"Everybody must get stoned.

Not in passive withdrawal, but in active re-enchantment. Not in apathy, but in aesthetic fury. We

must remember what we are. Not cogs. Not apps. Not accounts.

But wave-born animals.

Fevered dancers.

Singing neurons.

Beings of stoke.

Let the future be built not just by reason, but by rapture.!":

Dr. River Blaine puts it bluntly:

“Modernity declared war on ecstasis. It replaced waves with algorithms, breath with

metrics, awe with optimization. But the body remembers. The psyche remembers. The

ocean waits.”

To witness a surfer in full flow—limbs language-ing with the sea, body arced in perfect

surrender to wave-form—is to witness what Merleau-Ponty called the intertwining of flesh andworld. The surfer is not riding the wave as a subject upon an object; the surfer is the wave—a

choreography of mutual becoming.

And literature professor Elias Wolfe adds:

“The stoked surfer is the contemporary dervish. He spins, but not in circles—he spins

along the curving spine of Poseidon’s dream. He is subject to no metric but that of the

wave’s breath. It is a kind of literature of the body, a grammar of liquid grace.”

We must train our technologists in poetry.

We must give our physicists surfboards.

We must send our bureaucrats into the waves.

We must create rituals of awe, not just rules of order.

Everybody must get stoned.

Not in passive withdrawal, but in active re-enchantment. Not in apathy, but in aesthetic fury. We

must remember what we are

Dr. Cardona elaborates:

“We have built a civilization that distrusts spontaneous well-being. In its place, we offer

conditional worth: achievement through effort, pleasure through purchase,

enlightenment through productivity. The ecstatic is unearned, and thus feared.”

The result is a neurocultural paradox: a society addicted to stimulation, but... See more

Dr. Cardona writes:

“We live under the dominion of what I call Cognitive Calvinism: the belief that pleasure

must be earned through suffering, that joy is suspicious, and that altered perception is a

moral threat. The stoked/stoned state is not pathological—it is revolutionary.”

To be stoned and stoked is thus to descend into sensual literacy. One begins to read

the world again, not as text, but as texture—fluid, vibrating, mysterious.

To be stoked is not

simply to be excited. It is to be lit up by the world. It is a state of affective enthrallment, a

sensuous cascade of perceptual immediacy—a full-bodied yes to the present tense.