I hate to see psychedelics as just another thing people seem to use to isolate themselves and hold themselves above others. Holding any religious, spiritual or metaphysical viewpoint, either common and conventional or novel and strange, in some ways separates you from everyone else. With the big religions this is offset a little and doesn't result in alienation simply because of the size of the community, but the point stands that we're just splintering ourselves as a people into arbitrary groups. This is an artificial isolation, and in truth we are all more linked to each other by the common, ingrained and universally desired deep experience than we are separated by these superficial surface differences. Everyone you meet, at their core, is a complex, beautiful, suffering and loving mind. Psychedelics didn't add anything new to you. That capacity and striving for enlightenment, that innate deep humanity that everyone has touched in one way or another, that was there long before you tripped for the first time or chanted with your church group or cleared your mind of the clutter of everyday life. That is what links us.
Looking down on these people as unenlightened and shallow just pushes them farther away from you. Society breeds this shallowness. We can't always be ourselves because other people aren't always themselves. It's unspoken and self-propagating, because everyone has come to accept the everyday world as a place where we need to wear our masks. This is just how the human race and our culture has evolved. We are not perfect; our biology and our culture are the culmination of the incredibly fallible cosmic process of trial and error over enormous timescales.
Everyone you pass on the street, everyone who you believe is so egotistically motivated and nescient to the real beauties of life, they are like this because, before this very very recent cultural evolution we've faced, it was the only way to live. Human culture evolved because our ancestors' environment forced them to adapt to living in groups, and a million years later we're still working out the kinks. People look at how advanced our world is and they forget that all of this advancement is very recent, though our basic psychological drives are the same as they were a hundred thousand years ago. Comparing the world to some sort of perfect ideal is the best way to be disappointed with it. An essential part of getting older and maturing is to realize that life is a lot more rough around the edges than it has seemed as you were growing up.
Everyone's mask comes off at some point, but for the majority of our interaction with people both we and they are wearing it. It's the face under the mask that makes us all the same. Not everyone lives with the same degree of lucidity, the same frequency of self-connection and understanding, but that's just how the world is.
Looking down on these people as unenlightened and shallow just pushes them farther away from you. Society breeds this shallowness. We can't always be ourselves because other people aren't always themselves. It's unspoken and self-propagating, because everyone has come to accept the everyday world as a place where we need to wear our masks. This is just how the human race and our culture has evolved. We are not perfect; our biology and our culture are the culmination of the incredibly fallible cosmic process of trial and error over enormous timescales.
Everyone you pass on the street, everyone who you believe is so egotistically motivated and nescient to the real beauties of life, they are like this because, before this very very recent cultural evolution we've faced, it was the only way to live. Human culture evolved because our ancestors' environment forced them to adapt to living in groups, and a million years later we're still working out the kinks. People look at how advanced our world is and they forget that all of this advancement is very recent, though our basic psychological drives are the same as they were a hundred thousand years ago. Comparing the world to some sort of perfect ideal is the best way to be disappointed with it. An essential part of getting older and maturing is to realize that life is a lot more rough around the edges than it has seemed as you were growing up.
Everyone's mask comes off at some point, but for the majority of our interaction with people both we and they are wearing it. It's the face under the mask that makes us all the same. Not everyone lives with the same degree of lucidity, the same frequency of self-connection and understanding, but that's just how the world is.
