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Ginger Santiago Title: Psychonautic Science and Plant Technologies: Cultural Hegemony, Cannabis, and Consciousness Abstract

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Ginger Santiago Title: Psychonautic Science and Plant Technologies: Cultural Hegemony, Cannabis, and Consciousness Abstract Ginger Santiago Title: Psychonautic Science and Plant Technologies: Cultural Hegemony, Cannabis, and Consciousness Abstract: The Westerized cultural of materialism, and its narrrow programming through governmental controls, mass media, scientific materialsim, and other closed-system feeback loops through enculturation, is deterimental to humans and environment. Heresy within a culture becomes a moral imperative when faced with a crisis of this magnitude. The cultural hegemony is a progam and it can be transcended through the use psychonautic science using psychoactive plants as technologies. This paper explores paradigms, human consciousness potentials, cultural programming, and cognitive liberty rights in respects to psychonautic science. The cognitive effects of the cannabis “high” are explored. Humans have the capacity for multiple states of consciousness and plants are technologies to help facilitate access to these states. A Planetary Appraisal Western Culture and its Detrimental Effects We live inside a fragile ecosystem, which we have plundered and poisoned due to our misaligned consumptive and economic values. The current Western dominator culture has turned people into cogs in a machine based on economic growth, and stripped them of any sovereignty and internal self-guidance mechanisms. A shift is desperately needed from our current cultural paradigm of authoritarian, consumeristic, war mongering, plundering, and materialistic values to a discovery of what is “The Real” or what is vital, essential, and true. The internal and consensually enforced resistance to this much needed change comes from an investment in ideas we have not truly considered, for if we had, we surely would discover the flimsy façade of this cultural programming. We repeat what we have been taught, and embrace and defend these beliefs and values. It is further directed and enculturated through media marketing in a consumeristic- brainwashing exercise. We are immersed in what researcher, Richard Eckersley, refers to as a “cultural fraud,” manufactured by this massive and growing media marketing complex (Eckersley, 256). If we examine them, it becomes evident these dominator-culture beliefs and values truly do not hold water, nor do we believe in them with any sincerity. We are able to fool ourselves by adhering to long-held traditions of religions, work “ethics,” economic growth, institutionalized powers, and modern ideas of success and its symbols, which keep us under this spell. This hegemonic promotion of fraudulent materialistic national, social, and personal values, derived from economics, production, and consumption, keeps us distracted from contacting our own inner world, where our internal moral compass can be found. In his article, “Is Modern Western Culture a Health Hazard?" Eckersley says, “Modern Western culture undermines, even reverses, universal values and time-tested wisdom” (Eckersley 254). 2 We are members of a cult and have been brainwashed. The cult is called Westernized Culture. It is a sham. It is poison to the world and the soul of humanity. These ideas were often passed down to us by default from our parents and our grandparents to them. We are eating cold leftovers of the Industrial Age and the Baby Boomer Generation. The sale and the dress suit is a farce. The contents of the pretty packages are toxic, and empty in nutrition or value. Investment in this social program is making us sick and killing the planet (Hari, 181-82). Not only is our outside world polluted and poisoned, we are also feeling the psychological effects on our general collective disposition. Our very well being is threatened by these materialistic and consumptive values. Studies show that these values do not lead to a destination of happiness, but instead “dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, anger, isolation, and alienation” (Kasser). In Johann Hari’s book, “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” Hari discusses what researcher Bruce Alexander calls “dislocation,” or being cutoff from meaning, which Alexander says is borne out of living in the modern age. Withering social bonds and a consumer mindset, he says, brings about dislocation. (Hari, 180). Understanding Context of the Scientific Paradigm Moreover, it appears the status quo, led by traditional science (physics), has subconsciously subscribed to a mechanistic-materialistic scientific worldview. Although this worldview has gone through many revolutions and evolutions within the scientific community, for the sake of simplicity and use, science works in reductionist models using classical (Newtonian) physics (Barseghyan). In general, scientific paradigms are reflected in individual understanding, and cultural practices and beliefs, as it is physics that tells us what is “real,” or defines our reality. Historically, it is science that leads the way in imprinting the current acceptable paradigm for our mainstream experience with reality. 3 Dr. David Hookes, in his paper, “The ‘Quantum Theory’ of Marxian Political Economy, and Sustainable Development,” suggests, “quantum theory is a much better model for understanding society and culture than Cartesian-Newtonianism.” (Hookes, Intro). It is more important than ever that the metaphysical truths discovered by physics, from the time of Einstein onward, should be brought to the general public, and in a way that can be understood. Quantum theory, chaos theory, string theory, the unified field theory, and the “theory of everything,” have a great potential for expanding the material/objectified consciousness imprinting, and therefore help return us to a more integrated worldview (holism), for these new paradigms examine systems and a much deeper interconnectivity. These new paradigms speak of “fields” and that things “arise” from these fields. The new paradigms also speak of instantaneous “spooky action at a distance, ” “wave-particle duality,” and an “observer effect.” In what is called “normal science” a researcher works within the accepted paradigm. The motives for holding old paradigms together have much to do a tendency to “play by the rules,” for publication in research journals, peer recognition, tenured positions, and research monies. In science, when anomalies appear, science is thrust into crisis, which forces the scientists to do what they do not seem to like to do: consider a new philosophy and present concepts that challenge the “normal science.” This leads to scientific revolution. (Kuhn). These kinds of moves within research are met with raucous arguments. There is great resistance to change, as illustrated earlier in our mainstream consensus models. Going along and not rocking the boat must be considered as fail-safes to keep all these structures going and afloat (Schuster, 5-6). Historically, scientists who have dared to challenge the normal science of the time have been met with expulsion, imprisonment, the Inquisition, and even death (Entire Section: Redefining Reality Series). Seemingly “happy illusions” can be fantastic exercises in the game of life. However, in terms of our vital systems of our biological and environment (LIFE) we are at a 4 crossroads. While quantum theory perhaps challenges our perception of the nature of reality, it in no way challenges the reality of nature. In this new paradigm we are forced into many paradoxes. It is a mind expansion that blurs the objectified/materialistic reality, but in a way that also increases our relationship to it. We can begin to experience a sense of “inter-being” with life through the quantum lens. In Johann Hari’s book, “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” physician Gabor Mate sums it up: “It’s really like […] we’re still operating out of Newtonian physics in an age of quantum physics. Newtonian physics is very valuable, of course. It deals with a lot of things—but it doesn’t deal with the heart of things” (Hari, 184). As an illustration, Hookes’ paper is examining reconstruction of economics based on the Cartesian-Newtonian model of reality shifting to the quantum theory of economics. In his diagram he shows the transition from a print culture to an internet culture, and the resulting change in social structure and relationship. In this paradigm shift, top-down systems of hierarchal, bureaucratic, undemocratic, alienating, and localized organizational understandings are converted to non- hierarchal, cooperative, delocalized-localized, non-alienating, and democratic. Due to this restructuring, quantum theory, accepted as the standard, poses a threat to the very structures that support our current dominator paradigm (Hookes, 10). It is this very movement from one paradigm to another in which an atmosphere of social equality, cooperativeness, and interconnectivity with each other and the planet that answers can be found for our current crisis. The internet has been a great technological “physical-virtual” extension of these principals. Computer technology has begun in some ways to empower individuals for open source collaborations. 5 Searching for the Red Pill Assessing this situation and intellectually understanding it, only goes so far. The only cure for our planetary crisis is a reconnection, resulting in self-knowledge, and a change in human consciousness. We must find the way to create this opening inside ourselves and then to teach others to do the same. Without this exercise, we will end up committing collective suicide and murder of indigenous peoples. Ecocide, “destruction of the natural environment, especially when willfully
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