Will Earthlings ever conquer their animal instincts and travel to the stars?

Yesterday on Facebook:

Poetic Outlaws

“We are certainly in a state of transition; we have arrived at nothing less than the end of history. However, it is not something to be alarmed about. I imagine it's simply the normal situation that prevails when a species is preparing to depart for the stars…

"I believe that the psychedelic experience was the light at the beginning of history. That this is actually the thing; that we have now reached a sufficient level of analytical sophistication to discern the force that pushed the animal mind onto the human stage.

—Terence McKenna

(Full post below)

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The Light at the Beginning of History

A profound excerpt from Terence Mckenna's 'Archaic Revival'

Sloan Bashinsky

Hard for me to imagine any intelligent life beyond Earth wants or even would allow Earthlings to colonize elsewhere. Be that as it may, it's just as difficult for me to imagine Elon Musk actually living on Mars very long, so very, very far from the sun, requiring a space suit to take a walk on the land in a never ending search for water, and so forth. Perhaps Musk has not read, or read and sulfured off, Robert Heinlein's novel STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, which I think should ge required reading for every middle school student. 

As for psychedelics, perhaps some day Earthlings will be conscious enough to grok that using such assisted lift off agents might allow them to barely see what they so desperately wish to have, even own, but they won't reach that destination in that way. What they might achieve instead is their souls are hopped onto by supra or super natural beings, which come back to earth with them, so to speak, and feed on and otherwise use them for the rest of their earthly lives.

That may be viewed like grotesque sci-fantasy by some, but not by a shaman trained in the old way. Much safer to trip under the protective wing of such a shaman, who is looking out for and shielding trippers from what they cannot imagine.

Meanwhile, isn't the goal, or the hope, of most spiritual traditions and religions on Earth to achieve the stars, so to speak, heaven on earth, so also to speak, while still in human form? Failing which, in some traditions, we get to come back and try again, and again, and again? 

 

This poem flopped out of me in the spring of 1994:

Earth...

The sacred prism

through which souls are refracted

into their elemental parts,

purified in Holy Fire,

then one-forged

and sent on their way

to not even God knows where,

simply because they are all

unique emanations of God,

evolving ... 

 

As for the animal mind, consider the Sufi Poet Rumi:

CHICKPEA TO COOK

A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
‘Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavour,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.
Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.’
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Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.
Eventually the chickpea
will say to the cook,
‘Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can’t do this by myself.
I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver,
my way to existence. I love your cooking.’
The cook says,
‘I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.
My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.’ 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com