Hugh Miller
Victorian scientific illustrations …amplified(?) a bit.
Bodies, bones and the occasional careworn organ.
Just more fuckin’ art. Sexuality, feelings. Trying to convey something of the experience. Obviously NSFW.
Art helps.
I’ve seen this before, but just thought of it again. A well intended typical interviewer chats with a housewife who has volunteered (after undergoing a battery of psychological tests) to be observed while experiencing LSD.
She quickly begins the classic, indescribable stages of the LSD journey while being asked to translate it back into the word economy. If you’ve been in her shoes, you know that this is like being asked to communicate with gravel.
She absolutely lights up and you can see her confidently and joyfully finding the ordinary world transformed with meaning and beauty. It’s lovely to see her surprised pleasure. She’s a normal nice looking person at first but she becomes radiant. The part with her takes about 5 minutes. It’s the good part. Then there’s a bit you might or might not care about.
I’m so grateful for my psychedelic experiences, I couldn’t appreciate much of anything as much as I do, if i had not had them. I find myself longing for another taste despite the fact that they can be intimidating. It’s a big place to go with information that normal me can find overwhelming. It’s a bit like if you really believed in an awesome god and you had a mechanism to hear him…you wouldn’t pull that switch lightly…or every day.
I think it’s heartbreaking that psychedelics were lumped with uppers and downers and the only access became through manufacturers outside the law. If you liked uppers and downers you could be certain someone was making enough of those for the universe of self medicators aching to go up or down.
But Psychedelics are reality medicine, the sideways elevator to the sacred hilltop in the wind…It’s not usually crowded up there.
I want to go back.
There’s a lot of important information about human happiness waiting to be learned from some molecules wrongly placed on the “Evil things” shelf long, long ago.
Natural does not equal good. “Natural” includes violence toward outlanders and controlling women’s lives. I suspect “100% Natural” is a phrase Hitler would have liked.
Some questions we ought to ask:
- Why is there war? Why does xenophobia appear in every culture? Why does everyone have a culture? Why does virtually every culture come with a religion? Why do most cultures/religions form defensive barriers against each other?
- Why is it so common for people (men and women) in so many different cultures, to feel that they have a vote in how women should dress and behave, but almost never show that kind of concern about men? (The general exception being harassing effeminate men).
- Why are the young predictably liberal, and the old generally conservative?
- Why are liberal and conservative political stances universal within technological societies but always relative to local cultural details? (“I treat my slaves gently, they last longer that way”: Is that a progressive or conservative statement?)
- Why are people predictably kind to the rich and famous…but cruel to the poor? (Spoiler alert: It’s because we’re self-interested bastards who do it automatically.)
Woman arrested in Chicago in 1922 for too much exposed skin.
All of these behaviors are core hardwired human group traits that support a strong and stable primate hive. These behaviors aren’t beautiful or right philosophically, they are bits of scripting preserved by the natural selection of group behaviors. These are traits that helped us out-compete the good, the bad and possibly the ugly, over the last 200k years.
We are virtually blind to our nature as a species because we are so busy being individuals of our species. We are neurologically immersed in the matrix of these behaviors to the extent that they are not noteworthy. We feel like peripheral players at best to the great events of our time even though these movements are composed entirely of peripheral players. The larger picture is composed of us “pixels” forming the colors, shapes, and gradients, with our massed actions. And just as a cloud doesn’t exist without micro-droplets, human events don’t exist without us in our drifting collective groups. Every notable trend in our world emerges from the scaling up of the actions of individuals who generally feel no personal control over what is happening around them: Most people feel they are just tagging along trying to keep up and figure things out. The mirror of current events is too broad for us to recognize ourselves. It’s as if the sky was a mirror where we could see our city reflected but not our own little face peering up from it.
The behavior of large human groups is almost opaque to us in the same way that a cell knows nothing about the particular body it devotes every moment to supporting. We plug away at our daily business in much the same fashion. For many decades science fiction writers have explored the issues of robots and their programming and the nature of free will. I think it’s one of those ideas that is compelling because it echoes something deep and unresolved in ourselves, a bit like a profound but confusing dream. In a world where the first semiconscious robot has yet to ask if we want fries with that, the subject is clearly ourselves. Are we…free? Continue reading
These are screen grabs from Saudi television. I know that Memri TV attempts to make Arabic/Muslim culture more transparent to the west but I don’t know how these stack up in terms of intensity. Are they average moments of television or extreme? I can’t place them solidly in context where they belong but I also know that liberal westerners under-imagine the hostility to humanistic cultures and how far outside our norms of accepting diversity conservative Muslim cultures are.
I can tell you you that this is not like selecting the very worst of Christian broadcasting in the United States – this is much closer to mainstream in Saudi Arabia which makes no pretense of loving those outside its cultural signature.