Nobody else on this Earth has the combination of intellectual heft and the respect of millions of people and the courage to take on this subject like Graham Hancock does. He slams the harsh criminalization of the use of hallucinogenic plants by saying, “If we as adults are not allowed to make sovereign decisions about what to experience with our own consciousness, while doing no harm to others…we cannot claim to be free in any way.”
The DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) found in varieties of flowers, herbs and mushrooms mimics a natural brain hormone that we all have in our bodies but its function remains unknown for lack of research.
Hancock rightly notes, that “It’s not as though our society is opposed in principle to altered states of consciousness. I mean, billions are being made by the unholy alliance of psychiatrists and Big Pharma in over-prescribing drugs to control so-called syndromes like depression or attention deficit disorder…and we have a love affair in our society with alcohol. We glorify this most boring of drugs despite the terrible consequences that it often has and of course, we love our stimulants; our tea, our coffee, our energy drinks, our sugar and huge industries are built around these substances, which are valued because of the way they alter consciousness.”
What these “approved” altered states of consciousness have in common is that none of them conflicts with the “alert”, beta-brainwave, problem-solving state of consciousness that is valued by our society and which Hancock notes is useful for the “more mundane aspects of science, it’s good for the prosecution of warfare, it’s good for commerce, it’s good for politics but I think everybody realizes that the promise of a society over-monopolistically based upon this state of consciousness has proved hollow and that this model is no longer working that it’s broken in every possible sense that a model can be broken and that urgently, we need to find something to replace it.”
