Are you familiar with the documentary, The Spirit Molecule? It is a film looking at the hormone DMT (N-dimethyltryptamine) created by the pineal gland in the center of the brain and its relation to states of consciousness. Experiences of expanded or higher awareness tend to engender certain results:

• wider and wiser understanding of circumstances bringing an inherent sense of peace and compassionate detachment,

• the feeling of equanimity – shared life, empathy, and caring,

• a mind that is less bound by boxed thought: cultural or societal admonitions of what is normal or correct,

• and the personal experience that there is more to reality than what is called reality. In fact, the experience leaves one with an understanding of how comprehensive and beguiling the fundamental illusion is, thus inspiring one to live less according to that a paradigm of self-oriented gratification and veiled ongoing limitation.

In the 1960’s scientific experiments with mind altering substances were engaged. The substances quickly became available and the Counter Culture was born. As soon as experiences of expanded consciousness began to create political or sociological commentary and foment revolutionary thoughts, scientific research was pulled from the “drug scene,” and the use of mind altering substances started to be called a “dropping out” instead of a “tuning in.” Factors quickly came together that created these phrases including students dropping out of higher education because of its codified churn-out-robots agenda. The education young people were receiving from their expanded minds was more rich, real, and inspiring than the classroom so they were dropping out of college, seeking also to drop out of the societal norms that were being enforced upon the population. Their mind-expanding experiences tuned them into love, peace, creativity, and the truth of Life’s wholeness.

Immediately, funded research began to focus on dulling the senses as a direct response to the heightened awakening activism and political socialism that was being birthed. “Downers” were invented and, I believe, introduced to the wider population by the frightened government of the time. This was a significant action that keeps rippling to this day.

• Research was halted on mind and consciousness expanding techniques be they chemical substances taken, chemicals produced by the body/brain, or meditation. America was at the edge of change, so powerful and potentially overhauling that the government and the corporatocracy shut it down. LSD and mind expanding substances, including peyote and ayahuasca, were deemed dangerous, producing psychopaths and deviants. The simple truth was and still is that expansive human potential lies just below the surface of society’s reinforced banality. It’s release is the true revolution waiting to happen. As a person awakens, he or she is changed and seeks change, as well as seeks to change the unreality that is the focus of the world.

• Research was then immediately focused on that which numbs, dampens, or controls passion and mental activity. Such mental activity includes feelings of powerlessness or lack of fulfillment that lead any person to be depressed. As a result, women were handed the new family of drugs more readily than aspirin. During this same time frame, the Women’s Movement was gaining momentum. Note, therefore, the relation of a veiled action by the government and those that actually run the country on an arising population striving for expanded expression. That suppressing action was only for purposes of curtailing social revolution and redesign.

• As a result of the above, the United States has declined precipitously in moral standards, has denigrated itself into a mire of violence (we are the most violent nation on the planet), and have avoided growth of consciousness by becoming the most addicted population on the planet, thus unmotivated toward change.

Imagine the ripples that we could now be living if experimentation in personal mind and consciousness expansion had been given its opportunity, and if scientific research had partnered with the natural tendency toward whole-ism that expanded consciousness instills. Instead, money and effort was put into subsidizing small mindedness and the belittlement of human potential. Imagine the creative solutions to war, poverty, and disease that were glimpsed in the 60’s before being squashed. Global wholeness and being personally fulfilled through a shared orientation toward consciousness could have been empowered then. It seems that we are at the nexus again.

Fifty years ago, the wind of change was that of peace, love, expanded awareness, and a potential creative human revolution. That potential wanted to focus on the ills of the world and of human psyche, addressing them once and for all. Are we capable of engaging the wind of change as it cycles ’round again? It’s interesting that this time, it’s not imbibing drugs that is catalyzing the revolution in consciousness, but meditation itself. Maybe that’s perfect? Maybe this way, through meditation, a recognition of the range of human consciousness is being forced upon science and government. Awareness is happening. The call for change is being sounded and creatively acted upon. Consciousness, as envisioned in the ’60’s, still wants to make “all things new.”