By Dylan Charles | Waking Times
These days, a recurring story in health news is the potential for psychedelics to be used as medicine for mental health issues like depression, PTSD, and even end-of-life care. This, of course, comes as no surprise to the millions of psychedelic adventurers who illegally partake in the consumption of these mind-expanding substances. Apparently, it’s worth the risk.
To them, the real story isn’t that psychedelics treat mental health, it’s that psychedelics help connect one to expansive universal truths which tend to destroy one’s belief in and commitment to the destructive culture eating away at our sanity. The liberation of consciousness is the real story. Improved mental health is a natural byproduct.
Russell Brand commented on this in a recent video…
“Those kind of experiences under the correct tutelage could be used to guide me away from certain patterns and behaviors and micro-dosing… could alter the way that you see reality, and the way that you see reality, for your personal and empirical purposes, is reality.” ~Russel Brand
And of course, the late comedian Bill Hicks is remembered for his skits about drug prohibition…
“If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.” ~
But why are these substances still illegal, especially considering the mountains of evidence that they can cure depression?
In his 2012 essay, The War on Drugs and the War on Consciousness, author Graham Hancock made the connection that prohibition of drugs is really intended to keep human consciousness from seeing beyond the current Western Statist control paradigm. He alluded that the biggest threat to a system like this is a population of ungovernable people who simply have no confidence in or need for a massive, centralized state predicated on a monopoly of violence.
“…It’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum of individual consciousness.
That legalization of drugs would shrink the budgets of those selfsame bureaucracies, and ultimately put them out of business, is part of the answer. But to find the real engine that perpetuates the “War on Drugs” we need to look deeper and ask fundamental questions about the relationship between the individual and the state in modern Western democracies…
There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list. The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical, though always temporary, alterations in our own consciousness that drugs facilitate.” ~Graham Hancock
When you consider today the push to get the entire world onto the same page, believing in the same story, and you understand the financial stakes involved, you may begin to see that we are dealing with an effort to totally dominate the conversation about human health and civic responsibility. Any deviation from the prescribed narrative is met with new authoritarian censorship of information, deepening the level of control over the public’s perception of reality.
“We’re dealing with how to curate and corral cultural space. How reality operates. My personal belief is that many substances are being controlled precisely because they alter the way that people see reality. The only way you can control a society… is if you manage people’s perceptions.” ~Russel Brand
So many people today have a matching perception of reality, are living strictly by the forced narratives, and now demanding that non-believers do the same. It’s called group-think.
Russel Brand goes further into this in the video, also looking at how the pharmaceutical industry model is threatened by natural medicines that appear to treat mental illness's root causes, not just mask the symptoms.
It’s not fair to have a conversation about the newly discovered clinical benefits of psychedelics without including the bigger picture of personal transformation through transcendent experiences, but this conversation is brushed off as insignificant.
The antidote to group-think is a shift in perspective, a change in the way you see reality. As a self-mastery coach informed by my deep experiences with shamanic plant medicines, I help people make major shifts in their perception of reality, so they can finally see the places in their life where they are caged and limiting themselves. Check out my work, here.
About the Author
Dylan Charles is a self-mastery coach, the editor of Waking Times, and host of the Battered Souls podcast. His personal journey is deeply inspired by shamanic plant medicines and the arts of Kung Fu, Qi Gong, and Yoga. After seven years of living in Costa Rica, he now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he practices Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and enjoys spending time with family. He has written hundreds of articles, reaching and inspiring millions of people around the world.
Dylan is available for interviews and podcasts. Contact him at WakingTimes@gmail.com.
This article (Controlling Your Perception of Reality – The Real Reason Psychedelics are Illegal) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.
