A rant followed by a big dream followed by some thoughts on psychedelics and the microbiome by Gary Lindorff!
(2022-03-16 at 22:35:37 )

A rant followed by a big dream followed by some thoughts on psychedelics and the microbiome by Gary Lindorff!

I need to get something off my chest. This is a rant:

It occurs to me, as I contemplate the horrors of Ukraine, that I would not wish our system on the world as alternative because our system is the most violent system in the world.

It is insidiously violent when it is not blatantly violent. It claims to be a democracy but it is no such thing. It claims to be a defender of other democracies but that is nothing but a great lie and deception.

It is spinning a mythology about itself with our tacit permission (it is birth, its coming of age, it is destiny) and it lives inside that myth, prowling the world, sniffing out enemies to bate, so it can convince weaker countries to fall in line behind it. This self-created mythical monstrosity of the United States, is essentially a giant tick sucking the juice out of the world, sucking the future out of us. If we do not wise up very soon we will not recognize our planet. It will not be our planet anymore.

Now I would like to share a big dream I had last night. You be the judge of how these two posts relate:

When you write down a dream, the language you use is important and can shed light on the dream, so I am sharing my recall of this dream verbatim:

I am receiving some information about a special kind of old tree called a "significant" tree where, after the top part ( visible part above ground) dies and disappears, the roots stay vital and keep growing down into the earth. I am studying an illustration of this. In the illustration, the roots are extending very far down, vertically. There are other old trees that, of course, are special, but "significant" is exactly that; these trees have a unique gift - purpose - nature - role ... I am sharing this with someone, possibly my son. The dream ends with me watching a super dome fill to capacity with expectant people who have gathered to hear about trees rather than to watch a game. There are thousands of them all anxious to hear about significant trees and the medicine of trees. (A program of speakers is about to start. I am one of the organizers and I might be one of the speakers), and I am thinking, This is the time we were hoping for and praying for, the great shift to a new consciousness.

In my opening rant I am comparing the United States to a giant tick. I stand behind every word of that rant, but that is not the whole story by a long shot. That is what is on the front burner for me; it is hot and it is right there. Writing that was a way of performing a kind of exorcism on myself. I needed to clear the air, clear space for my day. A rant may be true or not. It may express something that someone else is carrying on their "front burner". But a rant is nothing more than a rant. You are welcome to agree or disagree.

Dreams, on the other hand, are about psychic realities and possibility, They are the raw material of reality. In other words they go beyond mere possibility. Whether we dream something uplifting or terrifying, it is wise to pay attention because it represents a certain amount of energy, psychic energy, that is suing for attention for a reason.

If, for example, we dream that we are sick, that is our psychic body that is sick, and we should take steps to heal our psychic body. If we dream of someone else getting sick, then it is wise to ask who is that? What part of us is that? Or, what part of the psyche is sick? It is much easier to heal on a psychic level than to heal the physical body, when physical symptoms of illness manifest. Conversely, when something amazing is happening in a dream, it really is happening on a psychic level. On that level it is absolutely real.

I have been investigating and broadening my awareness in two areas since Covid hit: psychedelics and the our microbiome. (If you have not watched Fantastic Fungi ( Louie Schwartzberg), I recommend it. It is visually entertaining and it reintroduces us to the Fungi Kingdom, and psilocybin [magic mushroom] in the context of the 21st century.)

Webinar after webinar, I am beginning to appreciate how much we are like the fruiting of a very special branch of consciousness. Dreams are like hearing from our mycelia. (If I remember correctly, from the film, when we are walking in a healthy forest, the mycelia under each step we take (if you lined up all those tiny filaments in a straight line) would stretch 300 miles. That too is the United States, by the way. All the mycelia in the United States is also who we are, if we want to embrace that. Or, if you prefer, it is Turtle Island.

Mycelia is the original internet, natures internet. When you take the mushroom (even if you microdose), you are tapping into this vast ancient organic internet of one billion year old wisdom. Based on anecdotal stories of people who have journeyed with the mushroom, spending time interfacing with such an oceanic consciousness is like hearing from God, which is why it is so effective in treating addiction, because, when you step into that story, call it the understory of creation, the story of addiction loses its hold on us.

Jung often compared the intelligence of the collective psyche to hearing from a million year old man. (Back when he said that he did not know he was being sexist. In fact the intelligence of the psyche is gender neutral.) But, my point is, the psyche is probably a couple 100,000 years older than the ego. And the mushrooms intelligence is at least 100,000 times older than the human psyche. So that is all I want to say about the magic mushroom right now.

About the microbiome.

It is our inner rainforest. A healthy gut is made up of countless cultures of microorganisms and bacteria that are all, not only getting along (not fighting), but engaging with each other harmoniously to help us thrive. If our microbiome is healthy, it functions much like a healthy pristine rainforest.

It is an impossibly complex community of lifeforms all serving one purpose - our well-being. Our body is really two bodies in one, but there is more nonhuman DNA in our bodies than human. And, even if the jury is out as to how natural we humans are in the scheme of things, there is no denying that the microbiome is nature, so it is very interesting to me that there is less that is specifically human in us, than there is nature . . . unless we kill off our microbiome (the way we are clear cutting the actual rainforests of the world) with antibiotics, pesticide-laced food and ghost- (processed) food, sugar, and heavy duty drugs etc. If we feed our microbiome, we increase the diversity of nature within us and that affects how we feel and think and process, and how we create.

It is important to realize, we are not just what we eat. We are what we think. We are what we feel and emote, we are how much we love, what we let in and we are what we dream. The microbiome is real, but the chemistry of the microbiome is so infinitesimally sensitive and "conscious" that it dwarfs the intelligence of the rational brain. It functions as a quantum intelligence in fact.

I am not returning to my big dream to offer an interpretation by way of a closing thought, but I will just put the dream out there. Some big dreams are irreducible. They are what they are. I was very happy to have this one, and am equally happy to share it with you!

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Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!