The advent of prohibition during the shamanic period

When life still was the jewel of existence, making everyone sovereign of it all.
When in a flash of light a person’s alienation from its inner being is temporarily annulled, and the personal self is momentarily united with the cosmic self that permeats the entire creation, a flow of understanding invades and overpowers the mind. This understanding gives knowledge, tailored to the predominant questions each person confronts at that particular moment in time. The cobbler will find answers to the problems that have bothered him, while Einstein, occupied with issues of physics, saw his famous formula appear on a rainbow in the sky. Everyone though, from the humblest to the most extraordinary person, feels instinctively that all her or his problems have vanished. Some persons are so overcome with awe that they start believing that they know it all or that they have been chosen by the Ruler of the universe to bring a message to humanity. It is a comprehensible reaction from people who just minutes ago might have been suffering from uncertainty, a total lack of self esteem or utter confusion about the sense of their lives. The loss of self is the most important effect of this out-of-mind experience, the more so the closer it approaches the complete emptying of the mind, a state that bestows a feeling of total belonging, ocenic belonging it is called. At this moment, when all the pettiness and meanness and the worries and pains of daily existence have fallen off one’s shoulders, then the world around one takes on brilliance.
That happened to the hero king of ancient Sumer, Gilgamesh, after having travelled on the dark road that finally ended in the garden of the gods, where the fruits looked like precious stones. And in his Divina Comedia Dante also wrote that "In the court of heaven are many jewels so precious and beautiful that they are inconceivable out of that realm." English author Aldous Huxley, after having taken mescaline, points out to us that "The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open." (The Doors of Perception, pdf 4)
This is the moment when one’s cultural blinkers have fallen off and the mind flows on the waves of the soul as one descends from the realm of light back to earth, sovereign of one's own life. This is the state of bliss, of unbound happiness, formerly available to all before the skies darkened and illumination became suspiciious.

The mythical mind is convinced that the knowledge gained comes from the spiritual beings encountered during this entheogenic experience, while the rational mind considers these new images and sounds to come from the unconscious, an area imagined laying dormant beyond the self-conscious mind. But whatever the users’ convictions, shamanic traditions as well as contemporary agnostics’ highs testify to the experience’s inspiration and its healing effects for mind and body. The shaman will call his plant a teacher and modern anthropologists still debate what name to give for fear to sound unscientific when talking about a plant teacher, while the theologian might strenuously defend the idea that it is God Almighty who is teaching. But apart from these fundamental differences of philosophy, all those who have had the experience are agreed that existential knowledge is gained and spiritual balance attained.

If we wish to think along with the mythological mindset we can look at heaven as a metaphor for the enchanting world that reveals itself beyond the confines of the mind, that often obnoxious self-conscious tool crafted by the rules of our society and civilization at large, physically made possible by a cluster of inner-brain parts.
When illumination hits the brains - most often induced by some mind-altering substance - the self-consciousness creating cluster of brain parts enters into a state of disarray and at once the politically correct framework that normally guides us through daily life, disintegrates.
Beyond this framework of civic rules the road to heaven starts. It is said that there are many layers of heaven. The biblical apostle Paul thought he’d been in the third heaven and his forebear Moses was said to have been in the highest one, the seventh, where he’d been talking to his god YWH in person. Some stories speak of him having first picked a fight with the angels in the sixth one, just to give you an idea of the unlimited possibilities of religious imagination.
Nowadays, most people, burdened by an all pervading rationality that has incapacitated this power of imagination, will be happy to trod along on a magic trip beyond their wildest dreams. Or, when on a lesser mind-altering substance like cannabis, they'll enjoy socializing freely with others in their immediate surroundings, something they normally might have avoided at all costs. But even if the imagined heavens of our forebears don't open up anymore, the momentary liberation from civilization's confinement still grants us the joys of new heavens that open up when we escape from our fears and laugh heartily at the anguished selves we just left behind.

The consumption of an entheogenic substance sparks off an illumination that in its turn ushers in a state where one’s self-consciousness withers away and in rare instances is even completely dissolved, 'emptied' the ancient Greeks called it. A state in which imagination itself has been left on the treshold of the altar of cosmic consciousness.
When one has been touched by that light and then opens one’s eyes again, one comes to realize that with a single flash of that pure light all the deceitful wisdom of the day was wiped off the brain. For some people just a bit, but even so it's still enough to recognize - maybe a bit embarassedly ar first - some sillier parts of the own ego. "Oho," how shameful, a bit stupid actually and so presumptious; "hahaha." The laughing at oneself is a process of self-forgiveness and then the pleasure of becoming again aware of one's own hilariously dumb antics is experienced anew. Dumb or dumbest they might have been, but now they are joyously accepted as one's own innocent delusions. They have become part of one's cosmic being. There is no longer any need to feel ashamed of them, haha-haha, shame, what for? For whom? Shame for the cosmos? Who are you kidding?
This is the moment of sovereignty, when the mind starts recreating one’s world, one step at the time, in harmony with the pure feelings of bliss experienced.
In ancient times this moment of sovereign belonging was sublimely recorded by the Vedic poet, who exclaimed:

We too, like the Soma drinking poet, perceive at once that the others - those that we always distrusted and were afraid of, seceretly despising them - are not our enemies but our brothers and sisters. Egoism, nationalism, racism and chauvinisms of all kind are shown to be erronuously held ideas that don't hold up against the just revealed knowledge of belonging. Those that promote these beliefs are either ignorant or lying. The politicians and scientists that proclaim the evils of marihuana and other mind-altering substances are equally not to be trusted. They either don't know about the spiritual benefits of these substances or they don't want us to know about them.
We too start reordering our own life, like the Vedic poet, no longer according to the rules laid down by unthrustworthy authorities but in agreement with what we have felt to be true. We become rebels against the fake official discourse, of those authorities who have the gall to put neighbourhood dealers in jail while enabling global organizations to peddle toxic addictives.