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| "If
a man believes that he's happy and hilarious and grooving on everything
around him, the only sane description of his state is to say he's euphoric,
not to say that he imagines he is euphoric." "What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows what the subject feels better than the subject knows, that the subject doesn't feel what he feels but feels something else. This is the kind of verbal metaphysics that made the medieval theologians become the laughingstocks of Voltaire and other rationalist critics." This irrational type of thinking is part of the social conditioning process and the educational system. Timothy Leary gave a speech at a college just one week before he left Harvard. He knew that this would be his last speech as a college professor. Here is a small part of what he told those students. It's from pages 244-245 of his book, The Politics of Ecstasy: "We have to think about the university as a place which spawns new ideas or breaks through to new visions, a place where we can learn to use our neurological equipment. The university and, for that matter, every aspect of the educational system is paid for by adult society to train young people to keep the same game going, to be sure that you do not use your heads. Students, this institution and all educational institutions are set up to anesthetize you, to put you in step, to make sure that you will leave here and walk out into the bigger game and take your place in the line, a robot like your parents, an obedient, efficient, well-adapted social game player, a replaceable part of the machine. "The last thing an institution of education wants to allow you to do is expand your consciousness, to use the untapped potential in your head, to experience directly. They don't want you to take life seriously, they want you to take their game seriously. Education, dear students, is anesthetic, a narcotic procedure which is very likely to blunt your sensitivity and to immobolize your brain and your behavior for the rest of your lives." Leary was right on target with that, though few know what he meant. William Braden wrote a book, The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God. Braden was a newspaper reporter, hung up on the Western "religions". He tried LSD, without adequate preparation and had to take a drug that would get him out of it. He didn't understand LSD but did understand certain verbal, intellectual concepts coming from others and could repeat the ideas. This is from pages 205-206: "The world beyond the world of appearances is this world seen in a different way. We have said that nirvana is realized in this world by living men, not in some other world by dead men. Nirvana is the pure experience of the present moment in this world here and now. To see the world as it really is means to understand that life is immortal. And thus the myth of the terrible wheel of death and rebirth. The wheel is caused by the intellect and it is nothing more than the rational way of looking at things. To escape from the wheel means to understand that death is false and that life is immortal. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, from death as well as mechanism. If the intellect by nature cannot understand life, it follows that the intellect by nature cannot understand death. Its view of death results from the fact that it looks only at the parts, not the Whole. It it would look at the Whole, it would see immediately that life is immortal. The esoteric doctrine would be that it is precisely our insistence on personal immortality which makes us blind to our actual immortality." There may be confusion about what the "wheel of death and rebirth" means. In Buddhism, there is a word, "karma". Karma is the motivated activity of the ego, the ego games, the social conditioning, etc. This is based on thinking that things are separate which leads to the problem of how one thing causes another, when in reality, the two things are different parts of the same thing. All of this puts the person on the wrong track and this wrong track is the "wheel". Just think of karma and the wheel as all of the nonsense that the ego is involved with. A person needs to get beyond the ego in order to live fully. |