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Crucible of Modern Consciousness

An Essay

By Ross WyssPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Crucible of Modern Consciousness
Photo by Than Malar Selvan on Unsplash

Even in my darkest days when hope was dim and distant, I maintained a willingness to believe in an eternal light of consciousness. In the profound mystery of Life itself I found shadowy truth within and behind the impetus of thought. I know not the nature of ideas or where they come from but I am aware that they happen. I to them and they to me, we are independent benefactors of a mutually shared experience, both of us at home in our antithetical realms, separated by a thin physical margin defined by light and dark. I believe that even in death we are bound to the laws of physics, we just experience a separate side of them, the causes of which we feel here, the sources of which are shrouded by the nature of our incarnate existence. The fact is then - made evident by the fact of Life itself - that the laws of physics are capable of more than we can perceive. For lack of a better word we are talking about magic, or colloquially speaking, events or properties that evade understanding. Beliefs aside, reductionist ideology aside, we bare witness to the shackles of free will and self-aware volition, the movements of our bodies and our thoughts. Can they be explained in any other way but magic?

And where there may be no way of conceptualizing the answer in literal terms, we can look at the question in alternate ways. Which brings me to the bud. The piece of knowledge I believe has been overlooked and unseen, and it is present in the core of the human experience: Over the course of human evolution there was a jump in brain mass that has generally been unaccounted for but I believe the solution has been discovered. It is however taboo and uncivilized in its nature, because of the conversations surrounding it, it being the concept of drugs. Spearheaded by neo-shaman Terrence McKenna of the 1980s, the Stoned Ape theory posits that as the African rainforest receded we took from the trees and into the plains and assimilated new food into our diets. In the process, as we expanded our culinary horizons, what found its way into our lives but the magical psilocybin mushroom. Immediately we can see the implications. If you have ever experienced an hallucinogenic experience - and I do not condone you do so, they are neither for the faint of heart nor for recreation - you are aware of how powerful they are. They have the potential to change your life forever. They are capable of showing you things you never thought possible, inspiring connections, new ways of doing things, and presenting concepts you never would have imagined otherwise. There is the potential for both harm and good in it. But therein, I maintain, is also the seed of the human mind as we know it. The discovery of fire, the nomadic lifestyle, cooperation - these things are symptomatic of a brain that has been induced by a novel state of being. These things did not just happen - something caused them, and I believe the mushroom had something to do with it. Left to our own devices we may not have been any different than any other mammal, bound to desires of the flesh, but the Human Being is isolated in a class of its own. The cause may be as incredible as the result.

Of course it remains to be seen why some animals are more predisposed to the drug-induced experience than others. If it is as easy as eating a mushroom then why are there not many other highly intelligent animals? Well I believe that it is much more common than we think. Other animals are only as intelligent as their body is conducive to their environment, and our inherited thumbs put us in a class of our own. The argument then is where are all the other intelligent monkeys? I believe it to be two-fold: A) we presumably wiped out all other competing species and B) the ones who are still in the trees have yet to evolve. But i think the case could be made that in another 100,000 years it is possible that current-day apes have the potential to begin devising languages of their own. It is a phenomenon I do not see as out of the realm of possibility, after all, they exhibit a certain degree of tool-using intelligence already, and if we did it, so can they.

fact or fiction
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