My daughter was telling me of a historical discussion today about Joan of Arc. Her instructor was saying that if Joan of Arc was alive today she might be drugged and left drooling in a corner more likely than taken seriously.
It is much more likely that unless today she was born into a mystical or tribal group that accepted dreams and visions as he norm rather than aberrant she would most likely, as I said, simply drugged and left drooling in the corner somewhere. This is my main criticism of our modern so called civilized world.
I have seen first hand what happens in California in group homes for emotionally disturbed teenagers as recently as 1990. Just like in private prisons the prisoners are often not treated as human beings with rights but only as things to be drugged and barely kept alive. Though some people have to be medicated that otherwise would take their own lives or the lives of others, there are very few who actually are medicated that actually need it in my view.
The rest though they might have had problems in their families become wards of the state and because the drugs they take often permanently alter their minds there is no chance for a normal life after being forced to take many of these mood altering drugs for even one month.
One of the things I liked about studying native American shamanism was the common trait among such tribes of listening carefully to each others dreams and visions as harbingers of the future of the tribe for all. After all, this was how tribes survived for hundreds of thousands of years and this has only begun to change the last several thousand years. Without what was done before this none of us would be alive today at all.
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