Mind-Altering Worldviews

As a child of the 70’s, I took my turn experimenting with metaphysics and mind-altering substances. Carlos Castaneda’s teachings on seeking your “spirit-guide” (nahual) through peyote use was my particular goal one afternoon as I lay on a rock on the shore of Lake Travis near Austin, TX., to await for the third time the arrival of my nahual. Castaneda taught that you had to be persistent for the spirit teachers wanted sincere seekers of wisdom. That day it did happen, but not in the way I’d expected.

My nahual came in the form of some strange pterodactyl-like creature, hovering over me to lead me into the deeper mysteries of the universe. My initial positive reaction quickly changed into sudden fear as I intuitively recoiled from its grasp. With a telepathic sneer, the thing flew away from me, and all my peyote buttons and Castaneda books soon made their way into my university dorm dumpster. No more playing with psychotropic substances for me. I always felt grateful for having exercised my will at that moment, for I sensed that it likely saved my life from insanity (although some might contest the last part.)

This story from my dark peyote-eating past took on a new significance while pondering a story from the recent ‘Fort Dix Six’ fiasco . It turns out that a friend of one of the suspects, Bob Watts, a bakery co-worker for two years with suspect Agron Abdullah, is having a hard time digesting how some nice Muslim immigrant boys could suddenly flip into terrorists. “He was an easygoing guy, made you laugh all the time, he was somebody you really enjoyed working with,” Watts said on Good Morning America. “We were like brothers.” Apparently they were so much like brothers that Abdullah felt confident enough to openly express his admiration for his good ole ‘Uncle Benny’ (bin Laden), as well as show him some quaint bomb-making recipes in his car. Watts said he just thought his bakery bud was joking or maybe a bit touched by the oven heat. Gosh, but he never thought his laughing Albanian sidekick could be Al Qaeda Jr. “That’s what’s puzzling me and making my stomach turn knots right now,” he said. May I suggest, that with the dangerously na√Øve Mr. Watts, as well as with a healthy chunk of the present American public, there is something else with knots other than their stomachs?

Indeed, the poor Mr. Watts may unwittingly be the very metaphor for the post 9/11 American, for he is tragically not alone in failing to discern who is his friend and who is his enemy. Something strange has come over many Americans, so strange that it seems akin to a phenomena of mass hallucination at something like a Rainbow Festival or Grateful Dead concert, but without the good music in the background.

Take for example the colossal denial syndrome of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, who borrows a page from Zibigniew Brzezinski, in saying that there is no global terror threat and that the war on terror is a farce. Something is uncomfortable and difficult? Just deny its existence! Hey, maybe you’ll even get elected!

And can anyone truly fathom what kind of anti-gravitational cosmic disturbances must have been fermenting in the deep recesses of the minds of the PBS executives who, caving in to CAIR Islamists, censored a very professional presentation interviewing moderate Muslims who attempted to dissuade the public that the fanatical extremes represent true Islam?

Of course, no 9/11 memorial is complete unless you hire looncakes to inscribe statements of moral equivalency, blame Bush, or allusions to wackjob conspiracy theories on it for future generations to ponder upon, as in the case of the Arizona memorial.

And can somebody please somebody find out what solvent Rep. Bennie Thompson is inhaling when, as Democratic point man for Homeland Security, he threatens to strip an immunity clause protecting tipsters of suspicious terrorist activity from litigious CAIR jihadists because, somehow in his bafflingly befuddled worldview, this amounts to racial and religious profiling?

Does all this cognitive dissonance have any relation to a foreign policy which dumps gazillions of U.S tax dollars into the laps of assorted sheiks, dictators and demagogues who smile and laugh and joke their way to the bank, while their media, mosques, mullahs, maestros and masses are feverishly promoting the most virulent forms of anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-American hatred imaginable? “But they have a Walmart in Jeddah! Those fat, smiling sheiks must be on our side. Even Nancy Pelosi schmoozes with them! Now, where’s my remote? American Idol is on. Yay! I like Sanjaya. Who are you voting for?”

Even a population hopelessly blinkered from national obsession with food and sex, with entertainment and health, with self-esteem and self-promoting ‘spirituality,’ cannot begin to explain why, as it adores its excesses, it seems not to give a flip for its own very survival. Lack of oxygen to the brain because of frequent overdoses of “Sex and the City”, Dr. Dre, or Krispy Kremes can only go so far to explain the massive synaptic misfires we are increasingly seeing. Something deeper and more sinister must be at work.

Some viral idea has crept into our collective national consciousness, offering us a false wisdom and a feigned hope, while it meanwhile shuts down vital parts of our mental operational systems designed to initiate self-survival programs. We are fast approaching the point where either we must reject the pterodactyl-like hallucinations of irrational humanistic constructs that only produce mind-boggling complacent stupor, political correctness contrivances, and cowardice, or we will become a pitiful specter of our former selves through our utter stupidity.

“Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture.”– Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations