Not one; not two: Entheogens & Consciousness
What image does the noun, consciousness evoke? A rock, a scissor, a hard place? Is consciousness a feeling of sorts akin to an emoji, a lucid dream of neurological activity or some abstract thought matter of quantum mechanics and energy? … Entheogens; the go-between one another, connect what the corpus, canvas and cosmos of phenomena; that is consciousness beholds: the wisdom display of speech. Speech is everything that makes for time, moves through space and motivates body-mind… In time, what matters is recognized: coexistence. In space, relationship is embraced for what it stands: compassion. In body-mind, the wisdom display of speech evolves out and up from ignorance: clinging, craving and comparison… Clinging is as anguish driven as craving is an autoimmune disorder and comparison is degrading. “And on comparison one is brought up. All our education is based on it and so is our culture. So there is everlasting struggle to be something other than what one is. The understanding of what one is uncovers creativeness, but comparison breeds competitiveness, ruthlessness, ambition, which we think brings about progress. Progress has only led so far to more ruthless wars and misery than the world has ever known,” to cite Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Letters to a Young Friend… Entheogens connect what consciousness reflects and the wisdom display of speech brings to the fore: the true, the good and the beautiful. The true is the order in any chaos; the good is the clarity in any confusion, just as the beautiful is the precious in any passing… Take to the wisdom display of speech over falling for divinity, duality and dichotomy. Reflect upon consciousness in lieu of going for magic, myth and meaning. Turn to entheogens through the intake of psychotropic properties in place of self-talk, make-belief and tunnel-vision… Wisdom is as intimate as speech is ineffable. Neither can be conceptualized and, thus, befitted into a straightjacket of normative consent. In the words of Terence McKenna: “Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what’s really all about” … Redemption is about the revival of what matters rather than the recreation and deconstruction of meaning. Redemption is about surrender rather than sacrifice. Redemption is about letting go rather than taking on; humility rather than holiness and about integrity rather than ideology…
And so, as Jean Gebser notes in The Ever-Present Origin, “we must not lapse into the error of aspiring to an expansion of consciousness, since everything depends on an intensification of consciousness… The expansion of consciousness is merely a spatially quantification of consciousness and consequently an illusion” … The intensification of consciousness is brought about by moving forward and toward the inborn; that is the not-yet-known over going back in time; back to graspable reality and back to the mirage of memory, as echoed in: “History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified” ... The not-yet-known is the unruly road ahead. Not one; not two nor energy, the not-yet-known takes off where any and all figments and fractals of imagination cease to be. Thus, the inborn is faced upfront and personal; from awe to awareness and infinity to the loss of innocence...