BartBlog

I love to travel and visit new places — but it’s truly a sad fact of life that in order to go see the world, you really do need to have money. And lots and lots of it too. Oligarchs have it http://billmoyers.com/episode/what-the-1-dont-want-you-to-know-2/ I don’t.

For example, it’s a whole lot easier to be a hot-shot war correspondent if you actually possess the airfare necessary to arrive at said war. Syria? Ukraine? Venezuela? Israel-Palestine? Somalia? The Congo? Or any one of the other 134 places in this world where U.S. armed forces have bases and another war might break out at any minute or the CIA might start another “Color Revolution”? http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175794/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_secret_wars_and_black_ops_blowback/

The only way that I can get to these places cheaply is to join the Marines!

But I’ve also figured out another way to travel safely and cheaply to exciting and exotic places: Just pack my bags and travel to all those wondrous and profound places that exist inside of my own mind — instead of outside of it.

Back in 1965 when I was living on the infamous Lower East Side of New York City, LSD was still legal — and Sandoz pharmaceuticals in Switzerland was kind enough to produce a laboratory-grade LSD that one could easily get one’s hands on. Taking trips back then was easy and cheap — you simply took journeys deep into the depths of your own mind. But that’s not possible any more.

In the last 15 years, I have been all over the whole freaking world, been to every state in the Union except Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kentucky, set foot on all seven continents, visited every important religious shrine I could think of and toured every major war zone in the Middle East except Libya and Syria. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU961SGps8g&feature=youtu.be

But how far into the inside my own brain have I ever gone? Since LSD became a controlled substance? And peyote, mescalin, ayahuasca and magic mushrooms became so hard to get? Not very far.

Of course I have traveled short distances into the Outback of my brain with the help of various hypnotists — and that must count for something, right?

And I can always dream about traveling the world. Dreams are free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-c9DY01Q2M

What if you knew that every single night of your life, you could look forward to visiting, say, Tel Aviv and Tahiti? Or Paris and Pakistan? Or Kandahar and Kentucky…. Life would suddenly become a whole lot more fun.
And speaking of dreaming, there’s another possibility of sneaking inside of our dream worlds — by practicing a technique called lucid dreaming. But I haven’t mastered it yet so far either. http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream

For several years during the infamous 1970s http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/04/middle-class-not-%E2%80%9Cnormal%E2%80%9D#sthash.QFqgQxf0.dpuf, I used to sit cross-legged and listen to a Tibetan lama go on and on about what happens to us in the Dream Bardo. So I made up a bumper-sticker for my car that read, “Lost in the Bardo again!” And I think I’m still am lost in the Dream Bardo — but when I wake up, I can’t remember a damn thing. And then there was all that dream-training I went through in Subud. Not a clue what good that did either.

Because who the freak knows what goes on in our dreams? By definition, we are all sound asleep.

So I ask you. Have I ever really gotten right down to it, packed my suitcase, girded my loins and actually traveled very far into that scary and unknown country of the mind? Not so much — at least not since the 1960s. So this is the country where I want to go next.

Any suggestions on where I can buy a ticket to go there? Or how to reserve a few nights at the Neo-Cortex Hotel?

PS: Most Americans really, really do not want to go there — back inside of their own brains. They seem to want to do anything that they can to avoid it, in fact. They leave the TV on 24/7, let infomercials and talk-radio hosts do their thinking for them, never take out their ear-buds, and shop til they drop in malls designed to distract people from thinking. Plus all too many Americans immediately attempt to get stinking drunk at the very first sign that an inner journey might be about to begin.

“Know thyself,” Socrates once said.

Most Americans seem to shudder at the thought.

PPS: The interior of our brains contains the good, the bad and the ugly — not just Einstein-like thoughts. Sure, we might discover another Theory of Relativity. But our brains are also the places where our worst nightmares are stored. Are we ready for that as well? As well as for all the good stuff? Sure, why not.

Just view all that bad stuff in our brains as a Oscar-quality horror movie and then just relax and enjoy being scared out of our minds. Or into them, as it were.

Also, it seems like such a waste that most consciousness-expanding substances are now labeled “controlled,” and can’t even be legally used by mental-health professionals to further explore the human brain, or in religious ceremonies to get ourselves nearer to spirituality, or by cancer patients to help still their fears of impending death. But cigarettes are legal. And so is booze. And Prozac. How come only the mind-numbing stuff gets legalized?

PPPS: Another reason why traveling inside of my brain is important to me: I am so badly frustrated that the world as we know it today will soon come to an end and yet nobody seems to care or to act in a responsible way to solve all our myriad problems. http://www.thenation.com/article/179458/why-thenationcom-today-all-about-climate

If only I could get inside of my own mind, tap into that incredible resource, find a goal or a plan that would work and then Just Do It, I wouldn’t have to lie awake nights worrying so much about all the crazy-bad trouble that human beings have gotten themselves into so far.

PPPPS: Cattle-rustling is NOT patriotic. So what is? Stopping climate change and jailing sleazy banksters and un-electing corrupt politicians.