Luminous Numinous

I used to date this hippie girl who was a bit of a crystal worshiper. I thought she was silly. But over the years, I’ve come to see how rocks can and do have “magical” properties. And there is good science to back this.

I’d like to start a series of posts that examines a number of rocks, minerals, and crystals whose powers to create and destroy are nothing short of miraculous.

Let me start with the most obvious: with Plutonium and Uranium.

Do you know what nuclear bombs are? No, really, do you really understand what makes atomic energy work? No? Well, then, sit back, relax, kick off your shoes and don your reading spectacles, because I am going to tell you in the simplest, clearest language possible exactly what nuclear bombs are and how and why they work. And I’ll bet you a dollar that you walk away understanding nukes better than you ever have before.

Okay…are you ready? Without further ado, here goes.

To make a nuclear bomb (or thermonuclear bomb…and if you stay tuned I’ll explain the difference) what you need is…magic rocks. What kind of magic rocks? Well, magic rocks that unleash the same power that fuels the sun and all the stars in the heavens.

Where do we get these magic rocks? Well, they come from supernova explosions, of course! The only place in the universe where you can get these magic rocks is from exploding stars. Luckily, (or unluckily I should probably say), Earth itself is a huge repository of cosmic debris that clumped together due to gravity.

The cosmic dust and rocks that coalesced to make our planet include some heavier elements that were cooked into being and then blasted out into space by exploding supernovae.

The Carbon that forms the basis for life on this planet, for instance, comes from stars.. The Calcium in your bones comes from stars.

In fact, while Hydrogen and Helium were created in the initial phase transition which birthed our universe–the so-called “Big Bang,” all elements heavier than Hydrogen and Helium were, with rare exception, created through fusion in stars. And, deep within the earth, there are teeny tiny specks of super magical rocks called Uranium and Plutonium.

Now, at this point, you might say something like “Uranium and Plutonium aren’t magical; they are radioactive.” My response to this is that the word radioactive has no meaning whatsoever. At the time when radiation was first discovered, radio waves had also just been discovered.

Because radio waves were so intriguing and mysterious, scientists called the mysterious properties of Radium and similiar minerals, “radioactive.” The truth is that these elements have nothing to do with radio waves whatsoever. The term magic, however, seems most apt at explaining the nature of these rocks as I hope to demonstrate.

You probably think that the physics involved in creating a nuclear bomb is very complicated, and there is some truth to that notion. But the basic engineering principle behind nukes is astonishingly simple. All you need to do is get some magic rocks made from exploding stars and then either pile those rocks up into a big ball (in the case of Uranium) or just squeeze them really hard (in the case of Plutonium) and…..that’s it….that’s all….kaboom! You have a nuclear bomb.

Now, I know what you are thinking. “There has to be more to it than that.” Well, yes and no. There are lots of details of course, but in principle, all you really need to do is pile up magic rocks or take some magic rocks and squeeze them.

As it so happens, the most difficult aspects of building an atomic bomb are, by far, 1.) getting the magic rocks in the first place and 2.) holding the bomb together long enough for all of the magic rocks to explode before they are blown away in the initial nanoseconds of the blast. Luckily, these two details are rather difficult. That’s good news, because otherwise any delinquent 8th grader with a bootleg Xeroxed copy of The Anarchists Cookbook could go and build a nuclear device!

But before I get ahead of myself, explaining the intricacies and complexities of nuclear weapons manufacturing, let me get back to my point—to the simplicity of it all. Uranium 235 (the REALLY magic version of Uranium) is so magical that all you have to do is create a ball of it about 13cm in diameter and it will, of its own accord, without your having to do anything else, explode with the power of the sun. And with Plutonium, all you have to do to get it to unleash the power of the stars is squeeze it REALLY hard.

[Just to be absolutely clear, you don't even need fire or heat to make a nuclear bomb. You only need to squeeze or pile up magic rocks. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing most people on the planet don't realize this fact.

The fact that the United States is the most powerful country on Earth has almost everything to do with the fact that they were the first country on the planet to harness the power of these magic rocks. They were certainly the first (and, thank God, only) nation to prove itself insane enough to use these weapons in "battle" (if incinerating civilian women and children from the sky by dropping a star on them can be called battle.) The five most powerful nations on Earth-- which make up the so-called United Nations "Security Council"--are simply the first five countries that learned how to use the magic rocks as weapons. But alas, the relationship between nuclear weapons and the current power structure of nations on this planet deserves its own post and will be discussed later in this series on magic rocks. An in depth look at the particulars of the destruction caused by these devices on both humans and on the earth also deserves its own post later in this series. But for now, I only want to establish unequivocally that certain rocks are as magical and supernal as anything in any Fantasy or Sci-Fi story.]

Now, those of you who are physics buffs might, at this point, say, “Wait a minute, the fissioning of Uranium or Plutonium atoms isn’t the same force that powers the sun and stars.” And you’re absolutely right. Nucleus for nucleus, atom for atom, there is actually MORE energy released in the fissioning of one Uranium atom or Plutonium atom than in the fusioning of hydrogen into one Helium atom. So if you take issue with my saying that Uranium and Plutonium unleash the power of the stars, alright, fine; have it your way: they unleash an energy that is even more powerful still! Because thermonuclear Hydrogen bombs are many levels of magnitude more powerful than atom bombs, we tend to think that the process of fusion is more efficient and powerful than fission, but this isn’t exactly the case.

But where was I? Oh, right. So…you need only pile up Uranium to make it go boom and you merely squeeze Plutonium to get it to.

The first three atomic bombs ever created used these simple methods. The first nuclear bomb ever exploded on Earth (”Trinity”) near Alamogordo New Mexico and the third nuclear bomb ever exploded (”Fat Man,” which instantly killed almost 40,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan) were both Plutonium fission devices, wherein Plutonium was placed within a hollow sphere of Nickel with dynamite charges circumferencing it. The dynamite charges were exploded inward, thus imploding or squeezing the Plutonium to a critical density.

The second atomic bomb ever exploded on Earth–and the first one ever used in combat (”Little Boy,” which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan)–was a “gun” type bomb. What this means is that you take one chunk of Uranium about the size and shape of a volleyball, but with a thermos-sized (and shaped) hole in the center, and then you take a thermos-sized (and shaped) chunk of Uranium and “shoot” it into the hole in the first chunk, filling that hole, and creating a whole chunk about the size of a volleyball. At this point, the U235 has reached a critical mass and fissions. This is so simple and foolproof that this type of device was never tested. The Manhattan Project scientists were so absolutely positive that it would work that they dropped the first one they ever made on the people of Hiroshima without ever conducting a trial run. Unfortunately for the people of Hiroshima, the scientists were right. It did work.

Although, those bombs dropped on Japan could be thought of as duds by today’s standards, since only about 2 or 3 % of the fissionable material actually split. The other 97 or so % was blown free in the first instant of the explosion. Modern physicists today know how to reflect stray neutrons that escape back into the fissionable material, allowing for much higher efficiency (and smaller bombs that require less raw material). Today’s bombs are close to 99% efficient. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you exactly how the stray neutrons are reflected back into the core because the science behind magnetic lensing and tampers is HIGHLY classified. You know the cliche: I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. In Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, only a measley 600mg of matter was converted into energy. (600 mg is approximately the weight of one and a half aspirin tablets). And yet that was enough to cause an explosion equal to what you’d get if you blew up about thirty-two MILLION POUNDS of dynamite. And Little Boy killed around 140,000 people all told.

All that destruction from less than two aspirin tablets worth of magic rocks! Einstein’s famous E=mc² is a fancy (and extremely precise) way of saying that you can turn a whole bunch of energy into a tiny bit of mass OR turn a tiny bit of mass into absurd quantities of energy.

Okay, now that I’ve driven home my point—that Uranium and Plutonium are magic since they come from exploding stars and since all you have to do is pile them up or squeeze them to get them to explode with untold force—I suppose I owe you an explanation of why it is exactly that Uranium and Plutonium are so volatile.Well, it goes something like this. Uranium and Plutonium are both “heavy metals” and what that means is that if you were to look at a single atom of either, that you would see a whole grip of “nucleons.” Nucleons are the particles that exist in the center, or “nucleus,” of an atom. Nucleons come in two varieties: protons, which have a positive charge; and neutrons, which have a neutral charge. Technically—and this is a little known fact—neutrons aren’t really a particle in their own right, since each is actually a proton and an electron that have been smushed together. The electron cancels out the proton’s positive electromagnetic charge. That’s why a neutron has no charge and its mass is exactly equal to the mass of a proton plus the mass of an electron. But anyway, every nucleus of every atom contains protons. And some nuclei also contain neutrons. It is the number of protons in an atom that determines what element the atom is–its atomic number. But both protons and neutrons determine an element’s atomic weight. Again, since a neutron is really a proton and an electron that have been smushed together, neutrons weigh a teeny bit more than protons, but since the weight of an electron is trivial—even in relation to a subatomic proton—we can generalize the weight of protons and neutrons as being more or less the same and so, again, together they determine an isotope’s atomic weight. Really quickly, I will remind you that it is the number of proton’s that determines what element (like hydrogen) you have, but it is the number of protons AND neutrons that determines what isotope (what version of an element you have–like Deuterium or Tritium, two of the heavier versions of hydrogen). Many elements have several different versions or isotopes. Uranium, for instance, has two main isotopes, U235 and U238.

Well, the thing is that Uranium atoms and Plutonium atoms are really heavy (they have lots of nucleons) and they are really awkward (the position of the nucleons is unstable). So what happens is that the force that holds the nucleons together is eventually overwhelmed. We call the force that holds the nucleons in the nucleus of an atom together the “strong nuclear force.” What is the strong nuclear force? Well, if you get two nucleons close enough, they kind of stick together. Normally, they resist each other (particularly in the case of protons which repel each other due to their mutual positive electromagnetic charge), but if you get them REALLY, REALLY close together, what happens is that each nucleon sort of loses track of where it ends and where the other begins. You see, each nucleon is made of quarks, and what happens is that if you get two nucleons close enough together, they star sharing quarks. It would be like me standing so close to you that we started swapping arms and legs back and forth over and over again so quickly that it was impossible to tell whose limbs were whose. Why do neutrons and protons swap quarks when they interact? Well, we’re starting to get REALLY technical here, and to a certain extent we are bumping up against the current edges of human knowledge and the limits of what can be expressed in non-mathematical language, but scientists claim that the quarks themselves are interacting by emitting and absorbing even smaller (in this case perhaps 0entirely massless) particles called vector gauge bosons or “gluons.”

It should be noted here that, at the level of gluons and quarks–and even protons, really–that the concept of solid, local, “particles” starts to become outmoded. The universe isn’t really constructed of tiny billiard balls at all. The concept of “atoms” interacting in the “void” as put forth by Democritus of Abdera is rendered utterly obsolete by modern physics. In fact, the cosmos isn’t split into pieces separated by empty gaps at all. The very fabric of space-time and matter-energy is nonlinear, corporeal, continuous, and viscous. To quote Allan Combs and Mark Holland: “The cosmos is of-a-piece, not empty, but filled with itself, much as a painting is filled with itself. There are foreground and background regions, but the canvas is continuous.” But thinking of the universe as points with boundaries and limits separated by emptiness is a useful model and it’s the current paradigm shaping how modern science looks at and talks about the object world.

But…Hinduism aside…

If protons and neutrons get close enough, their constituent quarks start exchanging gluons and they get “glued” together to the point that you can’t tell whose quarks are whose. That’s sort of what the strong nuclear force is.

And when I say it’s strong, I mean it is STRONG, boy! For example, if your left bicep were to represent the force of gravity, to represent the force of electromagnetism, your right bicep would have to be bigger than the observable universe! And yet, even the electromagnetic force is tiny compared to the strong nuclear force. But whereas electromagnetism works at great distances and gravity acts to infinity, the strong nuclear force only kicks in when two tiny nucleons are so close that they are touching together so that they can swap quarks.

Okay, back to magic rocks. What happens in the nucleus of a Uranium or Plutonium atom is that the nucleus is so big that most of the nucleons aren’t touching each other. Sure, each nucleon is  touching (and trading quarks with) its immediate neighbors, the nucleons right next to it—above it, below it, beside it, behind it, and in front of it. But the nucleus is so big that there are hundreds of nucleons that each nucleon is not touching and is therefore not immediately stuck to. And while each nucleon is not attracted to these other nucleons that it isn’t touching, each proton is repelled away from all the other protons due to electromagnetism.

So in any atom—be it Helium or Gold—each proton is confused. Each proton suffers a kind of cognitive dissonance, wherein it feels a pull toward each other proton because it, indirectly, is stuck to protons that are stuck to protons that are stuck to protons… that are stuck to even the farthest protons at the other side of the nucleus by way of the strong nuclear force. But each proton also feels a push away from each other proton (except the ones that it is immediately swapping quarks with) because positive repels positive; like repels like just as opposites attract.

So in an atom like Uranium or Plutonium where there are so many protons that aren’t touching each other, eventually the electromagnetic repulsion or push is so strong that each end of the nucleus pushes against the other side  until the atom splits in two. Scientists refer to this pushing affect as the “weak nuclear force” and there is even a named particle that corresponds to this force (the weak gauge boson)… but really and truly the weak force isn’t a fundamental force (like gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force) at all. Rather, the weak force is epiphenomenal, secondary, subsidiary, accessory to the electromagnetic force that causes it.

Let’s say you took a cookie and broke it into two pieces. The two pieces aren’t quite going to weigh as much, together, as the whole cookie did before, right? Why not? Because there are tiny crumbs that break off. You have two big pieces—two halves—and a hundred itsy bitsy little crumbs. That makes sense, right? Well, let’s try this then. Imagine that you have a rubber band and you snap it in half. Now, it’s possible that there are tiny little bits of rubber “crumbs” that might break off in addition to the two halves. But let’s say that there aren’t any crumbs. Nevertheless, the two halves of the rubber band don’t quite weigh as much as the one whole rubber band weighed before you snapped it in half? How come? Well, before we get into why the two halves weigh less than the unbroken whole, let’s just agree that it takes energy to hold the rubber band together. You have all of these rubber molecules and they aren’t stuck together by glue; they are stuck together by energy. In the case of rubber molecules, they are stuck together by electromagnetic energy.

When you break the rubber band or when you break anything, really, you are releasing energy. So while there might be material crumbs that break away, there are also energetic “crumbs” that break free as well. How much energy is released when you break something? Well, that depends on how much energy was being used to hold that something together!

In the case of Uranium and Plutonium, a LOT of energy was being used to hold them together. Remember that the extremely strong electromagnetic force was always trying to break the nuclei apart anyway and that the force that held them together in spite of this electromagnetic push, the strong nuclear (or quark swapping) force, is the strongest force in the known universe. So when that Uranium or Plutonium atom snaps in two, all of that force, all of that power, all of that energy is released! In nature, when a Uranium or Plutonium atom splits, it breaks into two smaller elements and there are two or three nucleons that are left over. These nucleons goes flying off unimpeded. The kinetic energy released when the Uranium atom splits is sufficient to propel its freed neutrons about 13cm. In the Earth’s crust, Uranium never exists in large piles because it is so rare. It is rare because only a little bit of it was made in the first place in the supernova and also because Uranium is so volatile that it is constantly and rapidly decaying into other elements like Molybdenom and Lanthium. So whenever you find Uranium, you only find it sprinkled amidst a blend of other rocks. You never find it anything even remotely approximating a pile with a 13cm radius.

But if you have enough Uranium, the probability of a given stray nucleon “escaping” eventually reaches zero. In this case, rather than flying off free, this nucleon smacks into another Uranium nucleus, which is now too “heavy” (there are too many nucleons NOT directly attached) and so this new nucleus now splits, sending more energy and another stray nucleon flying off. Put another way, it’s not so much that the Uranium nucleus becomes too “heavy” when it absorbs a new nucleon; what’s really happening is that the new nucleon causes the Uranium nucleus to shift its balance and its shape becomes awkward. The nucleus “elongates” and becomes just long enough for the electromagnetic force to be able to gain the upper-hand in its battle with the strong nuclear force which dominates at close range. If you have a “critical mass” of Uranium, the Uranium chunk is so big that ALL of the stray nucleons keep smacking into other nuclei, which then also elongate and split, sending off more stray nuclei. And on and on. This is called an “uncontrolled chain reaction.” While we can think of these reactions happening sequentially, many millions of nuclei are splitting in the blink of an eye and a tremendous amount of energy is released instantaneously.

With Plutonium, again, the trick is not mass, but density. When a Plutonium atom splits, stray nucleons go flying off freely. But if the Plutonium atoms are packed tightly enough together, rather than escaping, each stray nucleon is smacks into another Plutonium nucleus, which then splits, and an uncontrolled chain reaction (nuclear explosion) takes place. All nuclear (fission) weapons use Uranium or Plutonium (or both).

All thermonuclear (fusion) bombs also use Uranium or Plutonium bombs as “starters.” This means that you use the heat and energy released from an atomic (nuclear, fission) device to start the thermonuclear fusioning of hydrogen isotopes. Fusion bombs work EXACTLY the way stars do. The reaction that turns Hydrogen into Helium in our sun is the same reaction that powers thermonuclear hydrogen bombs (”H” bombs). So while we might be able to debate oer whether a nuclear bomb is actually a miniature star, a thermonuclear bomb most certainly is a small manmade star. End of story.

Our sun overcomes the repulsion that normally keeps protons from fusing with two key ingredients: pressure and motion. Both come from gravity. Because the sun is so huge, gravity pushes all of the protons together into a very cramped space. They try to get away from each other electromagnetically, but there isn’t much room to do so. Secondly, as all of the gases rub against each other in the sun, friction causes heat (and then there is the extreme heat once the atoms start fusioning of course). Heat means motion. That’s exactly what heat is if you ever wanted to know: it’s random molecular motion.In the sun you have all of these protons wiggling and jiggling about randomly (because of heat) and they’re also already packed like sardines (because gravity smushes them together). And so since they are all bouncing around with such intense fervor in such tight quarters, direct collisions occur. When this happens, when the protons bump right into each other or right up next to each other, the strong nuclear force (the quark swapping force) takes over, completely overwhelming the electromagnetic force that holds the protons apart and, eventually, Hydrogen is fused into Helium. [The fusing of any smaller atoms into larger atoms is always "exothermic," or energy producing until you get up to Iron. The fusing of iron into "neurtonium" in neutron stars is actually endothermic and creates an infinite vacuum resulting in a black hole.]

The exact same thing that happens in a star occurs within a Hydrogen bomb. A Hydrogen bomb absolutely is a little, man-made star. Doesn’t it shock you to  know we can make STARS? I was shocked when I learned this. It’s one thing that we can make Shamwows and Snuggies. Making stars is a totally different magnitude of engineering!

The surface temperature of the sun is about 5,780 K, which is 5,500 °C or about 9900 °F, while the sun’s core is around 15 million °C or 27 million °F. Since the earth is not as hot as the sun (thank God), we need to artificially create an environment that is sun-like in its temperature. And the only way to do that is to make an atomic (fission) device, using Plutonium or Uranium. The heat, remember, is what’s needed to get those nucleons bouncing around.

And since the Earth does not have the intense gravity that you’ll find at the sun’s core, we need a synthetic way of mimicking the sun’s pressure, its power to squeeze. To mimic the squeezing power of the sun, nuclear physicists use a very mysterious (magical?) substance called…”styrofoam.” That’s right:  everyday household styrofoam (which is actually a brand name for a product patented by Dow Chemical) is one only a feww substances in the known universe that shrinks when you heat it (ice is another). Most substances expand when heated (because their molecules get excited and start bouncing around more). But not styrofoam. No, Sir. Styrofoam gets smaller and smaller as you heat it.

So here’s how you build a Hydrogen bomb (star).You put an atomic bomb at one end of a long tube. (You already know what an atomic bomb is. It’s a device that either piles up Uranium into a “critical mass” or squeezes Plutonium to a “critical density.”) This fission bomb provides the heat. Then, at the other end of the long tube, you put some Hydrogen (almost always a heavy Hydrogen isotope like Deuterium or Tritium) and you surround this Hydrogen “fuel” with styrofoam. You need a long tube; otherwise the atomic starter bomb blows the Hydrogen fuel to smitherines before it gets a chance to nucleothermally fuse.The shockwave of the starter bomb travels at the speed of sound. The electromagnetic energy released from the starter bomb, (mostly x-rays and gamma rays) however, travels at the speed of light.Light travels much faster than sound, of course. That’s why you always see the lightning before you hear the thunder.

So if you have a long enough tube, the x-rays and gamma rays travel at light speed from the fission ignition device at one end down the tube to the styrofoam-wrapped hydrogen isotopes at the other, heating and shrinking the styrofoam, and exciting and smushing the protons together. And when the Hydrogen fuses into Helium….well, you’ve seen the sun before and that sucker is (on average) 93.6 million miles away! Because light travels faster than sound, the gamma rays and X-rays from the starter (fission) bomb have time to fuse the Hyrdrogen into Helium before the shockwave blast from the starter tears the whole bomb apart.

The largest thermonuclear explosion ever, the “Tsar Bomba” created a blast equivalent to what you’d get if you blew up Two BILLION pounds of dynamite. It generated enough heat that any person within 62 miles of the blast would have suffered 3rd degree burns! The blast was felt over 600 miles away, and for the split second that the bomb was doing its thing, it produced 1.4 % as much energy as the sun did during the same instant.

Okay. I’m done for now. This has been a long and somewhat technical post.

But let me restate my thesis for the umpteenth time really quickly. If we can use rocks from exploding stars to MANUFACTURE our own stars, then that’s some magic shit!

If you don’t think making stars out of infinitesimal amounts of rocks that themselves come from stars is magical, then you need to get your head examined!

So the next time you tease some hippie for thinking that minerals are magic, remember Hiroshima. And remember that Hiroshima was, by today’s standards, a dud.

The whole war on drugs is a linguistic war–a semantic war. We wouldn’t have a war on “metabolites.” That would be nonsensical. We would quickly perish. So we break up the category of “metabolites” into subsets.

This is always how the dualistic mind works. We take THE ONE that, alone, is and we break it up into parts–good and bad being the second distinction we learn as humans, and this distinction derives from the first, yes and no. (”No” is the most common first word children say even as “Mama” and “Dada” are inculcated into their poor little minds). And so we break metabolites down (we metabolize them?) in our minds; we break the superset down into manageable bits–some we call “food.” Others we call “medicine” and still others we call “poison.”

The word “drug” used to merely mean “medicine.” Even now the primary definition of drug is “A substance used in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of a disease or as a component of a medication.” Yet at some point, “drug” began to mean “poison” more than medicine. Hence we have drug dealers and drug addicts and a War on Drugs.

One of the first people to realize that the War on Drugs was a semantic war was (surprise, surprise) Dr. Timothy Leary. Leary realized that no one was going to just sanction the widespread use of “poison.” So Leary figured he’d market LSD as medicine. But none of the medical people were interested (at Harvard as concerned Leary anyway). Leary made the point in Design For Dying that, in the 80s or 90s or especially now, you might be able to market psychedelics as vitamins–another buzzword for a certain (artificially and arbitrarily delineated?) subset of “metabolites.” Is LSD a brain vitamin like Ginko Biloba (only far more affective and much less toxic to the liver)?

 

 

 

The only people interested in Leary’s vitamins were, however, the people at the Harvard Divinity School. They tested the usefulness of Psilocybin as yet another kind of metabolite–a sacrament. And the results were amazing. Something like 90% of the people who were given the psychedelic (literally: soul-revealing) communion had a “mystical experience” (i.e., they actually did commune with the numinous, with the divine). Harper’s magazine reported that to this day 90% of those original 90% STILL consider their Good Friday Mass at Boston University’s Marsh chapel to be one of the three most meaningful experiences of their lives. Apparently Rick Doblin tracked down the original members of the study for his doctoral thesis at Harvard. Many were married, had children, lost parents, and so on and yet, I reiterate, the mushroom sacrament produced an experience that remained, for the vast majority, one of the three most meaningful experiences of their lives. It is also interesting to note that one of the people who received psilocybin in the experiment was  a graduate student by the name of Huston Smith, who had a full-blown mystical experience and went on to become the most famous Religious Studies professor in the history of the world and one of the Twentieth Century’s leading advocates of the perennial philosophy!

And so Leary marketed his vitamins as a sacrament, advocated “Do-it-yourself theology,” and started the League for Spiritual Discovery (you can figure out the three-letter acronym without my help). And so the fight to re-classify psychedelics began.

Today, we need to use a two-pronged attack. Because there are two main enemies to the responsible use of plant entheogens: Science and Religion. Those are the two most closed-minded groups of people. The scientific, scientistic, objectivist, logical positivist, materialistic doubters and the puritanical, fundamentalist, doctrinaire, superstitious believers. Those are always the two groups of people causing all the trouble: the silly theists and the sillier atheists. (But I digress, and the silliness of both theists and atheists deserves its own post.)

The point is that if you want to convince the religious morons that a metabolite is good, you’ve got to call it a sacrament and establish it as such. Now, irony of ironies, the original sacraments WERE psychedelics on almost every continent–Iboga in Africa; Ayahuasca and Mescaline (Peruvian Torch) in South America; Liberty Cap (Little Brown) Mushrooms in Europe. Ergot in other parts of Europe; Daturas, Mandrake, Belladonna and other Deadly Nightshades in still other parts of Europe; Amanita Muscaria mushrroms in Siberia; Lysergic Acid-containing Morning Glories in Hawaii and Meso-America; Salvia in Meso-America; Peyote in Meso-America; Mushrooms in Meso-America; Hell, mushrooms everywhere and everyTHING in Meso-America!

Nowadays, our sacraments are useless. Wafers in Catholicism. Torn up pieces of day-old discount Wonderbread, bleached of all nutrients, are the sacrament in Mormonism. I know. I used to prepare these breadcrumbs as a Teacher (at 14) , bless them as a Priest (at 16), and administer them as a Deacon within the Mormon Church (at 12).

It’s funny now that we have to convince the people with fake sacramental substitutes that the real sacraments are really sacraments. It’s an absurd world as the existentialists (and I suppose the absurdists) would say.

The other prong of the attack is to convince those crazy physical scientists who are even more afraid of the meta-physical than superstitious religious zealots are of the demonic. To convince the scientists (who, like the religious freaks haven’t discovered post-modern post-structuralism yet) that the metabolites in question aren’t bad you have to call them medicine.

And so that’s how we do this. We demonstrate that each psychedelic is a sacrament (which they all are) and that each psychedelic is a medicine (which they also are).

“But aren’t some drugs–even some psychedelics–poison?” you ask. Sure, just as enough water can drown you or enough Vitamin C can cause kidney stones. Penicillin is a wonderful antibiotic but no one would suggest that it’s wise to pop them like tic-tacs when you’re not sick. (Hell, it’s probably not wise to pop tic-tacs like tic-tacs.) It’s all about content and context–dose, set, and setting as Leary was fond of saying. In these next posts, lets discuss the ways in which the plant teachers ARE and CAN BE sacraments. Then we’ll look at how they are and can be Medicines.

I was helping my friend Jolie, who is getting her MA in Philosophy from San Diego State, prepare for a paper and a presentation that she was working on. She asked me about the “problem of evil.” She wanted to know if I believed in “evil.” Is there such a thing? One of my (two) responses was that evil is a developmental issue. Using the chakras as developmental stage-structures, I argued that there are different perspectives on evil from each level as follows:

At the first Chakra, evil is anything that hurts or harms my physical body. If I have a headache, the headache is evil. If I am getting rained on and don’t like it, then the rain is evil.

At the second chakra, evil is anyone who has sex with (or tries to have sex with) my girlfriend/wife or boyfriend/husband. Evil is my sexual competitors.

At the third chakra, evil is anyone who has different membership values or explanatory myths than I. If I am Catholic, Protestants are evil. If I’m an Israeli, Palestinians are evil. If I’m a Democrat, then Republicans are evil. If I like the Lakers, then the Celtics are evil.

At the fourth chakra no ONE is evil. (Hitler needs a hug). Only power structures are evil; and they all are!

At the fifth chakra, evil is a linguistic construct that exists (only) in relation to other linguistic, cultural, and inter-subjective constructs.

At the 6th chakra, I can SEE (literally envision, but within my mind’s eye) that evil and good come from the same wellspring.

At the 7th chakra, evil IS good IS chaos is order is creator is creature/creation is evolution is destruction is Brahman, Buddhamind, Abraxis, is the I AM is the Clear Light is The Bright is the Luminous Numinous….all dualities collapse in the singularity of the Void.