Category: drugs

What Armistice Day Could Mean to the Psychonaut

The cessation of conflict that was tearing one apart – whether physically in the form of war or spiritually – is celebrated on Armistice Day

Armistice Day – 11 November – is a celebration that marks the armistice that ended hostilities at the conclusion of World War One. On this day in 1918, soldiers on all sides put down their guns, bringing an end to what had been, until then, by far the most mindless display of human savagery, ruthlessness and murderlust in history. The retrospective sense that it may have been better to not have fought in the first place echoes in the life of the psychonaut.

In the life of an ordinary person one struggles, and fights, and desires, and wins and loses, and always it’s a tremendous battle to satiate the demands of one ego, which yearns to be exalted. And then, if one ever sees the brick wall at the back of the theatre, one laughs because the battling is all so silly when there’s no way for you to ever really lose.

This is a microcosm of the struggle of nations to exalt themselves on the world stage – a struggle which is so bloody that if it ever stops being violent even for a moment we commemorate it almost a century later, in the hope that we never forget the price of peace.

Like the Great War soldier, the psychonaut has to learn how to put down his guns, but in a metaphorical sense. He has to learn how to be open to the world and to reality, to not be afraid of the inevitable, the indescribable, the ineffable or the incomprehensible. His is the path of the shaman, one who sees beyond, and who returns with knowledge that is not accessible from ordinary perspectives.

Putting down one’s guns might mean, spiritually speaking, that one puts down one’s more aggressive egotistic defences and accepts that one will die one day, and therefore that all victories on this earthly plane are fleeting, transitory, and not worth losing one’s dignity over. It’s the kind of realisation that one might just as well get on the battlefield as from a psychedelic.

Believing this means to value peace in one’s life.

Part of this might be to accept the inevitability of the future death of one’s physical body, and thereby to prepare oneself for the profound change to the contents of consciousness that will follow, instead of repressing it, panicking at every mention of it, or denying the magnitude of the chaos that will befall one over the horizon of death.

The vast majority of people, being materialists, can only look at the prospect of the future death of their physical body with whimpering horror, because materialists almost always bear the delusion that the brain generates consciousness and therefore that the death of the brain necessarily means the extinction of that consciousness.

A person who has seen beyond has had cause to put down his guns, because he knows that living a life that expresses an acceptance of the inevitable will cause the environment around him to be more harmonious than it otherwise would have been.

This doesn’t means that the psychonaut must martyr himself on the spot out of guilt. Putting down one’s guns does not imply that one become passive, or submissive, or self-debasing.

It simply means that one stop behaving like a traumatised dog, ever on the ready to lash out in self-defence, and ever vigilant to all possible new threats from any direction. It means to relax, to let go and to forgive. This teaching is in many ways at the core of all religious and spiritual sentiment.

The lesson of Armistice Day is that conflict has a time and place and when those qualities no longer obtain then it’s time for peace. A genuine interest in peace means tuning oneself into a frequency from which conflict does not arise, a place that a Pyrrhonist would all ataraxia, a Luciferian would call apotheosis and a Buddhist would call nirvana.

Are You Trapped At Stage 4 of Kohlberg’s Scale of Moral Reasoning?

The majority of people can’t get past the idea that the law is the law and must be obeyed without question – which makes things hard for people who need medicinal cannabis

American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg had a lifelong obsession with morality and moral reasoning, and the best-known result of his research was his six-point scale of moral reasoning. A continuation of the child development studies of Jean Piaget, the theory suggests that people develop through discrete stages of moral reasoning, with each stage more sophisticated, effective and enlightened than the previous ones. This article discusses the tremendous number of people trapped at stage 4 of the scale.

Kohlberg’s scale suggests that moral sophistication develops over the course of a person’s life, with entry into each new stage marked by a brand new perspective which is different to the old one but still a derivative of it, in the sense that the individual holding it has “grown up” and become more of a functioning adult.

Essentially, most people start out with a similar level of moral reasoning to that of a wild animal. Kohlberg euphemistically referred to this stage as “Pre-conventional” and it consists of the wretches who do nothing but try to avoid punishment in stage 1, and the narcissists and psychopaths who are only interested in personal advantage in stage 2.

Conventional reasoning is where most people are. In this stage, moral decisions are justified with reference to what other people in society do or believe. Stage 3 of this involves an effort to display good intentions as defined by social approval, and a person here tries to be good and be thought of as good, wanting to earn a pat on the head.

In stage 4, a person comes to appreciate the value of the law. In this stage it becomes possible for a person to reason to themselves the need to follow a law or social convention despite that the people around them are not doing so. Someone here is capable of overcoming being induced by peer pressure into doing something immoral or criminal.

This is not the most sophisticated stage of moral reasoning, but in the same way that most people are intellectually unremarkable they are also morally unremarkable. In other words, most people just follow the herd and are neither vicious nor Buddha-like, and so they develop to here and no further.

It is speculated that most people never reach stages 5 and 6 of moral reasoning – collectively known as “Post-conventional” reasoning – on account of that they have neither the courage to stand out from the herd nor the intelligence to determine when it might be correct to do so. At these stages a person is willing to break the law if doing so would uphold a higher moral principle.

Kohlberg used to test the participants in his studies with something called the Heinz dilemma. This is a thought experiment in which the participants are invited to ask themselves if they might consider it morally permissible to steal a medicine if this was necessary to afford the medical treatment of a loved one.

New Zealanders often find themselves faced with something that we might call the Renton dilemma, after Rose and Alex Renton, who faced it. The Renton dilemma could be described as whether or not to act in order to help a sick person get hold of medicinal cannabis despite that the medicine has been prohibited by whatever local ruling power has claimed the authority to do so.

If a person was stuck at stage 4 of Kohlberg’s scale of moral reasoning, at which point they put the importance of the law above everything else, they would argue that Rose Renton should not have tried to get hold of medicinal cannabis without the relevant government approval, because laws like this must be obeyed for the sake of social cohesion.

The reason why this is dilemma is because a person who follows the law would not help a sick person get hold of medicinal cannabis, ergo they would let a sick person suffer needlessly for the sake of upholding the law.

A person at stage 5 of Kohlberg’s scale might not reason in such a manner, perhaps deciding instead that acting to reduce the sum total of human suffering in the world was more important than mindless obedience to a law that the people never consented to, and which was forced upon them on false pretenses and supported by lies.

Anyone who can’t get their head around the idea that the law can be wrong is likely stuck at stage 4 of Kohlberg’s moral reasoning scale, and it’s on issues at the forefront of cultural change, like cannabis law reform, where they get the most confused. Unfortunately, these people are by far the majority and the herd rules under the laws of democracy.

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Vince McLeod is the author of the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook.

Defending Human Rights Begins At Home

There’s no point in Jacinda Ardern’s Government fighting for the rights of “refugees” in Australia when it is committing human rights abuses against the New Zealand people by denying us medicinal cannabis

Watching Jacinda Ardern virtue signal about the need for New Zealand to take in country-shopping refugees from Manus Island is disgusting when she is representing a Government that is currently committing human rights abuses against its own people. The fact is that if the Sixth Labour Government wants to get a reputation for being on the correct side of human rights issues, it needs to start at home with a repeal of cannabis prohibition.

Putting a sick person in a cage for growing the medicine they need to alleviate their suffering is a human rights abuse. No reasonable person doubts this anymore, despite the 80 years of propaganda seeking to demonise the plant. There is ample evidence that cannabis is medicinal and should never have been made illegal.

Plenty of unreasonable people once argued otherwise, and unfortunately our law still reflects the conclusions drawn by those unreasonable people in the form of the Misuse of Drugs Act. But much like prohibiting women from voting, or to putting gay men in cages like animals, reasonable people have kept the pressure on to get the law changed to something reflecting basic human compassion.

The majority of the New Zealand people now believe that the politicians who criminalised growing medicinal cannabis, and the Police officers, judges and bailiffs that enforce this illegal law are human rights abusers. This is because, if people do not have the right to a medicine that takes their suffering away when they get sick, then they don’t have any rights at all.

A law that forces sick people to endure unnecessary suffering when those sick people could themselves be growing a palliative medicine is obscene. It’s more obscene than anything else currently happening in New Zealand, and this is why Ardern needs to begin with a repeal of cannabis prohibition and not by meddling with Australian “refugee” policy.

It’s clear that it’s important to the Sixth Labour Government that they are seen to be doing the right thing. Much of the argument for voting for them in the first place is moral – that a greater redistribution of wealth would alleviate poverty and that we have a moral obligation to reduce poverty because it causes suffering. So they have an obligation to actually make moral decisions.

It’s also clear that the Fifth Labour Government fell, in part, because the public perception was that it was more interested in being seen to do the right thing than actually doing the right thing. They started to appear hollow and dishonest to a jaded electorate, and the public became cynical.

In order to avoid this, Ardern’s Government ought to deliver a meaningful win to the disenfranchised and dejected masses who voted them in, and quickly. It ought to introduce an immediate moratorium on cannabis arrests, effective today, by giving notice to Police Commissioner Mike Bush that it had intent to repeal cannabis prohibition.

If the intent was to look good from taking correct moral actions, this is one that the Fifth Labour Government should have taken 18 years ago, because there was enough evidence for California to make medicinal cannabis legal in 1996. Ardern would do well to make up for the tardy refusal of the New Zealand Government to stay informed; a pig-headedness that has caused so much suffering.

Of course, if Jacinda Ardern had any real integrity, and wasn’t just another of the virtue-signalling hypocrites that Western voters now expect leftist politicians to be, she would make a public Government apology to those impacted by cannabis prohibition, emphasise that the New Zealand Government never had the right to make The People’s Medicine illegal and open discussions about compensation for past criminal convictions. That would be the result of making an objective, honest appraisal about how to put things right.

This is too much to realistically hope for, but we can still call for an immediate moratorium on cannabis arrests on the basis that prohibition will not survive this term of Government.