Elevate and Evolve | Cannabis & Psychedelic Culture Blog
Guillem Mari is an illustrator whose distinct watercolor style has gotten a lot of attention.
After working in the animation industry, Guillem became a freelancer in comics and illustration, working for Marvel and Image Comics.
The following selected excerpts are from Tripping as a Tool for Self-Realization, originally published on The Psychedelic Frontier.
Psychedelics have a variety of uses, dependent on the user’s attitude. If you use them as intoxicants, you will become intoxicated. If you want to see pretty shapes and colors and “trip out” to music, then they will act as sensory enhancers. If you want a new mode of consciousness that leads you to experience life in a novel way, they will satisfy that urge.
These psychedelics can go much deeper than recreation. Those who never choose to explore psychedelics more seriously than as intoxicants or sense-enhancers will miss out on their greatest potential. Why stop at pretty sounds and colors when these medicines can catalyze deep epiphanies and lasting change?
Psychedelics can show you your true self, dragging your insecurities and internal conflicts into the light for examination. Or mediate a conversation, even a partnership, with the subconscious. They unseat your deepest assumptions and lead you to question the most rigid of habits and biases.
Psychedelics are molecular battering rams, crumbling the castle called Ego and raising from the rubble a profound feeling of pure love and unity. Your real self is revealed, defenses down, moat drained, drawbridge lowered. A trip may be the first time you have a free reign in your own mental kingdom. A molecule may be the truest mirror you ever held up to yourself.
Myron Stolaroff, a researcher and advocate of psychedelic psychotherapy, describes how recreational use tends to taper off naturally:
The use of psychedelics is self-regulating in most cases. Their true purpose is to enhance growth and interior development. Used only for pleasure, or abused, the Inner Self is thwarted, which leads to unpleasant experiences and depression. Though everyone who pursues the use of psychedelics for personal growth must be prepared for the “dark night of the soul” experiences, those who seek only entertainment will lose interest in these substances.
“Tripping with intent” is not an alternative method so much as a complementary one. People use psychedelics for all sorts of reasons—to improve sex, deepen their connection with nature and other people, explore their internal emotional landscape, and so on. A focus on self-improvement, with proper preparation, method, and post-trip integration, will help bring more meaning to all of these activities.
For the whole article “Tripping as a Tool for Self-Realization”, please visit The Psychedelic Frontier.
The late, great Terence McKenna explains how the psychedelic experience clears all preconceived notions and prejudices and leaves the psyche with a clean, pure view of the self and the universe.
Data has been arriving about the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet that they dissolve ordinary realities, ordinary cultural values, through an interaction and symbioses. A relationship to local plants that perturb brain chemistry. And in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry, the cultural operating system is wiped clean and some thing older – even for these people , something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul, replaces it.
Replaces the cultural operating system with some thing not determined by history and geography, but some thing writ in the language of the flesh it’s self. This is who you are, this is truly nakedness, you are not naked when you take of your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.
When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of you own psyche.
The Shaman is in possession of certain facts about plants about, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about local geography, about mojo of many different sorts that the client is not aware of, the client is running culture light, the shaman pays for the registered and licensed version of the software and is running a much heavier version of the software than the client.
I think we should all aspire to make this upgrade.
It’s very important that you have all the bells and whistles on your operating system, otherwise some bodies going to get a leg up on you. Well, what’s wrong with the operating system we have consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is… well… its dumb, its retro, its very non competitive, its messy, it waste the environment, it waste human resources, its inefficient, it runs on stereotypes, it runs on a low sampling rate which is what creates stereotypes.
Low sample rates make everybody appear alike when the glory is in every ones differences, and the current operating system is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. Contradictions such as we’re cutting the earth from beneath our own feet, we’re poisonings the atmosphere we breath. This is not intelligent behavior, this is a culture with a bug in its operating system that’s making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior.
Time to call a tech, and who are the techs?
The Shamans are the techs!
