Last week, the Chrysler Corporation threw a "Hail Mary" pass to car buyers in an effort to ward off another bankruptcy. They are now offering to cap their customers gas prices to $2.99/gal for three years. The caveat is that "the program is limited to 'fuel efficient' models and limits each buyer to the discounted price on only 12,000 miles worth of fuel each year." However, "fuel efficient" for Chrysler includes the large Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, all Chrysler minivans and even the Dodge Ram large truck and Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV.

Wow! Is that one big mound of dung or not?

At first glance I was thinking that this is a bad move, because it will just encourage people to buy and consume more gas. Then I read about the limitations and thought, "Hmmmm. This might not be the worst idea, since it will encourage people to purchase fuel efficient vehicles."

But leave it to big corporations to turn a good idea into a worthless and irresponsible marketing ploy. By adding the limitations to the limitations, nothing constructive is going to be done, either for Chrysler's bottom line or more importantly, for the environment and the critical global issues we are facing.

As far as Chrysler is concerned, they deserve to perish--but more likely they will be bailed out by the feds like in 1980 when Congress gave them a $1.2b loan guarantee, which to their credit they did pay back to us. Then again, Chrysler is really not an entirely American corporation any longer, is it? Twenty percent is still owned by German automaker Daimler.

This marketing move, which could have been a powerful incentive for Americans to at least consider more fuel efficient cars--as if the gas prices themselves wouldn't be--becomes moot in that they will continue to push some of their worst gas hogs within the promotion. This makes me wonder if anyone at these corporations gives a goddam about anything but the next fiscal year! Are they all that greedy...or are they all just brain dead?

So how does this relate to the focus of this blog? Only peripherally, yet, in at least one important case, a psychedelic substance has given us a more metaphysical overview of the world of gas and oil.

Ketamine is called a dissociative anesthetic and is used in human and veterinary medicine. It is also a powerful psychedelic that by its nature produces some of the strangest effects that I've come across in psychedelic literature. Dissociatives include phencyclidine (PCP), Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas), Ibogaine, Dextromethorphan (the active ingredient in cough syrup) and the plant Salvia dininorum.

Ketamine works on the conscious mind in a rather astounding way, that is, by allowing the person to experience becoming and being various inorganic objects such as a chair, a rock, a bridge or virtually anything; thereby dissociating from his or her real body. But this dissociation can also involve various other life forms as well.

Stanislav Grof, in his book, "When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality", recounts one of his first experiences with this drug when many around the world were experimenting with it shortly after it was first synthesized in 1962.

"I had several ketamine sessions that were so horrible and disgusting that I was determined never to take the substance again. They revolved around fossil fuels and the curse they represent for life on our planet. The following is the account of one of these sessions.

"The atmosphere was dark, heavy and ominous. It seemed to be toxic and poisonous in a chemical sense, but also dangerous and evil in the metaphysical sense. Initially, I experienced it on the outside, as part of my environment, but gradually it took over, and I actually became it. It took me a while to realize that I had become petroleum, filling enormously large cavities in the earth. While I was experiencing identification with petroleum as physical material, including its penetrating smell, I realized that I was also an evil metaphysical or archetypal entity of unimaginable proportions. I was flooded with fascinating insights, combining chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, mythology, history, economy and politics.

"I suddenly understood something that I had never thought about before. Petroleum was fat of biological origin that got mineralized; it meant that it had escaped the mandatory cycle of death and rebirth the recycling that the rest of the living matter is subject to. However, the element of death was not eliminated in this process. It was only delayed. The destructive Plutonic potential of death continues to exist in petroleum in a latent form as a monstrous time bomb awaiting its opportunity to be released into the world.

"While experiencing what I felt was consciousness of petroleum, I saw the death intrinsic to it manifesting as the evil and killing resulting from the greed of those who seek the astronomical profits that it offers. I witnessed countless scenes of political intrigues, economic scams, and diplomatic shenanigans motivated by 'petrodollars'. I saw countless victims of wars fought for oil laid on the sacrificial alter of this evil entity. It was not difficult to follow the chain of events to a future world war for the dwindling resources of a substance that had become vital for the survival and prosperity of the industrialized countries.

"In a long series of hideous and most-unpleasant experiences, I was taken through states of consciousness related to the chemical industry based on petroleum. Using the name of the famous German chemical industrial complex, I referred to these experiences as 'IG Farben consciousness.' It was an endless sequence of states of mind that had the quality of aniline dyes, organic solvents, herbicides, pesticides and toxic gases, all hostile to life.

"Besides the experiences related to various industrial poisons per se, I also identified with the states of consciousness associated with the exposure of various life forms to petroleum products. I became every Jew who had died in the Nazi gas chambers, every sprayed ant and cockroach, every fly caught in the sticky goo of fly-traps, and every plant dying under the influence of the herbicides. And beyond all that lurked the highly possible ominous future of all life on the planet--death by industrial pollution."

Whew!! Imagine risking more than one of those experiences, yet as Dr. Grof says, he had a number of them like this. Still, as a result, he states this:

"It was an incredible lesson. I emerged from the session with a deep ecological awareness and a clear sense as to which direction the economic and political development had to take should life on our planet survive."

What an amazing, amazing trip! Certainly for Dr. Grof, it was a trip to a hell on earth that should be experienced by those who continue to rape the earth and pillage her resources for the most dubious of purposes. And that is to create a world culture of materialism and consumerism that can only estrange mankind further from the very Mother Nature that gave birth to our species.

Happy Mother's Day.