Wednesday, October 5, 2011

When Jesus ate the magic mushrooms

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford on 'shrooms.

People who had mystic experiences while taking the mushrooms were more likely to show increases in a personality trait dubbed "openness"... The change was still in place a year later, suggesting a long-term effect. -Bloomberg

It's true. If there's no serious corporate profit to be made from a given life enhancer (psilocybin, like pot or MDMA, can't exactly be trademarked) it therefore cannot be allowed to legally exist. It must be banned. Outlawed. After all, we can't have everyone running around feeling all "open" and fearless and defining god on their own delirious terms completely gratis, can we?

What a strange and wobbly time in which to live. We refuse to believe something until it's "proven" via scientific method, but once it's proven half the nation immediately discredits it because science is for elitist liberals and only creationist Jesus and a sad gang of very dead, enormously repressed Bible-writing priests from 1,500 years ago actually know anything about "truth."

Did Jesus take magic mushrooms? Can we deliberate for a moment? How about Buddha? Allah? Eve? Was the gleaming apple from the tree of knowledge not laced with ayahuasca and wormwood and dark rum? Can we safely assume? Oh, we absolutely can.

This much we know: mushrooms inspire a numinous state, and Jesus was nothing if not a card-carrying mystic. A seer. An anti-establishment, proto-hippie, street-screamin' visionary who hung out with prostitutes and freaks and loved everyone equally, saw everyone as full incarnation of pure divinity right here on earth. And he was what, sober? Sure.

What street mystic worth his or her cosmic epiphany wouldn't eagerly sample from the garden of earthly delights to better jack into the holy mainframe? What, you think Jesus was eating bologna straight from the package and sucking Bud Light and watching NASCAR and "Jersey Shore" like a dupe?

In other words, you are God, silly. The mushrooms just kinda sorta show you how.

There is nothing I could possibly add to that.

9 comments:

Phil said...

I dunnow, the last time I ate shrooms, we were picking and eating them while we were gathering them at the same time and I spent the next ten hours praying to my God to let me come back down.
Some people call it being wasted, I call it being completely incapacitated, scared shitless and laying in the fucking dirt alone.

I do have to admit the colors were spectacular though.

David Aquarius said...

Been there and back again, dude. Did my share of mushrooms with my homies back in the day but the time I went 'out in the woods' with a 93 yr old Nez Perce medicine woman and her grandson was the clincher.

She had peyote and some other kind of nasty stewed shit that rebooted this white boy's sensibilities. I saw Purgatory, a few levels of Hell, what could be called Heaven and the inside of a goat.

I found that it doesn't take balls to start that journey, but it takes a bushel and a half of them to get back in one piece.

Any armchair Christian blowhard would be a shapeless puddle of goo 10 minutes into the trip. Guaranteed!

Gordon said...

Let's dose 'em and watch. Heh.

Lisa said...

Well, now Gordon, we're (you're) not God, we're (loosely-speaking) just dudes eating mushrooms. We might be eggmen or walrus, but just that. Ditto for Him. No one's God but God, tautologically-speaking (should you believe in God.)

Like St. Anselm, God is the greatest thing I can imagine. Am I that? I don't think so. I can aspire to good behavior, I can feel an oceanic consciousness, but to me, it is foolish to have a construction which is not-man, and then speak of converging with that.

BTB, I had an epiphany the other day, without even the benefit of ayahuasca:

"Living in purgatory is HELL!"

Talk amongst yerselves.

Fixer said...

(though the standard argument that those who need it most -- Tea Party, conservatives, war hawks, homophobes, et al -- sadly remain the least likely to experience it)

I have a job for the Air Force ...

Gordon said...

I think the AF thinks they work directly for God already.

Gordon said...

God is the greatest thing I can imagine

That's why people imagined him in the first place.

David Aquarius said...

This is one of the things that I encountered on my travels with the infinite.

There is a God.

Not the God of Abraham or the God Shiva or Zeus, those are myths. We used those stories to explain shit we haven't the mental goods to understand.

God is the Unknown.

Everything we don't know is God. No old dude sittin' on a cloud tossing lightning bolts nor an angry multi-armed blue Hindu character, God is what's left of the universe (and beyond?) after we write down all we know. That amounts to a three-word poem in a library of a trillion encyclopedias.

We got here because humans will question everything. We answer one then move ahead one space. But sometimes we come up with some that are pretty fucked up. Some of those questions can never be answered because we're still too immature to grasp it. So, instead of just putting the question aside until later, we made shit up.

Hell is a hot place because the people who thought it up lived in the desert. Angels have bird wings because to these people it was the only way to fly.

So, in a nutshell, the Bible and Mother Goose have a lot more in common than we care to admit.

Lisa said...

Mr. Aquarius,

No doubt on the fable-nature of religion, yet another origin myth.

But: "God is the Unknown"

Per Gordon's statement, we are then unknown. Do you think that is true?