Blog 5 or Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory

Dig all the groovy colors, man!

So, mescalin gives you the same effect as HDTV. Bright vivid colors, enhanced picture and sound quality. I always knew something wasn't quite right with all those engineers.

I found the many references to Christianity/religion to be the most interesting of the book. I know nothing of Huxley or his background, is he Catholic? The discourse beginning on page 68 dealing with alcohol is very fascinating. He writes of most churches being tolerant of alcohol but not to the point of excess or religious drunkenness. Sometimes it depends on the situation. I worked for a while for a church which contained a provision of employment that you abstain from any alcohol intake. ANY. At the time I was not a "formal" employee so the provision did not technically apply to me and when a coworker explained that byline I expressed relief that I was not contractually obligated to follow their provision. The employee thought it odd that I would not volunteer to accept this idea. We did not get into a big debate about it except for me to say alcohol was never a problem for me, still isn't, and Jesus' first miracle was to provide more wine for the wedding guests so how bad can it be? Granted Jesus would not have encouraged anything to excess, save for faith, but He did have wine with His meals. Most notably the Last one. Enough of that, I believe.

I also enjoyed his writings about peyote within the Native American church, p 69 and on. I think the integration of Christianity with Native American culture is truly inspiring. Not the suppression of their ideas or the forced conversion and wholesale slaughter of the culture that was originally perpetrated upon the First Nations when the New People appeared, but rather the mixing and blending that has occurred in latter times. Many of the concepts and ideas of Christianity can only be appreciated through a spiritual high. Generally that is attained through prayer/meditation but within certain aspects of the Native culture peyote was/is used to further expand your senses to allow "communion" in a higher sense. Huxley covers that a little bit and I think that's cool. Most of the religions of the world have a lot more in common than they would choose to believe. A little research and an open mind could do wonders. It seems whenever man and his egos get involved in anything it won't be long before it's f***ed up.