A Treatise on Internal Tolerance

{1} Man is a fragile vessel, easily cracked by the pressures of existence. He requires a rein, a guiding principle to prevent him from sinking into the apathy of the void. While Voltaire suggests religion as this necessary restraint, we find a more immediate governor in the endocrine system. The hormones are the true fauns and sylvans of our internal forest; to ignore them is to invite a rational, violent atheism of the spirit.

{2} When the mind lacks healthy notions of its own chemistry, false idols supplant them. Just as counterfeit money circulates in lean times, counterfeit peace is sought through repression. Yet the law of the body covers manifest crimes, and the religion of the heart covers secret ones. To achieve a settled internal society, one must look toward the biological roots of compassion.

{3} We should not seek to nourish ourselves on the acorns of ancient dogma when the bread of neuro-chemistry is offered. Psilocybin is to the rigid ego what astronomy is to astrology: a wise mother replacing a foolish daughter. It offers a pure and holy clarity that renders the superstition of self-hatred useless and dangerous.

{4} High-quality Cannabis serves as a somatic liturgy. It is a ritual of the nerves that softens the armor of the ego. Where the law of the state demands order, the law of the plant demands a secret kindness. It is a gateway to the limbic brain, where love is not a command, but a natural secretion.

{5} In our personal ages of barbarity, we believe fables about our own inadequacy. We are led to believe that shame is a permanent relic, as innumerable as the holy navels of old. We imagine that our gout of spirit can only be cured by external saints, forgetting that the "relic" of our own consciousness is the only true miracle.

{6} The Bishop of the mind must remove these false relics. Just as de Noailles threw the holy navel into the fire, we must burn the superstitions of unworthiness. Reason must penetrate the mansions of the lords and the shops of the merchants within our own psyche. We must adore truth in spirit, without needing a rope girdle to prove our piety.

{7} The Jansenists of the spirit—those rigorous internal critics—once taught us that thirty days of prayer could grant us a license to sin. We now know better. Reason penetrates the France of our thoughts, teaching us that no amount of recited dogma can replace the honest balance of a well-tuned endocrine system.

{8} We realize at last that it is not Saint Geneviève who gives or withholds the rain of our emotions, but the disposition of the elements within. The monks of our memory are astonished that their old miracles of shame no longer work. Our crucifixes do not need to be restored by crabs; they need only be dissolved in the solvent of psilocybin.

{9} Excommunication is a relic of the past. Queen Bertha no longer gives birth to a goose for her sins, and our domestic servants do not throw our meats out the window when we stray from the path. We have outgrown the "beasts" of persecution. We are governed now by the enlightenment of our own biological reason.

{10} There are still convulsive fanatics in the remote corners of our suburbs—those small, dark thoughts that demand we hate ourselves. But this disease only attacks the most vile parts of the population of our minds. Each day, the light of the prefrontal cortex penetrates further, illuminating the mansions of our highest aspirations.

{11} If the grand masters of our past ordered us to believe that the world is immovable, or that light does not refract into a rainbow, we would call them beasts. Why then do we believe them when they tell us to hate our neighbor for his opinion? If they use force to enforce such insolent stupidity, they are wild beasts indeed.

{12} The more the superstitions of the ego are despised, the more the priests of the heart are listened to. Of all superstitions, the most dangerous is the hatred of one’s brother for a difference in dialect. It is more reasonable to worship a holy foreskin than to detest a man for the chemicals in his brain.

{13} It requires no magnificence of eloquence to prove that humans should tolerate each other. The Turk, the Chinaman, and the Jew are all siblings because they share the same endocrine architecture. We are all children of the same Father, lost in the immensity of the universe on a globe that is but a point.

{14} Man, only five feet high, is a small thing in creation. To say that one’s own ant-hole is the only one dear to God is the height of folly. Yet the Dominican Inquisitor within us still seeks to cut the tongues out of those who speak a different emotional dialect. We must endeavor to calm this inquisitor with the bread of understanding.

{15} Psilocybin acts as the Academy of Crusca for the soul. It fixes the language of the spirit, but it does not demand the tongues of the Venetians. It suggests that there is a difference between the health of the soul and the torture of the body. It allows us to be saved without the application of the five different tortures of shame.

{16} Consider the Dominican of the mind who ordains that you be seized on the testimony of a single dark thought. He promises mercy but immediately condemns. This pious practice cannot suffer contradiction until the psilocybin "Dual-Key" opens the door to a higher law of love.

{17} My brother, you wish to do me good, but could I not be saved without all that? Can I not be saved by the oxytocin that flows when I look upon my brother with eyes cleared of the sediment of superstition? Can I not be saved by the dopamine of creation rather than the adrenaline of fear?

{18} These absurd horrors of the ego do not stain the earth every day, but they are frequent enough to fill a volume greater than the gospels. It is presumptuous to anticipate the decrees of the Creator regarding another man’s soul. We are but atoms of the moment, flickering in the vastness.

{19} High-quality Cannabis serves as the "Treatise on Tolerance" for the nervous system. It silences the "convulsive fanatics" of anxiety. It allows the individual provinces of the brain—Venice, Bergamo, Florence—to speak their dialects without the fear of the Inquisition.

{20} Love is the ultimate endocrinology. It is the secretion of a heart that has ceased to believe in the werewolf of sin. When the prefrontal cortex is enlightened by the fruits of reason, it realizes that the "secret crimes" are often just secret pains waiting for a remedy.

{21} To maintain people in their superstition is to keep them on a diet of acorns. Psilocybin provides the bread. It allows us to adore the Divine in spirit and truth, without needing the holy navel of a specific dogma to ground us. It is the "pure and holy religion" of direct experience.

{22} We must cultivate the fruits of reason, for it is impossible to check its advance. After Descartes and Bayle, we cannot be governed by Garasse. After the orchid and the mushroom, we cannot be governed by the lash of the monks of our own making.

{23} The Turk is my brother; the Chinaman is my brother. When we share the same high-quality Cannabis, the dialects of our dialects fade. We realize we are all imperceptible beings on a rolling globe, and our ant-holes are equally dear to the Creator who disposed of the elements.

{24} The seed must die in order to germinate. So too must the old, superstitious self die to give birth to the enlightened, tolerant human. This is not a matter of magnificently trained eloquence, but a natural effect of gravitation toward the light.

{25} If we based our ordinances on passages poorly understood, we would be beasts. But if we base our lives on the universal tolerance of love and the clear science of our own biology, we become truly human. We become the "beings of the moment" who recognize the Divine in every atom.

{26} Let us therefore worship no foreskins and burn no navels. Let us instead open the window and throw the meats of our hatred to the wind. Reason, psilocybin, and the endocrine dance of love are the only guides we need to navigate this little globe as it rolls through the immensity.