Entheogens - Technologies for Consciousness and Afterlife

 This will no doubt be a controversial post, as I already get a great many emails from earlier posts (which were much more benign in nature) about psychadelic substances and their correlation with understanding what happens after we die. It is not my intention to offend anyone, and I recognize that I have a wide range of readers here, so I'll just ask that you not form an opinion about entheogenic plants and their use based on this post.  Also, don't dismiss this post simply because it may lie outside the realms of acceptance in your personal, religions, and communal customs. 

Whew, okay.  I said that. 

Now.  I recently watched (and had already read) Michael Pollan's Netflix docu-series called "How to Change Your Mind."   It makes a case for the use of entheogenic plants in modern psychiatric medicine, and I won't repeat that here.  I encourage my readers to view it if they have reliable access, though, because I believe that this docu-series, while attempting to explain how these plants can benefit us through controlled, medicinal use, also underscores the potentiality of these plants to serve as technologies, which may allow us insight into ourselves and our very nature and life here on this planet and in this time. 

What does this have to do with death and dying?   Well, in the series, one of the individuals interviewed is a woman who has been diagnosed with cancer, and the entheogenic drugs she receives as part of her treatment help her accept the diagnosis and ultimately live a higher quality of life.  I'm summarizing, and it likely seems trivial, but to her it wasn't.  So how then can these plants offer us a glimpse of what is to come? I believe entheogens serve as a technology that we don't yet fully understand, but one that we likely need to harness for our next level of understanding in the development of our consciousness.   More importantly, I believe the plants we currently classify as hallucinogens - which do fall under the banner of entheogens - offer us the opportunity to experience life in a different way, and maybe outside the boundaries of our limited tactile senses, too. 

Entheogens may offer us an opportunity to accept (and move beyond the fear of) biomechanical death.

Currently, hallucinogens such as DMT, mescaline, psilocyin, and LSD are considered illegal in the United States.   But these substances come from plants, and have been used historically in very old traditions across the world to help healers/holy men/shaman/ritual leaders get in touch with the realities that are normally veiled to us.    Stanislov Goft researches this tradition, along with the potential modern uses of psychactives to help us expand our awareness and consciousness, in much of his work. Of course, Johns Hopkins Medicine purports that psychadelic drugs may reduce the fear and anxiety around death, as well. Other sources point to the fact that these substances may stop time, produce euphoria, induce a utopic state of being, and much much more. 

All of these are reasons why I believe that entheogenic plants can serve as technologies to help us understand the deep conscious universe.   These plants - whose mysteries have long been investigated and explored by pre-colonial cultures - may offer us the keys to a deeper understanding of consciousness, and may help us feel more secure in our experience of biomechanical death.