Fear not, Goody-Two-Shoes out there; this post will not send you to the street corner looking for Meth.
This is about our look at Brain activity regarding meditation, non-linear thinking and the search for higher consciousness.
From This article in the Huffington Post, Author Ryan Grim provides an adaptation of his book "This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History Of Getting High In America".
Specifically, Grim details how some of the most important advances in science, medicine and technology have been influenced by the use of psychedelic drugs.
From the article, which centers around Apple computer and i-product founder Steve Jobs:
That Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America's foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.
Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple's Jobs has said that Microsoft's Bill Gates, would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn't deny having dosed as a young man.
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John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut, he's certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties activist, he's perhaps best known for Gilmore's Law, his observation that "[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." He told me that most of his colleagues in the sixties and seventies used psychedelic drugs. "What psychedelics taught me is that life is not rational. IBM was a very rational company," he said, explaining why the corporate behemoth was overtaken by upstarts such as Apple. Mark Pesce, the coinventor of virtual reality's coding language, VRML, and a dedicated Burner, agreed that there's some relationship between chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: "To a man and a woman, the people behind [virtual reality] were acidheads," he said.
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And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the Nobel Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.
(D.R.)-- LSD Guru Timothy Leary belived this too, that psychedelics trigger changes in DNA, causing the human species to actually evolve.
Now, I'm not advocating everybody go on out and get dosed, but this is an example of our look at non-linear thinking and the possibilities in spirituality and innate knowledge that we can achieve through mind expanding experiances.
By this, I mean to include prayer, contemplation, and meditation in non-dogmatic, non-religious framework.
