Why I Left the Zeitgeist Movement | Pt.1 - The Psychedelics Conspiracy in Academia

In 2011 I had the first psychedelic experiences of my life and wow did that make an impact on me back then!

Green had already been a part of my life for years before that but the first mushroom and lsd experiences had really wowed me in the summer of 2011. Not to say that they were easy or friendly experiences, they were quite challenging - exploring and discovering parts of my mind, awareness and the human existence that I had never ever heard about nor conceived of. But it changed everything in terms of my worldview - aspects that I had never heard talked about within the zeitgeist movement but that became quite pressing to me after my first trips.

I was beginning to feel a huge discrepancy between the issues "permitted" inside tzm discussions and my own need to find out about the depths of psychic phenomena as experienced under the influence of psychedelics. Not to say that there was any specific indvidual "permitting" or "barring" certain topics, but the general theme in tzm is reputable scientific debate - meaning any mainstream topic prestiguous enough to be part of the academic mainstream school of thought. Which in turn meant all subjects, inquiries or discrepancies cast aside by mainstream scientism are automatically ridiculed and not taken seriously by most people in the movement. Quite the contradiction with the scientific method but so it goes. Though I met many wonderful people in tzm and they all have good intentions, it also tends to attract cold so-called "rationalists" or "realists" which I could now just as well call "materialists", "atomists" or even "naive scientism disciples".

After my trips I felt there was so much more to life then what we had been told and in tzm there was no serious inquiry or discussion about these intangible phenomena, as the topic was deemed irrelevant to a better future for humanity. Anyone who has ever had a psychedelic experience will know completely what I mean when I say that within the confines of the "common mode of everyday consciousness" we barely scratch the surface of what is actually going on.

And so the more psychedelics, their healing potential and their awareness-related qualities became an intense interest of mine and changed my outlook on reality around me, the more it annoyed me that the topic was shoved aside and giggled at.

When I finally inquired about this "conspiracy of science" that is hugely being ignored within tzm and academia at large I was laughed at.

"What are you talking about? The scientific method forbids the barring of important truths, as long as they can be proven and haven't been disproved."

And I said: "Well that is precisely my point. Here we have an entire discipline of medicinal and psychological research, with major implications for humanity, mental health, spirituality and our own self-knowing and despite the heap of evidence in favor of psychedelics the topic has been barred by scientific mainstream ever since those compounds were deemed dangerous by the establishment. And until this day science-mainstream has been going along with that unscientific and political decision. We simply cannot have actual unbiased science these days, because if we did then a state of affairs like this would never be allowed to exist."

And it was shrugged off. Again and again.

It's funny really, within tzm any and everyone will readily agree that money corrupts politics, the media, the school system, people and societies. But even to hint at the possibility that we call "science" today - its institutions, its tenets, its rationale, its history, its narrative - is somehow affected by the very same monetary influence I am being laughed at and eye-rolled.

And wow was that an eye-opener. The more silenced scientific breakthroughs, concepts and paradigms I uncovered the more I felt we in the zeitgeist movement had been utterly ignorant about actual science, you know, the one that adheres to the scientific method and is not taken to be true on mere faith in self-appointed authorities or democratic concensus in academia's highest circles.

Psychedelics blasted that discrepancy wide open for me.

Here was a shunned discipline of medical science that had been carefully swept under the carpet, despite all the documented evidence for psychedelics' amazing healing potential - both physically and mentally - and of course their uncanny ability to open our doors of perception as human beings, to sense our surroundings and other people, to pick up on intentions of others without hearing them utter a single word, to communicate telepathically with other beings around us. As proven by experiment, both in the lab and by my own immediate experience and experiments.

And it was just ignored.

"Well if that were true, it would be part of scientific concensus today." - "NO IT FREAKIN' WOULDNT. HAVE YOU EVEN BEEN LISTENING TO ME?"

Yup, I had hit a wall. This is as far as the crew will go... and it wasn't far enough for me any longer. "You can't simply ignore this - it has merit, proof and implications and leaving it out will only make us stagnant and ignorant." But it was no use, tzm went on as it had and apart from a few single individuals the topic didn't catch much interest to be somehow included in the broader tenets of the resource-based economy or the general discussion. I felt more and more alienated as well; sort of giggled at as"the pie-in-the -sky hippie" by some in our German chapter, somehow tainting the credibility of this "science-based" movement with all my talk about this weird woo-woo stuff. Stuff that to most in tzm seemed of little consequence to humanity as a whole and mentioning some uncomfortable implications such as the mere idea that mainstream science as a whole had been somehow co-opted really was too much for my former activist collective. It can't be true what mustn't be true...

Too bad because I thought questioning everything we ever learned was exactly the point of tzm, constantly evolving our understanding when new evidence comes in to change an old obsolete view. Nope, it seemed more and more like a new fortress of dogma had been created and we had all long moved in to make ourselves comfy here, speaking condescending remarks at the people outside of that fortress in the forest of mainstream media consciousness. No bare insults, just kind of an arrogant stance with a smirk. It became more and more obvious to me that I had fallen for another trap of sorts, despite all the great things I learned in tzm and all the awesome people I met.

So it gnawed at me for a good year or so and it became ever more pressing inside of me by the day, I could feel it needed to be recitfied somehow. And then came the straw that really broke the camel's back:

I went to the magical Ozora festival in Hungary for one week of psychedelic trance, people, music and mind-expanding experiences.

And after that magnficent week in actuality... it was really the beginning of the end for me in tzm...

To be continued...

Read other parts of this series:
Why I Left the Zeitgeist Movement - Prologue

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