EnlightenNext’s Best of the Web (06/13-06/25)
Here’s a choice selection of the posts, tweets, and news stories that caught our eyes as we surfed the net over the past week . . .
In the News
Religion & Spirituality
Environment
Science & Technology
Pop Culture
From the Twittersphere
Our Favorite Tweets
@JeanHouston: When vision allows us to know ourselves as the universe in innovative process, we gain a larger sense of our unique role and destiny in time
@joelpitney: Andrew Cohen: “At a certain point it becomes impossible to share with words how significant this shift really is.”
@KimmyBZ: The Flintstones Fallacy=believing prehistoric people experienced life just like us only surrounded by dinosaurs. Consciousness evolves!
@morgandix: very deep experiences of higher states of consciousness are the jet fuel that can change absolutely everything within us
Filed Under: Bright Green • Business • Consciousness • Culture • EnlightenNext Editors’ Blog • News • Politics • Pop Culture
Hello, all!
I submit the following with the interest of sharing my spiritual experiences and what I have learned:
The hit and high that comes from smoking good marijuana and the Awakening event are somwhat similar in effect.They both bring a kind of revelatory joy, bringing a feeling of an expanded awareness of Being and of the wonderfulness of a truer Self, Being re-discovered, re-assumed, re-endowed, permeated and blessed with grateful Selfness after periodsof not being in touch with that Self. It’s like a flame on low being turned up to a higher power. The Awakening is truly that, having been asleep with eyes open but going around not really awake. When the the opened doors of heightened perception are opened I’m enabled to perceive an Expanded view of Being, the conscious Awakened Soul celebrating anew the gift of Being with a profound happiness and general heightened awareness.
It’s an Enlightenment if it could be made to persist to the time alloted to me, it feels like that. Like getting a preview, a taste of the experience for the duration of the high.
BTW: I want to point out there’s use and abuse of marijuana, like any pleaure. Shall we mention alcohol use and abuse? I concede there may be a hazard for some, unable to resist the seduction of overdoing it and abusing it. I submit that though I have made somethimes poor choices that may have related to grass, that over 40 years of usage, I don’t feel any bad effects. If used judiciously, I think of grass as a spiritual gift and blessing to me.
Depends on the drug; depends on the awakening. Every human experience corresponds to something on a higher level. The problem with drugs of any kind, physical or emotional, medical or recreational, is that they become a hindrance to moving beyond them.
cannabis is but one of many gifts the Goddess has given us to facilitate the lifting of the veils
I’ve always liked the message from Baba Ram Dass that psychotropic substances should be used to facilitate connection and enlightenment; he said they show us what the altered state looks/feels like
of course, he also said we need to find out how to get there on our own, so we can graduate from the drugs; I’m still working on that part :)
Blessed Be
Z
It was Baba Ram Dass’s talking about the use of grass spiritually that led me (astray?) to incorporate it into my spiritual practice. Or was it the pleasureable highs that made me feel spiritual? I now say that getting high and seeking that pleasure is not the aim of spiritual awareness but it certainly played a big part for me, pursuing that consciousness and feelings that I credit to enabling my Awakening Event. Forty years later, I gratefully acknowledge my use of grass as fortuitous.
I have two minds re: legalization of it:
1) Aside from spiritual usage, it’s medically less harmful than the legal drugs–alcohol and nicotine smoking. Legalization would allow the release of lots of folks in jail, emptying the overcrowded prisons. The stressful chance of being busted for recreational use would be a good thing.
2) Even when the consequences of being busted for abuse of grass and poor work performance would be severe, I think we’d still have a lot of folks getting stoned inappropriately acting irresponsibly. I also would be uneasy thinking of folks doing risky business being stoned and lots of drivers too.
I’m not sure what the right way to go is. Any ideas, folks?