Anti-Soma:
Allopathic western medicine stepped up its chemical assault on the psyche in the 1950s, almost timidly, with the first tranquilizers, which were quickly overshadowed by the efflorescence of psychedelia in the 1960s, with their devil's spawn in following decades. The profoundly positive benefits from ritualistic use of mind-altering drugs were almost completely lost sight of in the social panic as families and governments feared loss of control. Then came the psycho-actives, Prozac, Son of Prozac, and Prozac: The Many Sequels. At present, something over 20,000,000 Americans consume these powerful, personality-altering drugs. Band-aids for dangerous, deep, septic wounds. Now, we both have lived with people who've undergone what, in effect, is chemical lobotomy. The massive vacuity of valuelessness (reductive science, and all it entails, combined with greedy, selfish capitalism, and all it entails) at the heart of this culture pulls us all powerfully toward pointless depression. Put me in an office for eight hours a day, and the effects on body and mind are numbing and distorting. Add the anesthetic, amnesiac effects of television, and I'm hardly feeling anything at all. Give me a bottle of officially approved pills that very neatly remove any sense of connection, of empathy, with other people, with the world, and, sure, I can then function for some years as a valued member of society. "Soma" by any other name. Anti-Soma Daily, hourly, minutely, we’re surrounded by cultural blackholes, some large, some small, which suck out of you the very energy you need to SEE, to FEEL, to HEAL. One must take gentle, internal action. It is not so much a matter of creating an "antidote," or forming a "line of resistance," I find, as it is of simply (!) re-focusing one’s attention. Just to survive (no talk of "thrive"), we have to pay a lot of attention to many aspects of the vampiric culture, yes? But we can, we can create islands of refuge for ourselves, periods of quiet focus on the nonjudgmental panoply of nature. It doesn’t have to be Thoreau’s year-long immersion (talk about typically American irrational exuberance). Just a little time, every day, with the gentle emetic / diuretic / laxative effect of those old Chinese words in the Hsin Hsin Ming as a kind of massaging obbligato. END
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