submitting an article to small student paper - any editors?

okay, so i just wrote an article to submit to a short paper put out by my dorm which will print just about anything submitted. i decided to submit an article in support of the use of psychedelics under a pseudonym, possibly my handle here. anyway, i was curious if people would perhaps read it for me and offer constructive criticism and perhaps proofread it for me as well.

i'm also open to different titles. the current title i'm working with is "on the place of psychedelics in the 21st century"

anyway, enough bullshit, here it is. any constructive comments are very welcome!!!



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The year is 2009, and we are approaching the apocalypse with formerly unimaginable rapidity. The world around us is in turmoil. Our nation has been at war for the past 8 years in the Middle East if you believe what the news agencies report, and for at least twice as long as that if you are willing to call any military hostilities war. Our economy is in shambles, and the economies of the world are being torn asunder with the same fervor as is our own. Lay offs, corporate bankruptcy, stock market crises are all commonplace. I recall instances when I began my freshman year of high school back in 2000 where it was no longer worthy of the front page of the newspaper when a student would go to school with firearms and massacre his classmates. The internet has effectively connected the world in ways never dreamed of before. Between radio signals and television signals, wireless internet, remote controls, and myriad other technological miracles, we exist in a world where even the air is densely packed with information and communication.

As if this wasn’t enough excitement for a sensible human being, allow us to pause and consider a few of the means of entertainment sanctioned by our culture. The latest bloody video games, the latest gruesome horror or action movies, comic books, crime novels, some of the crudest television programs ever produced. We have somehow almost become a nihilistic culture. The last vestiges of belief which bind together most everybody in our culture are a belief in the value of money, a belief in doing what pleases oneself, a belief that science and faith must somehow be at odds with one another, and a belief that technological, medical, and economic advancement will inevitably bear positive results.

The only problem is that all of these beliefs, these last commonalities among the minds of the American people, are absolute nonsense. We are conditioned to go to school, go to work, make lots of money, keep up with the news without letting the horrors get to us too much, and in our spare time retreat into equally or even more horrible fantasy worlds than the one in which we live. In fact, the world in which we live is a fantasy world. It is a world built on the notion that people fundamentally cannot live together peacefully, a world built on the notion that everything real must be empirically observable and that anything which can not be observed is unreal by proxy.

The apocalypse is coming. I don’t mean that the world is ending, but the world as we know it is ending. Apocalypse comes from a Greek word meaning “lifting the veil,” or “revelation.” We will soon all understand that business as usual will utterly fail to sustain the type of society and culture which we’ve idealized as a people for so long. The resources do not exist to support it, there is intense alienation and isolation in the face of an exponentially growing populace, and people are resistant to virtually any type of change that is not scientific change. The apocalypse I speak of is the apex of this mound of calamity, the moment at we as a culture will finally realize we simply cannot go on like this.

So I arrive, finally, to where psychedelics fit into all of this. The psychedelic experience is fascinating, a truly paradigm-shattering experience. Now, I’m not talking about kids taking 1 hit of the low-potency LSD that tends to circulate these days, or under 2g of dried Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. Both of these are relatively common practice, and serve to do no more than to induce a high. You may feel very peculiar, may giggle a lot, feel “out of it,” but this is not a fully psychedelic experience, not by a long shot. What I am discussing here is more along the lines of taking 3-5g of good quality dried mushrooms, laying in quiet darkness and accepting the visions, emotions, and ordeals that accompany it, or insufflating 50mg of DPT, or smoking DMT. I’m talking about all out pedal-to-the-metal psychedelia.

The experience can be rather terrifying for many people. After all, the experiences one goes through on psychedelics are totally outside the realm of everyday, normal waking reality. When was the last time you were confronted by divine or alien entities? When was the last time you saw something sung into existence, or had your body physically torn through walls into another dimension? When was the last time you transformed into something totally different than a human being? When was the last time you forgot you existed, had your concept of self totally dashed to smithereens?

I can only speculate as to the nature of the experience itself in terms of how “real,” it is. It may be all in the brain, it may be a genuine religious experience, it may be both, it may remove our sensory filters and experience genuine aspects of everyday reality we simply couldn’t cope with every day of the week. Regardless of the “true nature” of the experience, one thing is certain: it causes people to question and reexamine their values, their worldviews, their outlooks on life and god and humanity.

To what other source may we direct our search for new understanding, new revelation? The only thing I can imagine would be calamity, which is rapidly approaching. Many great breakthroughs in the past century were largely or partially influenced by the psychedelic experience. As a single example, Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick first conceived of the double-helix of DNA as an LSD-induced vision.

We could try looking to religion, but regardless of what faith one chooses, history has shown over the past several hundred years that expecting religion to make the world a better place doesn’t work out very well. We could try looking to science, but then again science is the creator of nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, submarines, stealth fighters, poisons, poisonous medicines recalled after a few months on the market or never recalled at all. Clearly both faith and science have a place in the world, but I believe the place of both have been greatly exaggerated, and both have the potential to do at least as much harm as good.

I truly believe that the psychedelic experience dissolves culturally constructed boundaries, drives one to question what in life is most worthwhile, to examine what connects us as human beings, what connects us to the earth and the cosmos, what is really going on. It spawns new ideas, creativity, new understanding, and new vitality that we sorely need as a species.

What I am saying is by no means new, but hopefully it is a new audience. In short, the message is this: things are bad, things will get worse. If we are to survive, we desperately need the adventurous, the daring, the humble, the wise. If we are to survive, we need to recreate culture from the inside out. The only way I can see to do this is to change, one person at a time.We need to stop buying into what we’re told is or is not acceptable and decide for ourselves what life is really all about. On a personal level, psychedelics can change your life and change your outlook on life. Use them carefully and conscientiously. The apocalypse will soon be upon us.





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so, any thoughts?

 

cool food for thought...word

 

nice!
but i'm no editor. sorry

 

I definitely enjoyed reading that and you should for sure send that it. And like the guy above, i'm no editor and dont really have any constructive criticism for you. But nice job on this!

 

OP Posted: 04-08-2009 04:21 PM
Nesta's Last Activity: 12-03-2009 03:47 PM

I wouldn't worry about it now.