Word: psychics
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...experience may well amount to a kind of loss of innocence. It demonstrated, for one thing, that American technology does not always work; all the F-111s and "people-sniffers" and laser-guided bombs and helicopters could not ultimately, not really, enforce the American will. Of more psychic importance, the war may have forever soured the almost subconscious, idealized conviction that Americans are somehow morally superior beings. My Lai, the massive bombing campaign, the image of a napalmed child?such things have corroded the American selfesteem. But how deeply...
Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton believes it may amount only to a kind of "psychic numbing," an emotional state encouraged by the Administration. The President still uses the high rhetoric of "peace with honor." Says Lifton: "Nixon has made it very clear that he wants to end the war without coming to terms with it. To learn from Viet Nam the country would have to accept some very painful truths?most notably that it was wrong. The impossible truth for Americans is that we are capable of evil and have committed it on a large scale...
Harmless. It sounds absurd, of course; yet many otherwise rational people are enthusiastic about TM. And unlike many supposed remedies for psychic malaise, it has drawn little criticism from behavioral scientists. At worst, say the experts, the hordes of American meditators-an estimated 250,000 strong, with thousands of new converts a month-are doing themselves no harm, though they may be kidding themselves about TM's effectiveness. At best, the meditators may really be on to something...
...belief in a social or mental ideal; a commitment to the achievement of that ideal; and a chosen method of effecting change. The methods depend on the man; if he is active he looks outside himself for evidence of wrong, and concentrates on altering the externalities of political or psychic life. If he is contemplative, he concerns himself with the state of his own mind, looks inward for guidance, and affirms his own internal relation to the world before prescribing correctives for others...
...drugs in this context is his refusal to attribute value judgements to the varied expressions of this need to experience a high. He carefully discusses the disadvantages and properties of drug-induced highs, and differentiates between the abuse of chemical agents and their proper use to attain a certain psychic state. The Amazon Indians' use of natural drugs as community events moves Weil to suggest four ways to encourage their proper use; use drugs in natural ways, avoiding synthetic chemicals and the isolated, more potent forms of natural drugs (marijuana rather than THC); use drugs ritually, for certain purposes...