The following article appeared in Soft Secrets UK which is published in Amsterdam. It was written by Fraser Clark, a member of our butterfly board.
email fraser@parallel-youniversity.comail
website: www.parallel-youniversity.com/

You can email the editor of Soft Secrets, Cliff Cremer at cc@gonzo.nl. They don't have a website, but you can check out their mother company, Highlife Magazine

I'll Take The High Road

Liberty Cap - the Cosmic Symbol of Peace?
I met an interesting guy on my Californian tour who's launched an organisation to promote the Butterfly as a better symbol for the Peace Movement than the Dolphin.
"What can the average aware person do to help the dolphins?" he asks rhetorically. "The butterfly is much more accessible, I can DO something about helping them." It's a good argument. But, once he started me thinking, I came up with a better one.
The Magic Mushroom!

The Liberty Caps Need Us To Be Peaceful & Happy!
If an alien species/intelligence is sharing our planet, largely unrecognised, it must be the mushroom, for only its spore could have survived the extremes of heat and cold which space travelling involves. I say 'largely' unrecognised because, of course, shamans since before History have worshipped the Magic Mushroom (MM, or mmm). 'Soma, Food of the Gods' might well have included it.

Terence McKenna had a smart whimsy that the MM arrived from a very distant home base which, for some reason, was dying. Needing to locate another planet with the precise balance of air, water and sunlight, the Mushroom Brain sent forth its explorer-spores along the tidal winds of the YOUniverse, through all the living cultures of our Great Cosmos, until, finally, planet Earth was discovered, and here these intergalactic denizens have been thriving, peacefully, since before us Great Apes appeared on the scene.

Certainly they've colonised most of the globe and been treated with reverence by the human species (until the "Christian" Priests came along). And " communication" with them helps, undeniably, to put life's daily crises into a much more interplanetary? perspective.

But now they're very very worried... about what the Apes are
doing to the planet!

"If you want to know what the Vegetable Brain of the Planet is saying, you must EAT Her!" said Terence. With most drugs it's really all YOU, or you have to extract any meanings from a flow of images, but the MM seems to speak to you, it communicates, like an intelligence. And here's what it's currently saying to us: " Isn't this a perfectly lovely planet? Look how beautifully, delicately interconnected it all is! You don't want those primitive Apes to destroy all this, do you? DO YOU?!"

So, unlike the Butterfly, and possibly unlike the Dolphin (which anyway lives too distant to be able to teach us much) the MM seems to possess an investment in Peace among us Humans!

They Probably Triggered Our Evolution In The First Place!
Any theory of evolution must explain one amazing fact: The millennial month our ancestors took to swap the ocean for dry land is lackadaisical beside the Cosmic Second some monkeys took to swap swinging in the African jungles for space travel, the world wide web and nanotechnology.

Such abrupt geometric acceleration is totally unlike anything else in history. Religions have grown up to explain it. Hi-tec alien visitors (or low-tec in this case) have been seriously suggested. But Science's proposals of the discovery of fire, the wheel, agriculture or language don't resonate with anything I've witnessed. A change of diet feels closer, we know a switch to health foods can greatly improve vitality, but it would take more than extra virgin
olive oil!

I've witnessed behavioural modifications as fundamental as swapping jungles for rocket building being caused by only two things. Spiritual conversion. And drugs. And the greatest of these is ... spiritual conversion through drugs!

If the first "spiritual conversion" the MM triggered in the Great Apes was the dash for Evolution itself, then it has even more investment in us than simply ensuring its own survival. Indeed its Gift to us, the Plug-In to the Big Picture (our Journey through the Stars), rather than holocaustic tribal battles for domination of holes in the ground with oil in them, suggests it's personally committed already to seeing the Human Species going out to join the YOUniversal Community.

What more vibrant symbol could the Peace Movement have than the Liberty Cap?!