in their children.

Only the fear and uncertainty their children would try to amass wealth against was the tumult, anomie, violence, and confusion of the decade of the Sixties, the era the Yuppies would experience swirling around their roots and upsetting the stability of their nurturant years.

Manic Irrationality, Voodoo Economics, Booming Debt and Mean-Spiritedness: The Eighties Began with Reagan Rising and Lennon Dying

Manic Irrationality, Voodoo Economics

The Eighties Began, Ominously, with Reagan’s Election and John Lennon’s Assassination

The Eighties began, significantly enough, with the death of John Lennon and the election of Ronald Reagan. Concurrent with the epidemic of cocaine use was a manic economy, massive military expenditures, and a tripling-plus of the National Debt. It is relevant to note that the huge increase in the National Debt was caused by a tax cut for the rich, which of course benefited those of the World-War-Two Generation who either inherited or earned, with a lifetime behind them, their wealth, as well as those upwardly mobile, materialistic Yuppies. The rationale for the tax cut—which was characterized by some commentators as “Robin Hood in reverse,” because it also coincided with cutbacks in social programs—was a “voodoo economics” (George H.W. Bush’s term) with a “trickle-down” theory of investment and economic growth.

That Voodoo That They Do So Well

This economics is based on a belief that a “dollar,” metaphorically speaking, given to a rich person will be more wisely invested, creating more jobs and wealth for everyone, than will that same “dollar” given to a middle-class or poor person.

This view, however, ignored human psychology, the standard economics of marginal returns, and the common observation that, simply put, for a person with a little or a moderate amount of money, that metaphorical dollar will have more value (because it will represent a much larger increase, percentage-wise, in their financial situation) than it will for a rich person, for whom its value is only marginally related to a rather large “purse,” so to speak.

Trickle-Down Ignores Human Psychology

Therefore, common sense tells us that “dollar” will be more conscientiously and thoughtfully spent or invested, creating more jobs and wealth for all, by the moderate-income person, who of course will attempt to maximize its benefit to him- or herself so that he or she can also rise to the ranks of the wealthy. To the moderate income person that “dollar” represents an opportunity for a rise in economic status; hence it will be invested, sweated over, and monitored intensely. In general, he or she will attempt to squeeze every possible ounce of benefit out of it, very often starting businesses of their own and thereby creating new jobs, opportunity, and wealth in the process. Whereas for the already wealthy person, that “dollar” is only a dollar alongside many others, and is only marginally relevant, reaping only marginal, or minor, returns.

And Of Course It Didn’t Work, Still Didn’t Work, Still Didn’t Work…

Voodoo economics did not work, of course, as indicated by the tripling of the National Debt. Another important indication of the falsity of its premises was the huge expenditures of money, during the Eighties, on luxury items, like yachts, works of art, expensive cars, and so on. Art items and artifacts were being bid through the roof and the prices they were going for were making headlines in newspapers and stimulating commentaries on the tube. Along with this was the overinvestment in spurious business transactions, including “junk bonds,” soon-to-be-left-unrented commercial buildings, and unwanted real estate. Much has been said about how these manic and ill-considered business transactions led to the lengthy recession of the late Eighties and early Nineties. Along with this is the connection with the S&L scandal which was behind the plethora of boondoggles and ill-advised investment.

The Manic Mentality and Mindless Waste

But there are two aspects of it that are especially relevant here for a discussion of drugs and generational cultures. They are the manic quality of the times—the go, go, go, buy, buy, buy mentality of the investing—and the obvious proof it gave to marginal returns theory, i.e., the money, given to the rich, was valued little and was mindlessly blown on trivialities—it was said that the Eighties was a huge party for the rich.

So rather than creating wealth for the wealthy, which would “trickle down” to the less well off, Reaganomics, as it was also called, turned into an unparalleled failure. It was called the largest shift of wealth in America’s history, taking it from the poor and middle class and benefiting the richest, top two percent of Americans.

More than that, it led to a debt that will be adversely affecting the well-being, lifestyles, and financial pictures of several generations to come.

The Hypocrisy and Materialism

Going into such detail about the intricacies and results of the economic policy promulgated by the WWII Generation, in alliance with the Yuppies and their parents, the Fifties Generation, is important because of the hypocrisy it demonstrates in the charge leveled at the Baby-Boomer Generation of being a “Me” generation and of being narcissistic. Again, we see the WWII Generation’s same tendency to denial, projection, and scapegoating.

To continue, however, other elements in the Eighties cultural arena, existing alongside the epidemic of cocaine use, was the aforementioned careerism and materialism among the Yuppies (comprised primarily of the youth in their twenties and early thirties who followed behind the Vietnam-era Generation), whose mantram was to get rich, get powerful, erect and maintain “family islands” which they saw as competitive with the rest of society (quite unlike the communitarianism of the Sixties Generation), and to retire early…social and environmental problems be damned.

The Necessary Mean-Spiritedness – Hating on the Kumbaya

Other standouts of the cultural scenery of the time included a rise of mean-spiritedness, e.g., cutbacks in social programs and charities, which, as it was said, had one effect of emptying the mental hospitals into the streets. It became fashionable to sneer at and blame (often scapegoating) the more unfortunate ones of society—the poor, helpless, mentally ill, children, the powerless–making some time for that alongside of outright snickering and smugness directed at the “hippie-dippie” values and “kumbaya” visions of the generation older than them.

Generation X and Their “Fallow Generation” Parents… No Wonder They’re So Pissed

Generation “X”

Was Disconnected from The Sixties

The next generation to wander into the cultural limelight has been termed Generation X. Whereas Yuppies came of age during the Eighties, Generation X came into adulthood in the Eighties and Nineties. As I’ve been saying, Yuppies were the earliest contingent of Gen X.

Predominantly these are not the sons and daughters of the Sixties Generation as the values of the Vietnam-era Generation included marrying late and having children late so that their children are mostly younger than and not among Generation X.

This value concerning marrying or having children later in life tied in with the Sixties folks’ belief in personal freedom, but is more closely related to the hypocrisy they perceived in the marriages of their parents, those of the WWII Generation. They not only perceived their parents’ marriages as being false and loveless, they perceived themselves as being the victims of poor parenting, wherein they felt they were not understood and were not accepted for who they were or supported in what they uniquely wanted to do with their lives.

Furthermore, they saw the social and global context as a negative and highly dangerous one. For one thing, having been children during the “drop and roll” and bomb-shelter, nuclear-shadow era of the Fifties, and having seen the assassination of idealistic values in the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King during their teens and young adulthood, they had great doubts about the future of the world. Though of course the Sixties Generation is noted for its idealism and for its attempts to fight these perceived dangers and injustices, underneath there has always been for them an uncertainty that success is possible, so that bringing a child into this particular dangerous and unjust social context was seen as possibly not a good thing for the child.

Parented by a Fallow Generation

So it is that Generation Xers are predominantly the sons and daughters of the Fifties Generation as well as those less idealistic of the Vietnam-era Generation that had, more often than not, opted for the traditional route of career, home, and family and thus had started having children many years earlier than their more socially conscious counterparts.

This Fallow Generation , let us call it, would conceive the children who would be called Generation X—who are noted for their apathy and lack of distinctiveness.

But keep in mind that the Fallow Generation is not a true generation in the sense that it is composed of two age groups—the Fifties Generation and those of the Baby-Boomers who opted for a family instead of the social activism, college education, and establishing a career before raising a family decisions of their more heralded peers. .

Fallow Generation Distracted by The Trivial

Hence Generation X’s lack of a unifying cause, value, or characteristic may have to do with their being children of parents from two different age groups and generations.

Drugs and Generations: Generation X Returned to Booze

At any rate, and understandably because they are mostly not children of the idealistic segment of Sixties youth, the drug use of Xers strayed back to the use of alcohol and cigarettes—the drugs used by their Fallow Generation parents, including the smaller number of them who were Boomers and who did not make either the cultural or drug changes of their peers. Alongside this “traditional” drug use, Generation Xers are noted for their pessimism, defeatism, and fascination with death—as, for example, in their selection of black clothes, their tendency to ripped jeans, tattoos, and the insertion of all sorts of pins and studs, as adornments, into virtually all parts of their bodies, and, in the extreme ones among them, a fascination with vampirism.

Generations, Their Drugs, Their Politics: Millennials, Ecstasy, Activism

Generations – Those Boomer Kids, The Millennials …

Drug Use — Ecstasy…

and The Movement — Activism… Again

Drug Effects—Ecstasy

This drug is very similar chemically to the amphetamines. Ecstasy has an hallucinogenic aspect, which distinguishes it, however. But it more reliably elicits the opening to love for others and the favorable perceptions of others and sense of unity with them as described above as occurring for amphetamines also along with the driveness of speed that is more characteristic of it.

Ecstasy came into use in the late Seventies and in the Eighties; and it has had continued appreciation of its effects through to the present. In fact, it is considered the drug of choice at raves—one of the more recent generational phenomena. The growth in popularity of raves maps near exactly on the increasing appreciation for Ecstasy. It would be hard to view that as coincidental.

Disco Yupp

So the free love and communalism of the Sixties was superseded by a disco phase in the late Seventies. The disco phase emerged and grew immediately upon the waning of use in the psychedelics, the increasing use of marijuana as a “cocktail,” mixed with alcohol, and the predominant use of cocaine by the Yuppies and Me Generation—the early contingent of Generation X.

Rave on, Millennials!

Raves became an emerging phenomenon following somewhat upon the fading of the disco phase—a decline which occurred in the late Seventies, early Eighties. So raves were a phenomenon coincident with the rising use of Ecstasy and primarily affecting the generations following the Yuppie/ Me Generation, i.e., Generation X and the Millennial Generation.

Baby-Boomer Echo Generation

For some reasons that may be obvious by now and until just recently, little had yet been said in the media about the daughters and sons of the Sixties Generation. This generation is currently in their twenties and thirties, though some are still in college and even junior and high school because of the tendency for some Baby-Boomer parents to postpone having children, often waiting till the very end of a woman’s reproductive years, just before the age of forty.

This generation has been called an “echo” of the Baby-Boomers in that just as the Baby-Boomers represented a significant population increase, conceived in the post-WWII euphoria and stability, these children of Boomers also represent an incoming population wave, due to the numbers of their parents. There was a wave of increased school attendance during the Nineties and post-millennial years. Universities more recently have been attending to their needs.

Just as in every other generation mentioned, this Echo Generation, also called Millennial Generation, shares many of the characteristics and values of their parents.

Similarly, they mirror the drug use of their parents. There was a great to-do in the press during the Nineties about the increase in drug use among the young, particularly in high school. Furthermore, in typical WWII-Generation style, the media and Republicans in Congress attempted, during the Nineties, to scapegoat Sixties-Generation President Bill Clinton on this issue of drug use.

For though during the Nineties the WWII Generation was in the process of leaving the scene, those elderly of them left were conducting a fierce rearguard battle to save what they could of the culture they knew and created. In their desperation, they risked any cost in terms of outlandish scandals, government costs, and loss of social progress and governmental effectiveness. They were helped by a Fifties Generation entering retirement with a lot of wealth who, as I’ve said, were extremely jealous of the attention paid to the larger Boomer generation who came after them.

Nevertheless, the truth of the matter is that the increase in drug use among the young—which significantly enough involves predominantly an increase in the use of marijuana and, as they say: LSD…It’s b-a-a-a-a-ck!—had to do with the fact that the parents of these young people are indeed the people of the Sixties who themselves experimented with these substances.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am in no way saying that parents, in general, actively teach their children to take drugs—whether we are talking about the alcohol and cigarette use of the WWII Generation or marijuana and LSD use of Boomers—yet children are influenced by what their parents do or have done, even if just in the fact that the parents are more tolerant of such usage, having done it themselves. I say this because it could be countered that even the Sixties Generation, as parents, were engaged in the public antidrug campaign. Yet when they did so they were doing it out of a fear for their children’s physical welfare, not from a severe moral perspective that these drugs are the royal road to hell or from such other paranoid attitude, as was most often the case in the parents of the other generations discussed so far. [Footnote 3].

Politics – Activism, Values – Idealism

To return to the point, though not enough has been said or written about this “echo” generation, these are some of what has been noted about them: Beginning in 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton, the youth vote has swung back to going for the Democrats. There has been an increase in activism and idealism among the young in the last two decades, surprisingly this increase was noticed as early as when this generation was in high school and grade school. Polls done on their attitudes as children and adults showed a strong increase in their concern about social and global issues.

In fact, the issues that appeared to concern them the most have to do with racism and the environment. It is no coincidence that in the peak of their influence as young adults, there was an astounding wave of participation in Obama’s campaign, largely by this cohort, that resulted in the first African-American to attain the presidency. [Footnote 2]

This group also has fears that the future may not be very bright or as good as it was in times before them, particularly in terms of a ruined ecology due to environmental assault and/or nuclear disaster, yet they, like their parents, also are more likely to activism and taking up causes in the face of such dire possibilities.

These values of the Echo Generation are understandable, not only in that they reflect those of their parents, but also in that in the most recent decades the Sixties Generation—and indeed it would tend to be the more idealistic of them that would opt for the low pay that teachers currently get—predominates as the teachers and administrators in the primary and secondary schools that taught the Echo Generation.

The same, however, cannot as much be said of the universities, with Millennials attending, for reasons having to do with cutbacks in educational funds, the lingering success of the WWII Generation in turning universities into career factories as opposed to truly educational institutions, and, with the cutbacks in funding, the lack of job openings for Sixties Generation applicants and the resulting continued influence, bolstered by the institution of tenureship, of pre-Sixties professors—those of the Fifties and Fallow Generations, and a few remaining, very old, WWII folks.

Still, the Sixties Generation influence on these youth in college existed because of several contrary trends. The Echo Generation’s numbers swelled university attendance, requiring additional hiring somehow, whatever the funding constraints, and those of the generations preceding the Sixties Generation passed from the universities into retirement, or the beyond.

The candidates for the openings that did come about at the university level not as much those of the Fallow Generation, the Yuppies, or Generation Xers, but were instead members of a Sixties Generation who alone, among the generations mentioned, valued education over money and careerism. They had been waiting a long time, diplomas and experience in hand, for their chance to return to the universities—this time as the instructors and administrators—and eager to change its course back to true education, as it was when they were students in the liberal-minded Sixties.

We see the effects of this in Obama’s election and the phenomenal numbers of demonstrators coming out to fight back union attacks and budget squeezes in Wisconsin and throughout the US. Though these are not attracting media attention these outpourings are continuing unabated. My analysis provides insight into why this is occurring now.

Painting the Faces of Generations: Drugs, Generational Cultures, Politics, and Culture War

Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Different Drugs, Different Worlds

Different Drugs, Different Worlds

This has been a brief overview of salient characteristics of generational cultures of some past and current generations alongside a description of that generation’s predominant drug use. I simultaneously unveiled in some detail what we know about the effects of these particular substances on consciousness and attitudes. Finally, I discussed the behavior and beliefs that can coincide with the use of these drugs, as they affect consciousness in different ways, creating different kinds of consciousnesses, different perspectives, indeed entirely different and distinct ways of perceiving the self and the world.

This discussion of drug use and generational cultures might be complete enough at this point. Any of the many connections not specifically made should be readily apparent and the information being brought together this way is suggestive of much more. What I do not think needs to be spelled out is the obvious: For example, how alcohol and nicotine use could be correlated with a generation that could put a Hitler into power, create a holocaust, and carry out the most destructive war in this planet’s history. It should be obvious how marijuana use could be correlated with the alienation, pessimism, and defeatism of the Beats. It should be abundantly clear how the use of LSD and marijuana among Sixties youth could correlate with a disgust with normal society and culture and thus the creation, from scratch, of a counterculture, with a pacifism in regard to war, with a reemergence of a lived and individual spirituality, with an emphasis on real communication, with an attempt to create real community and relationships, and with much more that has been associated with them. And it should need no explanation how cocaine use could be correlated with a manic economy and irrational, overoptimistic schemes, and failed business ventures.

Painting the Faces of Generations

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I should point out that, except for the WWII Generation whose drugs were legal and easily available, the above is based on generalities and trends of a minority of the people in the generations mentioned. Yet it is that distinctive minority of any generation that paints the face that generation presents to the world. It is the differences in generations and the new ideas and perceptions that make up the intellectual currency of a period and which rise above the familiar scenery to be spotlighted by the media and press.

The “Beats” did not comprise the majority of their generation and not all of them took marijuana or even had the horrifying perception of our normal unreality that is possible on that drug, yet a number of them, larger than any previously in any other generation, did exactly that…and those who did were often compelled to express those perceptions and the accompanying ideas, in literature, poetry, theater, and the like, that would influence the reality constructions of the rest of their generation and would come to characterize the palpable ideas of the era.

So it is as well with the Sixties Generation, the Yuppies, and even Generation Xers and the Millennial Generation. It is the differences between generations that is worthy of discussion. And it is my point that those differences are unusually correlated with the distinctive drug use of that generation and the effects that those drugs have on one’s perceptions of reality—a point that I have not seen explored before.

Drugs and Culture War

Finally, I wish to emphasize that these drug-influenced perceptions create the worldviews of generations out of which they create their generational cultures–the stark differences of which can fuel culture wars.

Continue with Culture War, Class War, Chapter Five: The King Won’t Die – An Aborted Changing of the Guard

Return to Culture War, Class War Chapter Three: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds

Footnotes

1. The events and statistics about this concerted effort are detailed in my book-in-progress titled The Once and Current Generation: Regression, Mysticism, and “My Generation”…stay tuned.

2. I’m not the only one to notice this generation or to see the swings in political leanings from one generation to the next. Kevin Drum, writing in The Political Animal, on January 5th, 2008 called this generation the Eisenhower generation. He places this generation in time between the World War II generation and the “counterculture generation of the sixties.”

He describes the swings from Democrat to Republican—World War II gen, Democrat; Eisenhower gen, Republican; Sixties gen, Democrat; Generation X, Republicans; Gen Y (boomer Echo generation, Millennial Generation), Democrats. And he predicts a political coming of age for Gen Y in that year’s presidential election (2008), which is exactly what happened.

What I add to that is the obvious point that these swings coincide with the parents of each generation of these youth. Specifically, counterculture generation members voted Democratic like their World War II generation parents; Gen X youth went Republican like their Eisenhower generation parents; Gen Y or Echo youth are solidly Democratic in line with their Sixties generation parents.

He describes it as follows:

Democrats and the Youth Vote

Voters, like other consumers, develop brand loyalties early in life. The World War II generation, which came of age during the New Deal and cast its first votes for FDR and Harry Truman, sustained a Democratic majority for decades. Likewise, the Eisenhower generation that entered the workforce during the fifties remains Republican to this day; the counterculture generation of the sixties and seventies remains a Democratic stronghold; and “Gen X,” the famously angst-ridden generation that started voting in the eighties, continues to vote Republican as it enters middle age.

And today’s youth? Surprise! It turns out it’s a Democratic powerhouse. In the early nineties young voters began shifting rapidly toward the Democratic Party and haven’t looked back since, even after a Republican won the White House in 2000. Today, twenty-somethings lean Democratic by 52%-37%, an astonishing advantage of 15 percentage points. It’s a bigger gap than any other generation currently alive, and it’s already showing up in the voting booth. Last year, not only was turnout was up, but young voters cast their ballots for Democratic congressional candidates by 60% to 38%.

All of this might be no more than a temporary blip if it were caused merely by a combination of George W. Bush’s historically dismal disapproval ratings and dissatisfaction over a grinding, unpopular war in Iraq — both of which will eventually come to an end one way or another. But that’s not what the evidence suggests. After all, the Gen Y movement toward the Democratic Party began in the early 90s, long before either Bush or the Iraq war had taken center stage. What’s more, in a recent New York Times/MTV poll of 17-29 year olds, young people were actually more optimistic about the war in Iraq than the rest of the population. It’s true that they don’t like President Bush much, but the war really isn’t the driving factor.

So what is? The most likely, and ironic, answer is a different war: the culture war that was originally stoked by the Christian Right and then taken up as electoral salvation by Republicans starting in the early nineties. Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, famously believed the Christian Right to be the key to victory in 2000 and 2004, and recent Republican leaders from Newt Gingrich to Tom DeLay have embraced it with open arms.

But young people aren’t buying. Quite the contrary. For the most part, they’re turned off by the sex and gender fundamentalism that animates so much of the modern Republican Party’s social agenda. Polls show that most young voters are OK with abortion remaining legal. They have openly gay friends and are far more comfortable with gay marriage than their elders. They think that legalizing marijuana for personal consumption is common sense, not a sign of moral decay and the breakdown of western civilization.

So when Pat Buchanan declares that there’s “a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” — as he did in prime time at the 1992 Republican convention — or when Jerry Falwell goes on national television and blames “the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” for bringing on 9/11, young voters cringe. And when the Republican Party embraces their agenda, they go off to vote for Democrats.

Over the past 20 years Democrats have found themselves consistently on the wrong side of conservative campaigns based on social wedge issues like these. But although these campaigns have produced short-term gains for the GOP, they seem to have done so only at the expense of long-term ruin. A generation that’s more secular, more sexually at ease, and more tolerant is increasingly casting its lot with the Democratic Party and is increasingly showing up at the polls to prove it. And unlike changes in the voting patterns of independents or soccer moms or other favorites of the political sociologists, this change is likely to be permanent. If Gen Y acts like previous generations, keeping its political loyalties essentially for life, it means that the past 20 years have produced a time bomb: an enormous reservoir of new Democratic voters who are just beginning to flex their electoral muscles. 2008 will be their coming out party.

Related article: Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution Awakening Millennial Gen….

3. For a look into this reality, check out this video of prototypic millennial, Jeffrey Lewis, performing his inspired “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane.”

Continue with Culture War, Class War, Chapter Five: The King Won’t Die – An Aborted Changing of the Guard

Return to Culture War, Class War Chapter Three: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds

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The Cultural Maze: Ignorance of the Divine makes for some pretty a-mazing untruths and empty rituals – The 27th Prasad from The Planetmates

Expulsion from Paradise and Cultural Overcompensation

Signifying Nothing .. Strutting and Fretting

Planetmates Release The Twenty-Seventh Prasad

The expulsion from Paradise that came with sedentary ways demanded increasingly complex, however vapid, entrancements—ritual and mores—of culture as compensation, however empty, for the loss.

Peacock is First Consciousness at The Twenty-Seventh Prasad.

Controlling-conforming-appealing-nonexpression traits…led to…increasing overcomplexity of the obvious simplicity of existence.

The Twenty-Seventh Prasad – Signifying Nothing…Strutting and Fretting

So the boon to the survival of the individual newborn—however twisted the reasons—became also the boon to what humans call “culture.” For the lack of direct knowledge that characterizes humans, and was increasingly selected for with the predominance of controlling-conforming-appealing-nonexpression traits in humans, led to the increasing overcomplexity of the obvious simplicity of existence. Your kind grew ever more fanciful and unnecessary traits, needs, desires, behaviors, wants, obsessions, compulsions, beliefs, visions, and thoughts out of this separation from natural ways, this split from Nature, this estrangement from the Divine, this “expulsion from Paradise.” (to be continued)

Paraphrase/ Elaboration/ Abstract of “The Twenty-Seventh Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema. A-mazing Compensatory Cultural Mania

Ignorance of the Divine makes for some pretty a-mazing untruths and empty rituals.

Your gradual changes from Natural Life involved two things, basically: A growing ability to survive biologically, physically at whatever cost to your happiness along with a separation from your natural inclinations and felt Divine guidance. Your ever widening separation from the Divine meant a constant hole in the felt meaning of your existence. Lacking roots in Nature or the Divine, you were like a weed without roots, growing madly above ground, reaching out vainly in all directions for sustenance because of the lack of direct connection to your deeper truth. This expanding outward desperately in all directions creates your culture—which is the artificial substitute and the dim empty reflection of existence. It is the “much ado about nothing” and the “strutting and fretting upon the the stages of life” and “sound and fury signifying nothing” of which our mutual friend Shakespeare wrote, having learned much from us. So, more of your newborns would live, but what was distributed among them was this watered-down offering, of a life drained of meaning and “juice” but mostly lacking the “colors” or “flavors” of experience we planetmates enjoy and containing instead the apprehension of the outlines of living not the immersion in its profound and lush plenitude.

This tendency for your lives to be bleached of real appreciation but multiplied maniacally grew steadily over time coinciding with the aforementioned rise in the predominance of the traits of controlling, conforming, sycophantic and desperate striving to please and to be appealing, and nonexpression of needs become repression of personality and cobbling of ability to participate in existence’s Divine creative stream.

So, driven by this inner abyss of unknowing, your outer behavior expanded in spurious and fanciful activity and productions of all kind. With time, your vapid nature would spin out unnecessary personality traits, hollow and unsatisfiable needs, fetid desires, furious but vain behaviors, insubstantial wants, blind obsessions, uncontrollable compulsions, fantastical beliefs, painfully burning visions, and tortured thoughts…of all kinds and all of it magnified, then multiplied, then repressed and fought, then struggled with…and all this in grandiose dramas that are further multiplied, exaggerated, over-dramatized, and so on round again: Such a fury you unleash, so as to create the smoke and mirrors of distraction and to keep you from the otherwise insidious trickling knowing of your horrifying creations and the gnawing abyss of dissatisfaction and unknowing inside you. (Footnote 1)

In all of these, you journeyed ever further from your roots in Nature and the Divine and made Edenal existence the most distant memory and the most certain component of everyone’s Unapproved and Hidden.

Continue on this site with
The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Six:
The Twenty-Eighth Prasad from The Planetmates

Footnotes

1. Check out this song by Jeffrey Lewis on his existential experience, which explains rather well—and artistically and humorously I might add—what I am talking about in terms of the apprehension of inner meaninglessness. As I have been explaining, such an apprehension is a result of our separation from the Divine and our abnormal birth. The name of the song is “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane.”

Jeffrey Lewis is not unusual in such perceptions and experiences. I know exactly everything he is talking about in the song, and it did not come from any LSD experience as his did. This is not a drug-limited experience we are talking about. Entire movements in philosophy—existentialism—as well as society—the Beats—have their roots in apprehensions like these.

The lyrics are what is important in the song. I’ve included the lyrics below, so you can see what I mean. It is extremely courageous of the artist to put this out and it demonstrates true pure genius in the result.

Lyrics to The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane:
It was a night in July, I think six years ago
Why did I eat the acid? I don’t know
I wasn’t thinking and I wasn’t scared
Why did I eat the acid? I wasn’t prepared
The last time I did acid I went insane

I was hanging with some friends just getting loaded
When all of a sudden my mind exploded
I had a flash that I was gay and I got paranoid
I was sitting on the floor listening to Pink Floyd
The last time I did acid I went insane

And I was drawing crazy pictures and before I was done
The pictures started pulsing like an alien lung
And I said ‘oh my god this is just begun’
And it was twelve more hours before I was done
We were up on the rooftop and I’ll tell you the truth
I was convinced I’d already fallen off of the roof
And these weird metal things rolling around in outta space
Were teleporting me from place to place
The last time I did acid I went insane

So we ran back downstairs where it was better to be
But I was trapped in spiral staircase infinity
And when we got to the door I couldn’t go inside
Cos it was the gates of heaven and I had died
The last time I did acid I went insane

And this kid named Graham he punched a cat in the head
He could read my thoughts, that’s what he said
And he described what it was like but I didn’t believe it
Like lifting a rug and seeing stars beneath it
Ooo-ooo

And the first rule of tripping was
Don’t be with people you don’t trust
The second rule of LSD
The rooftop is not a good place to be
The third rule is to be prepared
The fourth rule is to not get scared
The fifth rule is to stay serene
Turn off your mind and float downstream

The sixth rule’s to have a good friend at hand
The seventh, I hope that you understand
Is not to look to deep into your soul
Or you might find a hideous, hopeless hole
Of hatred, hunger, infinite, idiot
Mindless, meaningless, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness
And that’s what I did

And every aspect of life that I selected
Was instantly and brutally dissected

I saw the horrible emptiness within
The reasons behind everything
And it was at that moment that I went insane

Cos I figured why bother doing anything again
I didn’t understand my thoughts revealing themselves to be
The truth behind everything I’d ever wanted and believed
Revealed itself to be
Unwinding

I Stood up
I brushed
My head
I turned
To my right
All in my eye
And I said

There are things which we feel to be so terrifically true
That what were all but madness
For any good man in his own proper character
To utter or even hint of them

I’ve just discovered the meaning of life
I’ve just discovered the meaning of life
I’ve just discovered the meaning of life
I’ve just discovered the meaning of life

Lyrics www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/jeffrey_lewis/

But see also what I say about drugs and consciousness, in this regard, in Chapter Three of Culture War, Class War: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds. See especially the sections on marijuana and LSD use. For your convenience, I include some suggestive parts of the text here. Under the heading of marijuana effects:

Eventually.

Robert Masters and Jean Houston, in their book, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, provided an architecture of the psyche, derived from their study of the effects of LSD, that is useful in understanding what can happen eventually with continued use of marijuana. They conducted “depth soundings” of the LSD experience and discovered that there were four levels of the experience: the sensory, the recollective-analytic, the symbolic, and the integral. While marijuana is not as powerful in its effects as LSD, it has a similar effect on consciousness; one might say it acts in the same direction as LSD. In contrast to drugs like alcohol and nicotine, which serve to aid repression and to help to numb or reduce one’s perception of both inner and outer reality, both marijuana and LSD have the effect of opening or enhancing one’s awareness of inner and outer reality.

However, the effects of marijuana are complex because they do not as consistently open one to inner realities as does LSD. Pot opens or enhances one’s experience of the sensory world initially, and as long as it does just this it can be used as a drug of avoidance of painful (inner) reality just like alcohol and nicotine do. That is, one with sufficient repression and defenses can use marijuana to flee from inner pain, depression, or whatever, into an enhanced, pleasurable sensory world that does not trigger one’s pain. At this stage, only, pot can be used to defend against pain and can be psychologically addictive in providing a palliative to pain. Once again, it can do this because it serves only to “bend” not to bust one’s defenses against one’s pain.

Yet for some people this effect of marijuana changes with continued drug use. It is as if the continued “bending” of defenses can eventually lead to a “loosening” of them, and with that loosening comes the deeper level of experience described by Masters and Houston and termed the recollective-analytic. At this level, enhanced sensory experience opens the door, so to speak, to enhanced inner awareness. This enhanced inner awareness can include the awareness of the underlying motivations of oneself and others, and this is mostly not pretty.

Because the normal person is motivated mostly by past, or primal, pains or traumas and is acting out scripts or roles that are pathetic attempts to re-create or struggle with events that happened a long time ago, the normal person is not really IN the present. The person is, as the great religions have described it, in ignorance, in samsara , in dukha, and is basically unreal. The person, as humanistic psychologists have described, is inauthentic and is acting out games or scripts, which they are totally unconscious of. They have identified with these scripts, roles, goals, and motivations—the outgrowth of a completely unique set of past experiences of pain and trauma—and haven’t a clue as to their arbitrary character, let alone of the fact that other people are similarly acting out their own unique roles which are just as arbitrary and, well yes actually, pathetic.

However, pot, just like LSD, can eventually (sometimes even initially for persons who are, perhaps because they are young, or whatever, are unusually undefended, more sensitive, and more open to actual reality) open one to the horrifying perception of the inauthentic and unreal nature of ordinary social behavior. In this state of heightened awareness of the inner world of oneself and others, one perceives oneself and others as puppets or windup dolls, pathetically seeking to satisfy very old needs, which are totally irrelevant to the present context, with others who are similarly and robotlike also seeking to satisfy very different past deprivations. In common parlance, it is said that most actions of people are just “games.” So, part of the horrifying nature of this perception, on the recollective-analytic level of awareness, is that indeed people are not truly relating to each other at all, that they are like people trapped in spacesuits trying to communicate with each other through the layers of barriers between them. [Footnote 3]

What follows from this perception is the conclusion that people are basically phony, or plastic; that life is unreal; that normal motivations in pursuit of normal social values such as achievement, status/popularity, and pleasing appearance are meaningless rituals—games—that are totally irrelevant to the true nature of one’s being or reality; and that one is trapped in this prison of unconscious scripts, with no chance of release or true perception of reality.

For more: Culture War, Class War, Chapter Three: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds.

Continue on this site with
The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Six:
The Twenty-Eighth Prasad from The Planetmates

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The Fifth Prasad, of “The Great Reveal” by The Planetmates

The Fifth Prasad:

Your Wordism, e.g. – while actually an aberration, a flaw in your reality perceptors, causing you to never really

Koala was First Consciousness at The Fifth Prasad

hear or understand each other, let alone other beings or forms of life energy – is touted as a supreme accomplishment!

Whereas, your minds — suffused and distracted with a non-stop stream of non-sensical repetitions of word symbols – imprison and isolate you in a world of swirling mental “bookmarks” of reality, tagged to, but only dimly reflective of What’s Real, and keeping you blind to the wondrous reality itself in which other beings live in clarity of purpose and life meaning, and with direct intra- and interspecies and inter-entity communication.

And this you misconstrue as a benefit in awareness, while actually it serves to cover up your lack of knowledge of your meaning or reason for being as well as the fear that abides with that

(to be continued)

What follows is a video of a reading of The Fifth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.