Sunday, May 3, 2015

advertising psychedelics (again)

The Internet and modern computers were built largely by people who were inspired by psychedelics. Steve Jobs, for example. I guess I sometimes assume this is common knowledge, but I've recently been reminded that there's still a lot of misinformation floating around, so some more advertising may be in order.
 
Here's a video on Karry Mullis, who credited LSD for helping him make a discovery in genetic research that led to a Nobel Prize. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDeuzVrlEQ
 
He wrote a book about it, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field: http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Naked-Mind-Field-Mullis/dp/0679774009

Of course, musicians and artists are well known for getting inspiration from psychedelics. And scientists get inspiration from music and art. So even if some scientists don't take them (and often they do take them), they're still using the information, the gnosis, that psychedelics have helped provide.

10 Scientific and Technological Visionaries Who Experimented With Drugs: http://io9.com/5876304/10-scientific-and-technological-visionaries-who-experimented-with-drugs

All this, despite the official suppression and demonization of these compounds. But governments have had obvious tendencies toward shutting down overly novel phenomena that might challenge the governments' authority, and people understand this, and aren't entirely inclined to allow government dictates to define the limits of exploration and creativity.

Here's an interview where Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, speaks about LSD: http://www.intuition.org/txt/crick2.htm

The issue of psychedelics is important for many reasons, including for the light it throws on the way we delude ourselves and keep repeating the same scripts, the same opinions, and avoid those aspects of reality that would challenge those habits. The benefits, about which information is abundantly available, are so extreme, that our continued inability to integrate the psychedelic method into our institutions speaks to the limitations, the brittleness, and the problems, of many of those institutions.

A neuroscientist talks about DMT:
And for good measure, here's one more, from good ol' Terence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuEXBBaFAbw