Pearce Ch. 5 & 6; Electronic Reserve (attempt)

Pearce has again filled up more pages than needed. I can recall turning to my girlfriend while reading this and saying, "He could have said all of this in one sentence and spared us the technical reasoning and mumbo-jumbo jargon." Basically I think that Pearce is telling us (again and again and again) that we have the possibility to do ANYTHING. I was immediately pulled back to a quote by John Lennon of the Beatles that goes, "I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?" Pearce is saying that if it's in your mind, it can exist outside of the mind if you really want it to - another Lennon quote goes with this when he said something along the lines of 'war is over, if you want it to'. If we are this "mirror" and everything else is the other "mirror", when we make a "move" or a change in thought or a progression of thought, the other "mirror" is going to experience that change - a collective consciousness. Though I find Pearce to talk in ramblings, I digg the fact that he discredits the idea of a "discovery" and rather calls it a "creation". This goes along nicely with the theme of our class that seems to be over casted by the all powerful altered states theme: creativity. All the things we experience are a result of someones creativity. All you have to do to be creative is "move" in your "mirror" even if it's only a slight "movement".

Because of my absence from class on Thursday I can only speculate to what the electronic reserve handouts were about (I could not find them on any electronic reserve). It seems that one of the topics was law enforcement. This is a topic I could go on for hours about naturally. I completely loathe the fact that certain drugs are illegal - the drugs that don't harm anyone like LSD, Mushrooms, Cannabis, Opium, and various psychedelic substances. I find it a bit ironic that these drugs are looked down upon so much while the mind-controlling pharmaceuticals are shoved down our throats daily. It's also wonderful that the drugs that really harm people such as Heroin, Crack, and Cocaine, are the ones that are being brought in an distributed by our govt. They are treated the same way as drugs that are on a completely different level. Personally I believe that if you want to do something, do it - why not? As I traveled back from the Dead reunion this afternoon I began to think that there are two types of people: ones that ask "why?" and ones that ask "why not?" We seem to only persecute the people who ask "why not?" This leads me to my other speculated topic of one of the handouts: a psychedelic society. I think that this is what Pearce wants us to live in. Not psychedelic in terms of drug use, but psychedelic in terms of the way we think "normally". In order to have "advancements" or to evolve, we have to live inside of our thoughts for some time. We have to get inside of our ideas and not care about the consequences. We have to ask "why not?"