Sacraments And/Or Evolution?

I have a prescription for painkillers that I've hardly ever used. Mostly because the ibuprofen and/or naproxen (prescription dosages) usually do okay in combination with the other prescription drugs methotrexate for cancer and some form of quinine for malaria are keeping the more despicable aspects of the rheumatoid arthritis at bay. It's kind of like all-out war between the causes of my dis-ease and the doctors, and my body is the battlefield. Philosophically, I like to think I'm a detached and unbiased witness, and sometimes between long bouts of meditation and painkillers I pretty much am non-attached.

More and more frequently I'm beginning to "see" the advantages "tuning in, turning on, and dropping out" has provided for me. The first thing I did when I heard about those seminary students claiming to have had a conversation with God when they took LSD-25 was to start looking for an opportunity to have that same experience for myself. That happened in 1967.

The first opportunity came a few days later in an article in the Charlotte Observer. The article was about a anonymous group of older adults who had taken LSD through the Timothy Leary group's intervention into their alcoholism to try and cure their lifelong habit of boozing it up. I went to the reporter and asked him to introduce me. Eventually he did.

The people wouldn't give the the LSD right away. I had to read everything that they had every collected about the effects of taking LSD. I had to take lunch with them every Monday to listen to their conversations about their own LSD experiences. That was the Leary way. You didn't just get the acid and have it change your life, you sort of had to decide and understand why you wanted your life changed. Well, it's was that way until the black market for acid opened up, and they even Leary knew he was bullshitting himself to expect people to jump through his hoops.

I go to extremes with many of the activities associated with the things about life that interests me. I think it was the poet TS Eliot who asked how a person could know when they've gone far enough in their quest, if they had never gone too far. You can't overdose on any of the psychedelic sacraments, but you can do it too often and for too long a period of time. Suffice it to say that I know exactly how far to go before I go too far with the sacraments.

The first thing I had to learn during that period of tea and cakes with the ol' drunks that educated me, but never provided me with a single microgram from their Swiss commercial laboratory-made stash, was how to control my reaction to the side-effects of the most powerful drug ever known to mankind. Two years. I studied the material they provided (pre-internet and search engine days) and underwent oral examinations for two years, and they never gave it up. Finally, I gave up on them, and found my own way.

These people's average age was in their late fifties, and their leader was in his mid-seventies in the late Sixties. There was a huge generational gap between us. Many of them were older than my parents. They did get me high on pot for the first time when I was 27 years old, and for that I'm grateful. It was a generational thing that hung in the air between us.

I wasn't an alcoholic during that era like they were, and that was the cause of some distrust. Their relationship with psychedelics was more about booze as their drug of choice than about some arcane need to talk to God, and the Beatnik cry for a changing of the guard that introduced the Hippies. They were the remnants of the WW2 and Great Depression generations that needed changing, and yet I was myself barely across the generational abyss from that same gap that created rock and roll.

In regard to how taking the sacraments and how they have aided me in coping with these very powerful prescription drugs I'm currently imbibing by the handful, when I took acid I had to control the hallucinations or they might run away with me to some place I didn't wanna be, and didn't have to be as long as I realized how I controlled my reactions to what the sacraments were juking my childhood view of reality around.

Granted, the side effects of methotrexate and this quinine derivative can be tendentious, but it's fair easy (with my background in self-observation) to prevent my reaction to the side-effects of extreme, projectile vomiting nausea from running away from me and causing negative reactions to force me into some unnecessary depressed funk. I'm quite sure the hard evidence of my upcoming death will be view with the same indifferent sense of extreme caution.

A correspondent asked me if the occasion of my remembering vision, or rather my partial description of what happened, was similar to that of evolution. The paragraphs below are my response to her. Part of which was structured to address her snooty remarks about my recent explorations of the Theory of Aquatics:

"Hey Felix, were you referring to evolution?"

No. I wasn't ignorant of the implications, but evolution is just a theory somebody made up when it was their turn to talk. You can't really put evolution in a wheelbarrow and roll it around. No more than than you can do that with a historical OR a docetic Jesus. You can't hunt  down and shoot evolution or Jesus with a bow and arrow and gut them, and skin them, and cook them over an open fire in order to make friends and influence the other Bantu to vote for you as chief pygmy, simply because you have the best barbeque sauce.

Now, if you wanna replace the expression "barbeque sauce" with evolution, then "evolution" will be tasty indeed when thoughtfully basted upon a naked half-pig inside the home-made cooker.

Nakid? Subcutaneous layer of fat? OMG! The Jews were right. Pork eaters are no more than the filthy, mud-wallowing, genetically aquatic beasts they themselves cannibalistically consume.