tripping in the 21st century

Is Taking a Psychedelic an Act of Sedition?
[via nerdshit.com]

"So long as such stormings of heaven are outlawed and dismissed, the greater the likelihood for relapse from the cosmic consciousness they engender to the coarse materialist outlook that is consensus reality. With religion-inspired hatred on the loose, many see religion itself as a culprit for the Sept. 11 troubles, and point to psychedelics — or entheogens, divine-generating agents — as a means of bypassing religion to get to the wellspring of spirituality. Because they produce the primary experience on which faith is inspired, "entheogens prove that no intermediary is necessary," states Clark Heinrich, author of God Without Religion (yet unpublished) and Strange Fruit (Inner Traditions), a speculative history about the role of the Amanita muscaria mushroom in several world religions. After his own drug-induced awakening, the late British Ecstasy advocate, Nicholas Saunders (see www.ecstasy.org), surmised that religions may very well have been invented to explain entheogenic experiences.

"Still another nondenominational yet transcendental usage seen for psychedelics is as a tool of hyper-ratiocinative perception, a means to deconstruct media charades and help the intellect to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, according to Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information (Three Rivers Press). "I wouldn't necessarily want to trip in the aftermath of Sept. 11," concedes Davis, "but I can now use my psychedelic training for coping with the epistemological cyclone of a cataclysm such as this. I grew up in the cushiest reality in the history of the planet. Now I see demons pouring over the lip of my existence, but I've learned through psychedelics how to breathe through it and not believe its story."