Rocky Frisco's LIBERTY Page: DopeTITLE> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Rocky Frisco's LIBERTY Page: Dope</"> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="liberty, freedom, america, constitution, bill of rights, democracy, tyranny of the majority"> </HEAD> <BODY><BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFEE99" LINK="#332200" VLINK="#FFFFFF" ALINK="#330022" <CENTER><h2>Dope</h2> <h3> by Frank Ragoczy</h3></CENTER> <h4> <br><br>The old saw: "As the twig is bent; so the tree will grow," is undoubtedly true in the case of trees and shrubs. This is apparent whether the bending is done by nature or a human attempt to create Bonsai or topiary sculpture. The proverb is also obviously not really just about plant life at all; the analogy points toward the tendency for human behavior patterns to be set early and almost never really transcended. At some level, each of us is aware of this aspect of life, but for some reason we rarely seek out our own deep programs to find the roots of our own behavior. <br><br>If you search back far enough in any child's development, you will find that this tendency isn't just a case of learning-patterns and information-processing, but that it involves the original creation of personal cognitive defaults and paradigms, including the individual's very definition of identity and personal perception. <br><br>To ask someone to vary these patterns by taking conscious thought is to request the person to become somebody else; like an attempt to lift himself by the seat of his own pants, similarly impossible. Unfortunately, in our present culture, we support the collective myth that our individual behavior stems from our thinking processes, so we attempt to modify the behavior of others by adding to or changing their information. When this fails, the usual alternative is to resort to some form of violence or threat. <br><br>There is much to recommend the idea that our mental processes are far more often engaged in rationalizing and explaining our behavior than actually generating it. Upon careful consideration, the basis of our attitudes, actions and understandings would seem to be the search for a particular kind of biochemical balance, requiring certain levels of hormones and endorphins, matching a template created in early infancy as the personality first aggregated around its experience and interacted with its surroundings. <br><br>The person so created and defined is compelled to always attempt to recreate this biochemical "home state" in order to validate and support his/her existence, an unconscious process in most cases. The nature of the test of skill (ability/validity) that is found in the natal environment is imprinted on the arising personality like the experience of water to a fish, providing context and game-board, limitations and possibilities. Ever after, the endorphins and hormones of pleasure, fear, fulfillment and aggression are intrinsically caught up with this system and doled out and withheld in tune to its criteria, requirements and self-definition. <br><br>When we respond to the attentions of someone we find strongly sexually attractive, or experience sadness when a romance dies, or disappointment or anger when a promotion doesn't materialize, we are regulating our inner biochemistry to the tune of our own inner game, hardwired in the first hours and weeks of our life, modified and confirmed by the cognition and concepts added through a lifetime of conditioned experience. Added to this is the powerful verbal cross-programming created by incidental words spoken during traumatic experiences, and behavior based on personality traits incorporated from those who have harmed us or whom we fear. <br><br>The most righteous religious leader among us needs his continual doses of personal inner chemicals just as desperately as any narcotic addict. To be human is to be a junkie of some sort. For most of us, this is an unconscious internal process. As such, it fails to inform or engage our conscience, sense of fairness, voice of inner truth, our logic, or the ability to intervene in the process. As a result, few people honestly know why they really do what they do. Instead we explain and rationalize and justify our behavior, after the fact, to ourselves as well as others. <br><br>For an increasingly large number of people, as the old patterns of society slowly fail, the script they have been unwillingly cast to fit is becoming unacceptable to them. In order to perform the behavior required by their early programming to retain the biochemical experience of well-being, either they would have to act in ways that go against their informed conscience, or in some cases, the exigencies and realities of the world will not allow them to arrange their live so as to satisfy their inner criteria of performance. <br><br>It should be apparent to any honest observer that we all dance to this process and rarely deviate from it. The more traumatic or violent, toxic or repressive or even just crushingly boring the natal environment, the less chance there is of a person coming through it relatively unscathed, and since the process is more-or-less cumulative over the generations, by adulthood we are all dreadfully unconsciously hag-ridden. <br><br>To add to this, the whole process is certainly not by any means written on a tabula rasa. Humans are no less conditioned or constrained by their species' traits and instincts than bees or whales. We have the concept, on the one hand, of our "pre-speech" proto-human ancestors, whose brain chemistry and architecture we largely share, and on the other, the idea of the "perfect human", Christ, Avatar, etc. There must have been a period in our developmental process where we had what amounted to a language in common, but before "Languages" arose. For some reason we tend to imagine this experience as bestial and brutal, lacking in nobility or the finer emotions. I tend to disagree, thinking that what is best and worst in us has always been with us in some form. <br><br>Like the predisposition to verbal communication and common facial expressions, humans also share the spectrum of biochemical motivation. If a person's supply of these internally-generated medicines is withheld by his own inner processes because of his circumstances and considerations, for instance, if his mate betrays him or his child dies, that person may well commit suicide rather than continue in the depression that results. <br><br>Into the arena of this universal biochemical slavery, many hundred generations ago, entered a new aspect: "medicine". Suddenly, a new possibility appeared, that a person could bypass the internal biochemical programming by ingesting a close relative of the hormone or endorphin desired and feel satisfaction rather than the chronic, painful lack life had dealt up till then. <br><br>Since pendulums don't just stop at the middle right away, it's only natural that a person or cultural group when first encountering one of these biochemical bypasses might go a bit crazy and perhaps overdo it at least for a while. On the other hand, because of the way we are wired and plumbed, the pleasure to be gained from fulfilling one of these ancient longings is self-limited. The point of diminishing returns is soon reached. If the supply of the medicine is constant and consistent, most of those who undergo this process will either finally graduate from it or establish a small non-incapacitating maintenance dose to ameliorate the original lack. In this process, sometimes a person may gain the ability to be consciously detached from the biochemical dance, and sometimes may gain control of the process and learn to restore the natural flow restricted in infancy. <br><br>As resilient and tenacious as humans tend to be, just about the only sure way to prevent this process from achieving its successful conclusion is to halt the process by forcibly withholding the medicine from the person, which reintroduces the original problem, greatly magnified, focusing all the efforts of the person on the attempt to obtain the medicine. The agency withholding the medicine becomes the enemy, the medicine becomes valuable and hard to get, and the cycle is locked permanently into place, unfinished. <br><br>The above account describes the situation with narcotics and stimulants. The psychedelics are an entirely different matter. Rather than bypass the biochemical programming, each of these makes its own distinctive end-run around, or leap over, the monolithic unconsciousness at the heart of the personal identity. Usually, the more consciously aware of the patterns and paradigms one's behavior stems from, the less obsessively-constrained one is by the programs. This opens up the possibility that one may learn to feel the fear but refuse to run away; feel the aggression but refuse to act aggressively. Practicing this diligently finally results in no longer feeling the fear or aggression. Our deep programs, hidden under our ground of being, influencing and directing and commanding our behavior, can be immensely powerful when first confronted consciously, sometimes producing panic and distress, which largely accounts for the fear sometimes engendered by these medicines. For this very reason, they have been the tool and test of the visionary, mystic and religious seeker in many cultures throughout our species' history. <br><br>The near universal perception of general corruption and violent meaninglessness creeping into almost all aspects of modern life suggests that not only those substances currently labeled "drugs" are being denied validity, but also the frame of mind and direction of consciousness they promote and represent. I suspect that the reason peyote and psilocybe mushrooms and hemp are called drugs and alcohol and tobacco are not, is that the latter do not show you any alternative viewpoints or new ideas or call "common sense" into question, and the former often do. A large contingent of our population is frightened by any sort of "magic" or transcendence, since they automatically judge all "miracles" or "visions" not produced within the confines of their chosen religion to be evil, diabolical and dangerous. <br><br>A lifetime of traveling and discussing related subjects with many different people has led me to consider that most common folk experience their reality as dwelling on the surface of a thin crust of safe, non-magical certainty, floating on a world-sized molten ball of pure chaos. The instant they are made aware that another person might be meddling with the strings that tie the game together, they begin to fear and gather together and build gibbets or crosses or stakes with which to convince, once and for all, any dissenters that this is, after all, a solid and material world, which can with a little help kill one painfully. <br><br>Heedlessly at the beck and call of their biochemical programming, never having been afforded the opportunity to stand even momentarily outside of its constraints with the help of an herbal adjuster, misprogrammed further by the misinformation and misdirection engendered by an apostate federal government, it's no wonder the general population has been so easily stampeded into our present-day mini-inquisition, our attempt to slay the messenger along with the message, to abolish the practice of an ancient human art by the violent persecution of its practitioners: "Prohibition II", America's micro-holocaust and national shame: the so-called "War on Drugs". <br><br>How cruelly ironic that the source of all this violence and persecution is the need in certain citizens to promote and proclaim and enforce their own standards of righteousness upon others by means of conquest and punishment, a need based on the satisfaction they obtain from their own resultant favorite endorphinal fix, the high that comes from a hit of their own personal inner dope-supply. In the final analysis, when it comes to violence and compulsive antisocial behavior, heroin and cocaine don't hold a candle to the endorphins and hormones associated with self-righteous meddling. <br><br> -Frank Ragoczy e-mail = frankr@liberty-in-our-time.com <br></h4> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br><CENTER><h4>Contact Information: <br> <A HREF="MAILTO:webmaster@liberty-in-our-time.com"><blink>E-</blink> <IMG SRC="emailed.gif">mail<b><i> to The Webmaster</A></i></h4></b><br> <br> <br> </BODY></BODY> </HTML>