|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
Einstein once stated that it was one thing to understand waveforms as the basis of sounds, but no amount of explanation could give us the beauty of a symphany. Albert lived in a time when medical researchers thought it irresponsible to impose treatments on patients which they were unwilling to inflict on themselves. They were also identifying neurotransmitters and causal relationships that gave many a more mechanistic view of Man and his nervous system, than they had before. That started to change in the '60s. Psychologists and psychiatric researchers, (like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert) tested some psychoactive drugs (primarily LSD) on themselves and discovered a miniscule change in brain chemistry could could plunge a person into a full-blown mystical experience. To those who did not partake, if they were collegues, it could completely reinforce their prior mechanistic expectations. To those who partook, it was very real, very mystical, and even life-changing. To the conservative religious community, it was terrifying.On one hand, to be touched by the divine was somehow seen to be trivialized in experiencing it through LSD. Suddenly, you could see God by popping a pill, instead of by years of piety and prayer and hope and luck. But worse, those who experienced no longer needed to believe, because they knew. They were no longer subject to the religious authorities; they became their own authorities. As with Einstein's symphony, it was not enough to have an explanation of how neurotransmitters shaped our behaviour. Some scientists understood the importance of experiencing the effects of those chemicals.Perhaps today's drug laws are partly to blame for doctors distancing themselves from the drugs they impose on their patients. They are no longer allowed to experience that which they study. This, unfortunately, has succeeded in trivializing their patients. Psychiatrists dispense psychoactive drugs, primarily anti-depressants, in large quantities. Patients are reduced to numbers. After all, obtaining results must carry an "acceptable risk". Thousands are helped in the short run, only to sink slowly into living hell, as crippling depressions, tardive dyskinesia, tardive psychosis, and variations thereof, develop in place of less crippling depressions.
More frightening, psychologists can take away your rights without substantiation, without due process, on a mere claim that you are insane. You are left with no recourse. If you are not mad already, they quickly drive you mad with medications.As Doctor Thomas Szasz has said, psychiatry has turned into priesthood, with dogmas, rituals and mind-control games.Instead of integrating scientific knowledge with the religious and the mystical, we have moved further away from a true understanding thereof. We have denied religious experience to the majority of working people, who do not have time to spend a month or more in a cave chanting mantrums and meditating while neglecting their families and jobs. Instead, many can, and have, taken the shortcut of experimenting with hallucinagens, while risking freedom and livelyhood, because to do so, they break the law.Does a law protect the public, when that which is prohibited is little or no threat to the public, and far less threat to the partaker than the penalty for getting caught?Instead, medicine, protected by law, is using drugs to rip the spirits from their patients, right out of their living bodies, as if attempting to destroy that which they dare not acknowledge as real:
See also:
Psychologist and Psychiatric Licensing
Famous Drug Users
The Gnosis Site