You Are the Guardian of Your Own Mind

by Not Sure

16 Jan 2022

Plinio Prioreschi devoted twenty years of his life to write his authoritative series, A History of Medicine. He concluded that by the end of the 5th century B.C., the question of whether the heart or the brain was the seat of intelligence remained unresolved in Western medicine. Prioreschi wrote that this changed with the works of Hippocrates, whose statements show a clear understanding of the role of the brain, and quoted this from On the Sacred Disease by Hippocrates:

“Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain alone, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant… I hold that the brain is the most powerful organ of the human body… wherefore I assert that the brain is the interpreter of consciousness…”

If you go looking for an explanation of the mind in relation to the brain in our day, you’ll journey into a labyrinth of materialism versus dualism that may give you a headache and send you in search of an aspirin (or a hookah if you want your answer to come with an “experience.”)

In this 22 November 2006 talk by Alan Watt entitled, "Septics, Skeptics and the Drugging of Inner Space", Alan discussed the number of emails he received from folk wanting him to answer “just one question” and he explained that so much groundwork would need to be done to prepare the questioner for that answer. People want drive-thru answers, cafeteria-style pick and choose mystical journeys and drugs are marketed to us as ways to have transformative experiences. Alan’s observation is that the people who went in for mind-altering drugs are no wiser for it, if they are lucky enough to survive the dive from their third story window.

It is a fact that in 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency officially approved a project called MKUltra. The intent of the project was to study “the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior.”

Per a 2017 article from Smithsonian magazine:

“Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could: ‘promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol;’ ‘render the induction of hypnosis easier;’ ‘enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;’ produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients–‘people who could not fight back,’ in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.”

England’s Tavistock Institute, a charity concerned with group behaviour and organizational behaviour, received early and significant funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. William Sargent of the Tavistock Institute was a British psychiatrist who is remembered for promoting treatments such as psychosurgery, deep sleep treatment, electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy. His experiments with deep sleep treatment were part of British involvement with the CIA MKUltra program into mind control. In Sargent’s 1957 book, Battle for the Mind— A Physiology of Coversion and Brain-Washing he wrote:

“Various beliefs can be implanted in many people after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger, or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgment and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of 'herd instinct,' and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility.”

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Addiction is sometimes defined as a chronic, relapsing brain disease that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences. The National Institute on Drug Abuse details how drugs affect our neurological systems:

“Drugs are chemicals. When someone puts these chemicals into their body, either by smoking, injecting, inhaling, or eating them, they tap into the brain’s communication system and tamper with the way nerve cells normally send, receive, and process information. Different drugs—because of their chemical structures—work differently…We know there are at least two ways drugs work in the brain: imitating the brain’s natural chemical messengers and overstimulating the ‘reward circuit’ of the brain.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, drugs were part of the counterculture, and psychedelic drugs were promoted as facilitators of mystical insight with huge potential benefits for science, art, culture and of course, an individual’s quest for deeper meaning. Aldous Huxley brought us Brave New World but he also gave us The Doors of Perception. Timothy Leary was the Johnny Appleseed of LSD, so now we’re back around to the CIA. Leary received eight government grants from 1953-1958, most coming from The National Institute of Mental Health, which is now notoriously known for being a CIA front for the MKUltra program. Here’s a quote from Leary:

“The LSD movement was started by CIA. I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of the CIA scientists. It was no accident. It was all planned and scripted by Central Intelligence, and I’m all in favor of Central Intelligence.”

Drugs aren’t counterculture anymore. They’re mainstream. With the widespread legalization of marijuana, our own governments are both the promoters and pushers. Here’s a recent headline from South Africa’s Daily Maverick, “‘Microdosers’ of LSD and magic mushrooms are wiser and more creative” and another from the New York publication Times Union, “Could magic mushrooms be the next marijuana?”  When something has the approval and support of those in authority, e.g. governments, academics and scientists, we often lower our guard and think it must be alright, right? These are the same “authorities” who want us vaxxed and boosted with papers to prove it. That’s not right, but the mind-altering drugs they hype are good for us? I’ll need to get a gage up, fly Mexican airlines, blast a roach and boot the gong to get behind that twisted logic.

In one study by David Nutt and his colleagues of Imperial College London, researchers injected psilocybin into the veins of volunteers and scanned them with an MRI. They found that brain activity was widely reduced. “The mind-altering drugs decreased hemodynamic activity, including blood flow, in selected regions, such as the thalamus, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the ACC and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Activity in these regions dropped by up to 20 percent, relative to before the injection.”

A University of Delaware paper describes the effects of drugs on the limbic system:

“The limbic system is a collective term denoting a heterogeneous array of brain structures at or near the edge of the medial wall of the cerebral hemisphere, in a particular the hippocampus, amygdala, and fornicate gyrus, a gyrus of the cerebral cortex. The limbic system is responsible for creating your feelings and motivation. Your feelings supply the contexts for your sensory and motor activities and can alter how one perceives the world and behaves in it. This portion of the brain physically connects the survival oriented brain stem with the cognitively oriented cortex.

All drugs that people abuse change the way the limbic system works. Drugs disrupt the careful modulation of feelings and motivations that underlie normal behavior. When these feelings lose touch with reality, the person receives artificial relief; pleasure, contentment, and relaxation take over.

The Brain Reward System is a specific limbic circuit that generates the feelings of pleasure. This system originates in a group of neurons that are located in the mid brain (called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA). These neurons then connect to a variety of places within the limbic system, but the important connection is to the nucleus accumbens in the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are a large, complex set of structures within the limbic system that function in generating movements, some cognitive functions, emotional and motivational activities. When a drug activates the VTA neurons, these neurons release dopamine into the nucleus accumbens and the person feels pleasure.”  (Many drugs do this, including nicotine and alcohol.) Emphasis mine.

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Videodrome is a 1983 Canadian science fiction body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg which I am not recommending because it’s graphic, disturbing, disorienting and weird. This is how Wikipedia summarizes the plot:

“Set in Toronto during the early 1980s, it follows the CEO of a small UHF television station who stumbles upon a broadcast signal featuring violence and torture. The layers of deception and mind-control conspiracy unfold as he uncovers the signal's source, and loses touch with reality in a series of increasingly bizarre hallucinations.”

I saw the movie years ago, and have never revisited it because there are images in it I’m very sorry I ever allowed into my mind. However, I can recall a line of dialogue well enough to paraphrase it. When the top corporate executive of the conglomeration which owns the TV station realizes that the station’s CEO has watched the videos that they are broadcasting and has become addicted to those videos, he said, “We never watch that. Never. We put it out there for our viewers, but it’s obviously not something we watch.”

 You won’t find very many studies about the affects of porn addiction on the brain. A 2013 study out of UCLA suggests that sex addiction may not be a real disorder but a 2014 Cambridge University study performed brain scans on 19 men watching pornographic videos and those scans showed the same reward centres of the brain were activated as when addicts see their drug of choice.

An article from the website www.fightthenewdrug.org cites a 2014 German study in which the researchers did MRI scans of men’s brains while showing them a mixture of sexually explicit images and non-sexual imagery. Here a quote from that article:

“’Our findings indicated that gray matter volume of the right caudate of the striatum is smaller with higher pornography use,’ the researchers wrote in the journal article, referring to an area of the brain associated with reward processing and motivation. Men who watched more porn also showed less activity in another area of the striatum, called the left putamen, which usually lights up in response to sexual images. Their research was published just a couple of years ago in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. The study showed heavy porn consumers also had a weaker connection between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with decision-making.”

Sometimes it is helpful to look at things from many different perspectives to better understand what you’re seeing. In Berlin: Metropolis of Vice, a segment of the documentary Legendary Sin Cities, Germany’s post-World War One Weimar Republic Berlin was portrayed as a hotbed of hedonism, uncensored and untiring; a city indulged in every form of sex, open-minded toward all things erotic. In several talks, Alan Watt has presented this sad sex industry, where the buyer(s) could engage in sex with a mother and daughter or a pregnant young woman, (“family style” as it was so colorfully described in the movie “Idiocracy”) as an industry of necessity for desperate people on the fringes of society, who could not survive the hyperinflation, starvation and privation without selling their bodies.

I don’t think the U.K.’s Daily Mail purports to be a high-brow publication, but it is a good gauge of some things cultural. Here are a few recent “articles” to consider:

 

* Influencer Tammy Hembrow shows off her growing baby bump in a green bikini as she reaches the halfway mark in her pregnancy. She flaunted a hint of underboob in the two piece, which consisted of a long-sleeved crop top and matching trousers, as she posed in a mirror. 

 

* Chelsea Handler, 46, skis in a marijuana leaf bikini holding a bottle of vodka and a mason jar of weed. Chelsea Handler isn't leaving much room for imagination on the slopes. The 46-year-old comedian posted to her Instagram on Tuesday a pictures of herself in a bikini with marijuana leaves all over it while she snapped into her skis.

 

* Mommy and me time! Demi Moore, 59, and daughter Rumer, 33 - in bra top and undies! - exit a private gym that focuses on 'human movement science’ with barely there G-string bottoms.

 

* Pregnant model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley puts on a leggy display in sheer black dress that showed off her incredible physique and gave us a peak at her black bra and underwear underneath.

 

* Married At First Sight's Mishel Karen, 51, now performing hardcore sex acts on OnlyFans and selling her used underwear for cash after becoming a grandmother - and says she won't be shamed for her sexuality.

 

* Love Island twins Jess and Eve Gale flaunt their curves in racy figure-hugging outfits as they celebrate New Year's Eve in sexy style.

 

* Katy Perry 'lactates' beer out of a sexy dress made of cans before downing it during the opening night of her $168m Vegas residency - as she gives a nod to the pandemic with giant mask and toilet roll props.

 

* Model and television presenter Ashley Graham showcases her bare baby bump as she poses NUDE in a candid mirror snap while preparing for the arrival of twin boys.

 

The Daily Mail is just one quick way to have a peek at the “stars” put out for us to follow. If you want to keep abreast of the saga of Madonna’s sagging... sorry, of the 63 year-old pop star’s partially exposed nipple which was censored from Instagram, then you’ll find that (un)coverage there too.

 

Here’s another way to look at the this kind of titillating tripe. Our culture is pornographic by design because the effects of pornography on the brain have been well-studied, whether or not those studies have been shared with us.

The similarities between here and now and Berlin during the Weimar Republic are striking.  Grandmothers hard-up for cash sell used underwear.  Pregnant reality stars sexualize the miracle of creation.  Mothers and daughters pose provacatively and the viewer at home thinks perhaps there is a way to make cash that will also make them enormously popular on Instagram.

During the Great Depression (not the one we’re living through now), couples participated in dance marathons to the point of collapse and in some cases death, to earn the prize money.  Dystopian movies such as Death Race, Running Man, and Gamer show us extreme sporting events that people participate in willingly or by coersion.  In our pornographic culture, sex is no longer sacred, but simply another sport and one that can be monetized by everyone.  We’re all pimps and hos now.

As everything around us falls apart, many people still think the mystical, the divine if you will, can be purchased. And more shockingly, that it can be purchased from the same folk who’ve made it clear that our destruction is their intent. So these deluded seekers are going to buy a ticket on the magical mystery bus and journey to god knows where. Other sad souls just want to feel better as talk of variants and boosters goes on and on and on, inflation rises, and meaning and purpose are nowhere to be found. The trouble with wanting to feel better is that whatever it is that makes you feel better just might be highly addictive.

 

***

 

Be careful, Alan says. Guard the corridors of your mind very carefully. He talks about Revelations as a plan; not preordained. Mystery-speak. New Agers on a never-ending journey, designed by Fellow Travellers. The Brahmans of India have used drugs to control people for years. The drugs we’re given or sold are heavily modified. Guru-this and guru-that advocating this or that drug for your mystical experience. Alan calls this the drive-thru mentality. He described people’s attitude, “Here’s the money, give me the experience.”

 

The greatest gift anyone is given is the ability to be completely conscious. What our minders are good at is crisis-creation. In crisis and uncertainty, people are unable to handle their consciousness. Alan warns, don’t throw away your conscious mind, fight to keep it so you can go further.The New Age gurus don’t get there by chance and neither do the politicians.

 

“You are the guardian of your own mind. No one else is. And within... those walls that protect your mind you have sacred ground. Sacred ground. Be careful who you allow to walk upon it.”                                        -- Alan Watt

 

© Not Sure

 

 

Additional reading:

Drug Addiction and the Limbic System

https://www1.udel.edu/chem/C465/senior/fall00/DrugAddiction/Parts.html

 

This is your brain on drugs

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-is-your-brain-on-drugs/

 

Scientists Discover Brain Structure Differences in Frequent Porn Consumers

https://fightthenewdrug.org/study-shows-brain-structure-changes-porn-consumers/

 

Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated with Pornography Consumption

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1874574