The psychedelic party of Israeli politics

The article was originally published in the Reality Sandwich web magazine.

What is the Geula Party? Is it a political statement? Art? A spiritual manifesto? The Geula party seeks to be all of the above, but it is first of all an attempt to transmit a radically different message to the Israeli people on the eve of the Israeli elections which will take place this Tuesday, on the 10^th of February.

Like the Intergalactic Underground, the idea for the Geula Party came from voyages in the psychedelic realms. It was there, while traveling in inner space, that I confronted a voice which urged me: "In this chaotic reality in which you live, you have to raise your voice and say something that will break the wall of lies in which the people are caught, in which you yourself are caught."

"Israel," the voice said, "is in a psychotic state, and what it needs now is an holistic cure."

Psychedelically-induced voices tend to make some curious demands. This one called upon me to leave everything in my life in order to start a new party, one that will be radically different from everything Israeli politics has to offer, a psychedelic party which will bring a truly mind expanding message to the people. This was the Geula party.

"Geula" is the Hebrew biblical word for salvation or redemption, and it has an important part in Jewish thought about inner freedom and the end of time. The Geula Party uses both Israeli as well as Jewish symbols but plants them within a psychedelic context. It was designed to be an alien apparition in the field of Israeli politics, but all the while draw from the bank of the Jewish and Israeli collective unconscious.

So what is it? To put it briefly, I can call the Geula Party a consciousness expansion party. In contrast to the other parties that run for parliament, the Geula Party runs in the inner elections, i.e., the elections going on inside our consciousness (in Hebrew the word "elections" and the word "choices" are the same -- "B'chirot").

Who do we run against? Well, we run against various other inner parties and powers that compete for people's attention and state of mind. We run against carnivorous capitalism, the powers of nationalism, the powers of commercials and mass media, and also the powers of random choice, of just living your life with out making one truly aware choice.

During the past three weeks, since the end of the war in Gaza, we have been broadcasting campaign videos on the web, calling upon Israelis to wake up, to take active inner action and raise the voting turnout in their inner ballots. We have been arguing that while one can only vote every four years and while our influence on politics as individuals is rather limited, we are casting our inner votes at every moment, and our influence there is absolute. You can argue for hours in vain about the political situation, but spending a few minutes wisely exploring your consciousness can change your life. Maybe, we suggest, if people start making their inner choices/elections, then one day things will start getting better in the outer world too.

The Geula Party calls upon Israeli voters (And of course, on people wherever they are) to start taking responsibility for their lives, to drop out from the hoax of culturally defined reality and choose the good, choose the Geula.

The Medium is the Message, and the Message is You

Although I have been openly writing about psychedelics in Hebrew for the past few years, advertising an openly psychedelic party could have been highly unwise in the current Israeli context.

However, a program for psychedelic consciousness expansion for Israeli society was badly needed for the Geula Party to go anywhere. Some tools for our mind to grow needed to be developed. The nine-minute program, another transmission received from the other realms, became the main part of the political platform of the Geula Party.

The nine-minute program is a consciousness expansion program made up of nine one-minute, open-ended consciousness exercises designed to help people cope with life and to enhance abilities such as love, faith, gratitude, and connection with the cosmos, with the past, and with the future.

The idea of the nine-minute program was further developed into the Inner Product Market, a part of the Geula Party website which functions as a web 2.0 platform for consciousness expansion. The Inner Product Market enables people to upload consciousness exercises they developed, and enables others to download consciousness exercises from the site into their consciousness -- thus creating a community for collective consciousness expansion. The idea behind the IPM was to create a basis for a society which will not be based on polluting consumer products, but on consciousness "products," and in which we are not simply consumers but consumers and producers of consciousness.

What we say to people is that we have to assume responsibility for our consciousness. We advance this idea with the slogan: "The medium is the message and the message is you." Marshall McLuhan was of course the one who said that the medium is the message. Adding the statement that "The message is you" means that before all other media, the most primal medium is that of our bodies and consciousness, and these are the first media that need to be explored and taken as the base of our reality, rather than culturally defined identity.

Consecrating Dizingoff Center

On the 10^th of February, election day, the Geula Party will meet in front of the Dizingoff Center Mall in the center of Tel Aviv to perform a special ceremony. The ceremony, which draws inspiration from biblical sources as well as from the actions of the Yippie movement in the sixties, is meant to consecrate the Dizingoff Center Mall which is a symbol of modern day Israeli society with all of its sickness but also with everything that is so beautiful about it.

During the ceremony we plan to encircle center mall seven times while blowing our horns, and then stage a special ceremony in which we will sing some songs, and perform twelve consciousness exercises, one of which will include trying to get inside the consciousness of the next prime minister, whoever they will be, purge them of everything that is evil, and make them into slaves and servants of justice for the rest of their life.

The peak of our ceremony will be the forming of the alliance of the righteous. The alliance of the righteous is the alliance of all the people who are willing to proclaim that in 2009 --whomever the next prime minister will be, whatever our politicians do, and what other forces in the world do -- we choose to assume responsibility for our lives, to be good, and to be happy.

Is this politics? Is this art? Is this mysticism? Terrence McKenna said the first thing every activist must do is to become psychedelic. We like to think of the Geula Party as psychedelic activism, as a movement which advances "art that is politics, politics that are art. Mysticism which is politic, and politics which are mystical".

Israeli politics of consciousness

I realize that this text might raise a few eyebrows. Is it even possible to talk about consciousness given the current situation of Israel?

Since the last elections three years ago, Israel has engaged in two wars, the prime minister had to resign over suspicions of corruption, and the country's international position has radically deteriorated. Israel has polled a few times as one of the most hated or negative countries in the world, along with Iran.

I spent the whole of yesterday evening trying to write an introduction to Israel's current situation. I've decided to leave it out of this article because it was too tedious to read and too painful to write.

I realize with sorrow what the image of Israel and Israeli society is at the moment. I have seen some amazing people here react in totally different ways to the essential impossibility of the Israeli situation, either by becoming nationalistic or by becoming anti-Israeli or just by trying to distance themselves completely from the situation in Israel, sometimes by immigrating to other countries.

After 30 years of living the politics of this scarred country, the more I try to explore and to understand the political situation I live in, the less I feel I know. Both left and right ideologies seem to have crumbled. I personally can not believe anyone who thinks they have a sure solution for the situation. And by this I don't mean to say that we shouldn't look for one.

The only thing I can say about the situation in Israel is that it is not simple. Thinking about it in purely political terms has brought me nowhere. The only thing it made clear to me is the overwhelming pain and fear that people here experience on both sides. It is easy to hate Israelis and it is easy to hate Palestinians, it is easy to pronounce both as fools or fanatics. I prefer to think of them as humans in a really really cruel situation. What I am looking for is a way to feel compassion for all these people, regardless of the horrible mistakes we are all making.

It is difficult to engage in the politics of consciousness in the current situation in Israel. What is allowed for psychedelic activists in other parts of the world is liable to be called escapist in the bleak Israeli reality. But for me, psychedelic activism makes more sense than any other form of activism.

The Geula Party believes that the solution must start from within. And if we do offer a political solution in the conventional sense of the word, then it must be a totally different one, one that starts out from the psychedelic revelation that we are all first and foremost human beings and that the cultural definitions which have been forced upon us are a hoax.

If you ask me about a solution for the situation, I would have different proposals, but the only really good one I would have is: People should be people and live together. There is no other way. The thing that put us in this horrendous situation to begin with is culture. Without culturally-defined identity, there would be no reason for people here or elsewhere to fight in wars. What we must realize is that we are all under occupation, the occupation of false consciousness, the occupation of culture.

If we want to live in peace we must first let go of those cultural definitions that have been forced upon us and which prevent us from living together as human beings. People must realize that before everything else, we are humans, and that everything that hinders people from understanding that is destructive and should not be part of our identity.

Jacques Ellul said in The Technological Society: There are no political solutions, only technological ones, the rest is propaganda. The human race simply deserve a better political system, one in which all people are truly equal, one which brings people together and does not divide them by imaginary lines on a map, a political system in which the hellish wars we are currently experiencing would seem ludicrous since there would be no system to even make it possible.

Amen.