Are We Entering a New Psychedelic Post-Renaissance Paradigm?
Geopolitics & Empire Podcast
Despite many glossy official stories and historicist rewrites, the story of Western civilization remains largely misunderstood by most westerners, both religious and non-religious, intellectual and layman, students and teachers. Perhaps one of the most useful means of understanding the West and the miracle of the Renaissance is to contrast it with the new psychedelic paradigm of psycho-spiritual control currently proliferating across the West.
For, how did the conception of a unitary soul change our understanding of man, reality and the nature of free will? What do those who seek to remake man into the image of something else actually believe? How might we examine the nature of these new and old imitations?
Join us as we explore some of the intellectual frameworks underlying the proliferation of new psychedelic cults and spiritualities—always remembering that God is the absolute absence of all illusions.
As I listened to the exposition of virtue, goodness. Evil, and, of course, Plato there in the thick of it, I found myself repeating to myself the question at the opening of Meno. Of course after all these years I have no more of a certain answer regarding knowledge, virtue and the good than I had as a young student of philosophy and Greek literature.
Nevertheless, I have come to something which -- for lack of a better term -- I will call a new speculation. In short, I think I have found a tentative answer in the poets and tragedians, and in the tales of c.haracters like Ixion and Lycaon. They did not violate preceprs in some decalogue. Rather each in his own way overstepped a limit or boundary.
Borges seems ti gave vuewed reality as the world
Of Plato's forms , but if we understand Diotima and the Silenus correctly, our knowledge of beauty, love, goodness are inextricably bound with the physical world. We humans can only hope to understand such lofty abstractions insofar as they are embodied in the physical, in the body. We experience them in extenso, as a threshold not necessarily to be grasped entirely, but not to be violated. Perhaps this limit which is not to be transgressed but which also is not ultimately defined is an early but sophisticated formulation of what humankind came to know as natural law.
I suppose that where this must lead is to the shared understanding of a Humean community of knowers who know not moral or epistemological absolutes, but rather boundaries or limits of finitude and absolute uncertainty.
I can't recall the location, but Fanon has a brief account of a the French constabulary who was a patient of his, and had the dubious authority of governance over the minds and bodies of colonial prisoners. Fanon's patient did horrible things for which he compensated by allowing himself to be humiliated and hurt sexually. This man was not a moral phiosopher. Perhaps he was a legalist in the sense of a Javert or a Chinese official, but he seems to have sensed that under his cloak of power, something was amiss in that soul which he probably negated in the course of rationalizing his business. He was struggling and suffering at the vounds of sense, being broken on a wheel of realpolitik.
Well, these are just a few thoughts, speculations provoked by the podcast. As you can see, it partakes more of a question that an answer or codification.
If we are to see the truth clearly then we need to refine our perceptions rather than using drugs to confuse them and blunt them even more. None of these drugs would work anyway if they weren't already present in the human body. And if they're there already why introduce them from outside?