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and you know that lemis toilet leads me
to ask what is death our materialist
science reduces everything to matter
materialist science in the West says
that we are just meat we're just our
bodies so when the brain is dead that's
the end of consciousness there is no
life after death there is no soul we
just rot and are and are gone
but actually many honest scientists
should admit that consciousness is the
greatest mystery of science and and that
we don't know exactly how it works the
brains involved in it in some way but
we're not sure how could be that the
brain generates consciousness the way a
generator makes electricity if you hold
to that paradigm then then of course you
can't believe in life after death when
the generators broken consciousness is
gone but it's equally possible that the
relationship but nothing in neuroscience
rules it out that the relationship is
more like the relationship of the TV
signal to the TV set and in that case
when the TV set is broken
of course the TV signal continues and
this is the paradigm of
all spiritual traditions that we are
immortal souls
temporarily incarnated in these physical
forms to learn and to grow and to and to
develop and really if we want to know
about this mystery the last people we
should ask our materialist reductionist
scientists they have nothing to say on
the matter at all
let's go rather to the ancient Egyptians
who put their best minds to work for
3,000 years on the problem of death and
on the problem of how we should live our
lives to prepare for what we will
confront after death and the ancient
Egyptians expressed their ideas in
transcendent art which still touches us
emotionally today and they came to
certain very specific conclusions that
the soul does survive death and that we
will be held accountable for every
thought every action every deed that we
have lived through in our lives so we
better take this precious opportunity to
be born in a human body seriously and
make the most of it and in these
inquiries into the mystery of death the
ancient Egyptians were just exercising
their imaginations they highly valued
dream states and it's now known that
they used
visionary plants like the the
hallucinogenic blue water lily and it's
interesting that the ancient Egyptian
Tree of Life has recently been
identified as the occasional Attica
which contains high quantities of DMT
dimethyltryptamine the same active
ingredient that we find in ayahuasca now
it's difficult to imagine a society more
different from the Society of ancient
Egypt than our society today we hate
visionary states in this society in our
society if we want to insult somebody we
call them a dreamer in ancient societies
that was praised and we have erected
huge apparatuses of armed bureaucracies
who will invade our privacy who will
break down our doors who will arrest us
who will send us to prison sometimes for
years for possessing even small
quantities of psilocybin or substances
like DMT whether in its smokeable form
or in the ayahuasca brew and yet
ironically DMT is we now know a natural
brain hormone we all have it in our in
our bodies and it's just that its
function remains unknown for for lack of
research and 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 psycho psycho
psychiatrists and and big pharma in over
prescribing drugs to control so-called
syndromes like depression or attention
deficit disorder in in teenagers and we
have a love affair in our society with
alcohol we we glorify this most boring
of drugs despite the that the terrible
consequences that it often has and of
course we love our stimulants our tea
our coffee our energy drinks our sugar
and and and huge industries are built
around these these these substances
which are valued because of the way they
alter consciousness but what all these
approved altered states of consciousness
have in common is that none of them
contradict or conflict with the basic
state of consciousness valued by our
society which I would call the alert
problem-solving state of consciousness
which is good 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 then urgently we need to find
something to replace it
the vast problems of global pollution
that have resulted from the
single-minded pursuit of profit the the
horrors of a nuclear proliferation the
specter of hunger that millions every
night go to bed starving that we can't
even solve this problem despite our
alert problem-solving state of
consciousness and look what's happening
in the Amazon the lungs of our planet
this precious home of biodiversity the
old-growth rainforest being cut down and
replaced with soya bean farms so we can
feed cattle so that we can all eat
hamburgers only a truly insane global
state of consciousness could allow such
an abomination to occur and I did it
back of an envelope calculation during
the Iraq war it seems to me that six
months expenditure on the Iraq war would
have solved the problem of the Amazon
forever would be sufficient to
compensate the peoples of the Amazon so
that no single tree ever needed to be
cut down again to garden and look after
that amazing resource but we can't make
that decision as a global community we
can spend countless billions on warfare
on hatred on fear on suspicion on
division but we can't get the collect
together the collective effort to save
the lungs of our planet and this is
perhaps why shamans from the Amazon are
now mounting a kind of reverse
missionary activity when I've asked
shamans about the sickness of the West
they say it's quite simple you guys have
severed your connection with spirits
unless you reconnect with spirit and do
so soon you're going to bring the whole
house of cards down around your heads
and ours and rightly or wrongly they
believe that a high Alaska is the remedy
for that sickness and many now are being
called to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca
and ayahuasca shamans are travelling
throughout the West offering the brew
often under the radar often
personal risk to bring about
consciousness change and it's true that
the message of ayahuasca the universal
message is about the sacred magical
enchanted infinitely precious nature of
life on Earth and the interdependence of
material and spiritual realms and it's
impossible to work with ayahuasca for
long without being deeply and profoundly
affected by this message and let's not
forget that ayahuasca is not alone that
it's part of an ancient worldwide system
of the targeted careful responsible
alteration of consciousness it's
recently been been shown by scholars
that the CAI Qian used in the Ellis and
Lucy nian mysteries in in ancient Greece
was almost certainly a psychedelic brew
that the soma of the Vedas may well have
been a brew based upon the Amanita
muscaria mushroom we have the DMT in the
ancient egyptian tree of life we have
the whole global cultures of surviving
shamanism and what it's all about is a
state of consciousness that's designed
to help us find balance harmony the
ancient Egyptians would have called it
marked with with the universe and to
remain mindful that what we're here to
undertake on earth while immersed in
matter is fundamentally a spiritual
journey aimed at the the growth and
perfection of the solar journey that may
go back to the very origins of what made
us human in the first place and I stand
here invoking the hard one right of
freedom of speech to call for and demand
another right to be recognized and that
is the right of adult sovereignty over
consciousness there's a war on
consciousness in our society and 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 including
the decision to use responsibly ancient
and sacred visionary plants then we
cannot claim to be free in any way and
it's useless for our society to go
around the world imposing our form of
democracy on others while we nourish
this rot at the heart of society and we
do not allow individual freedom over a
consciousness it may even be that we're
denying ourselves the next vital step in
our own evolution by allowing this state
of affairs to continue and who knows
perhaps are immortal destiny
well
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you
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