Author Topic: my favorite post  (Read 1898 times)

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Offline GregFL

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my favorite post
« on: December 30, 2002, 12:31:00 AM »
Shortly after starting this forum, a new friend and fellow seedling from the early 70s named Marc Wordsmith posted this. In case you didn't see it the first time, I thought I would dig it up and share it. It seems so well thought out  and insightful that it gives me the chills to read it;

" I'm an ex-Seedling too. I did a Google web search on "the Seed" and "Art Barker" and discovered this site.
I have so many thoughts on this topic, I know I can't write them all in one post, but I'll try to get down the essentials. I am 44 years old and I live in California. I was in the Seed in Ft. Lauderdale in 1972, when I was 14. It came as quite a shock to me to be "kidnapped" by my parents into a "drug rehabilitation center," as I had never conceived of myself as a "druggie," having only tried pot a handful of times. I had no warning that it was coming . . . anyway, to jump ahead in my story a bit, in the years immediately following my experiences in the Seed, I found that--of the kids I'd been in the Seed with, and who had, like me, and like most everybody eventually, gone back to their old friends and gone back to experimenting with substances--I seemed to be the only one who still needed and desired to talk about the Seed a lot. The other ex-Seedlings I hung out with had apparently found a way to put it behind them without much trauma . . . it's all very mysterious to me still, how different people processed the Seed. I wish I could find and speak with some of the kids I knew at the time!
Anyway, here's a thought/insight that I'll share which helped me a lot when I realized it, and it came to me just about fourteen years AFTER the Seed . . .
I realized that, even with all the abuse, all the sleep deprivation, the all-night "coming down on me" sessions with my oldcomer and his cronies, the little and big humiliations, the thing that had really damaged me the most, the thing that had really hurt and twisted me up the worst, was that I had participated in my own brainwashing. I had tried, sincerely tried, to make the Seed's catechism true for me. That is, I had BETRAYED MY OWN EMOTIONAL REALITY . . . I had been an accomplice in my own mind-rape at some point, by trying to convince MYSELF that they were right, and that I had only read books like Siddhartha to be "cool," had never had any real friends, and, you know, the whole litany, that I had been utterly worthless and "full of shit" before the Seed and that I was grateful to the Seed for bestowing authenticity on my wretched self. So . . . it was my own inner attempts to destroy myself that actually wounded me the most . . . and once I could forgive myself for that, I began to heal a lot quicker and my life got a lot better. Now I'm not saying that I should have blamed myself in the first place, or that we were ultimately "responsible" for what happened to us--that's not the point. (Perhaps it was inevitable that I would have to try and convince myself the Seed was right, as opposed to trying to "con" the Seed which I never for a moment imagined I was capable of.) I'm just saying that, unconsciously, I DID blame myself, and I despised myself for what I had participated in. So, at age 28, I needed to look at the fourteen year old kid I had been in 1972, and understand the pressures he was under, and have compassion for the choices he made, and accept that I wasn't perfect, or maybe just not as heroic and invulnerable as I would have like to have been. I'm not saying the Seed didn't suck; it did. And I wish there was something I could do so other kids wouldn't have to go through that kind of thing today. It's one kind of hellish experience in a world of many different kinds of suffering.

Q. I simply ask, why is PUNISHMENT the solution with regards to the narrow group of behaviors which encompass illegal drug use....?

A.Pharmaceutical Business, both legal and illegal, run by the same people either way, money coming to the middle from both ends.  Bush.
http://www.luxefaire.com/' target='_new'>Bill Gallagher

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