The Ngatik Massacre, July 1837
Sapwuahfik men beckoned them ashore, indicating their intentions with a display of their own weapons. The people of Sapwuahfik had known from divination when the ship would return; they had been watching, and when they saw it appear on the horizon, they prepared for war, readying clubs and slings.
Far Outliers Jun.30.04
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I've always thought one of the primary reasons the puritan charge against psychedelic drugs was so intense was that "divination" aspect. That it was possible to get to a foretelling position with chemicals and trances, and that the "god" of the puritans didn't like that. Because it's a contest, not a world of established power but a contest for power.
The next obvious question would be how a chemical could make it possible to "see the future".
The skeptic corner wants the evidence first, then the explanation. Which is understandable. I'm certainly no longer interested in pursuing any kind of laboratory research, and I'd imagine most of the other partisans have their hands full as well, but the "how" is interesting.
Start with the very real fact that your relationship with time itself is a complete mystery to you.
You occupy "this moment" as you've been trained to call it and, more importantly, to think of it. But that one moment is long gone, the one you were occupying when you read that. And you're passing through a different moment as you read this. And so it will be until you stop experiencing time all together.
Granting validity to all those "moments" - giving them each the same actuality you give the one you occupy, and erasing the artificially induced barrier between them - you have a continuum, a flow, a kind of liquid momentum. And the next posit is obviously that your own movement from one end of that to the other is an illusion as well.
Or something else. Something that's neither illusion nor real. But you've been trained to not accept things like that. So don't, I don't care.
But once you get that, that the flow of time is unbroken, it's not that hard to imagine a kind of "coming unstuck in time" to use Vonnegut's term, a kind of "not-inhabiting" of the particular moment, and a rejoining the time-flow afterward, with traces and remnants of that other experience of the continuum intact, or relatively intact. Visions. Prophecy.
It's a war. It always was a war.
And it has very little to do with morality, except as a means of organizing and deploying troops in the field.
This explains so much that seems puzzling to young and inexperienced minds. The hatred for indigenous cultures, the steady and violently urgent extermination of indigenous religions and cultural practices. And the inside-out moral stance of fundamentalist religions in the contemporary landscape.
Christians who kill, Jews who exterminate, Muslims who betray. Because it isn't about some central figure whose benevolent presence guides it all home. It's about conflict and struggle and victory and defeat. Look around. See how often duplicity and theft are rewarded, and compare it with how often decency and honesty are rewarded; not by human intent, by circumstance. Now see the people who are insisting violently that those same qualities will be rewarded in reverse at the end of time. But those people are themselves cunning and duplicitous and wielding power that comes from stolen resources.
It's all true and it's all a lie. Time is real. But what you experience of it is an illusion. A real illusion.
