A section of people in many countries (any country for that matter. Any country of the 200 odd total) feel that elected governments should not be questioned about any decision they take. Another equal if not more amount of people, feel that every decision of the elected government taken in any context is to be questioned. The reality needs to be somewhere in the middle. A human body’s systems (digestive, excretory, nervous, skeletal, circulatory, respiratory etc.) need to work with each other and the external environment all the time, to keep us thriving and working.
Similarly a nation’s people also need to work with each other most of the time to solve their socio-economic problems, no matter how weird it is for our egos and feelings. Egos will be battered, but whichever country manages to take the best out of such shattered egos will do its people a lot of good. In such a day and age, having a dialogue between people of different ideologies, thoughts and beliefs seems like a gargantuan challenge, especially when attention spans and a lack of listening skill serves to complicate matters for everyone involved in the system.
All around the world of ours today, if one were to broadly categorize ‘what’s happening’, one would narrow it broadly down to:
- One community having an issue with another, escalating into mortal violence or full-scale riots or war
- Actions of a central bank or a prominent financial institution
- Actions of a central or state government, government elections or results
- Climate change related disasters or natural disasters
- Healthcare breakthroughs and cultural icons
- Businesses having a stake in all of the above
This is not being said in order to make the world of ours sound like a dour, tired and monotonous place. This is about stepping back and watching from the vantage view of the higher purpose to make better decisions for personal and professional reasons.
Let’s keep blazing.
The Altered States Economy
This term was coined in the book Stealing Fire written by Jamie wheal and Steven Kotler.
They categorize flow – a state of the mind when one is completely immersed into an activity that requires the complete focus of the mind and body – into three types:
- Mystical states: Induced by practices such as meditation and other forms of spirituality
- Flow states: Often triggered by physical activities and movement
- Psychedelic states: Pharmacologically primed or induced
Interpreted in this way, it is prudent to reason that we must be in flow all the time in order to be more productive and feel a sense of achievement and fulfilment. Ideally, to begin with one needs to take out a few hours and do some self-introspection about the general direction that his or her life is taking in terms of physical and mental well-being, not to mention things like financial status and plans regarding achieving a higher station in life, generally known amongst people as ‘getting ahead in life’ or ‘making progress’ or any other label that we assign to changing ourselves into our ideal ‘happy’ selves, if such a thing exists in the mind of that person.
And we must try to flow all the time by balancing all three aspects of flowing – mystical, flow and psychedelic states It is easy to say this, but in reality achieving such a balance is difficult not to mention, sometimes downright risky, especially since the Psychedelics part consists of underground marketed cannabis and magic mushrooms (our vote goes to natural plants), not to forget MDMA and LSD, while the legal side has beer, whisky, rum, vodka and tobacco as the main stimulants. A complete self-overview, an independent self-awareness is absolutely tantamount for an individual to even consider reading our blog.
Let’s keep blazing.
In Defence of Capitalism
For far too long, we’ve noticed some people in our circle harbouring a negative opinion with regards to capitalism, and seem to label it from one random time to another, for all the ills of the world around us today, sometimes going to the extent of blaming the capitalist system for the dawn of the pandemic itself, since evolution wouldn’t have had the necessary environment to create a new species like the coronavirus if it were not the free market in Wuhan, China. However tempting this argument may be, correlation is not the same as causation. The market didn’t cause the virus to be created. Humanity’s interactions with its fellow non-human beings did. The market was merely the messenger.
Again, the reality lies in the middle, rather than the extreme left or the extreme right.
The foundations of the world can be classified into two aspects – material-basic comfort and spiritual comfort – from the perspective of a single individual who is assumed to have the freedom to do what they want when they want. This assumption is not true in reality because people are not free all the time, rather they’re free some of the time and not so free for other times.
That being said, land, labour and machinery form the bulwarks of the material-basic world, while faith, belief in a divine power, music, dance and other activities constitute the spiritual world. The key issue responsible for most of the ills hurled towards capitalism is the fact about labour. Labour, here refers to us. People. Human beings. Since human beings are considered as one of the factors of producing material comforts, the same human beings, especially if they lack the social and economic privileges of other people, end up being exploited and ill-treated by the system in general.
Therefore we propose that every enterprise not consider labour as one of the factors of production, but rather as owners of production. How this will be imagined is something we’ll write about another time because we’re tripping on many things as of this writing.
Let’s keep blazing.
Have a great day 🙂
Marijuana Maharaj 