Spiritual Claustrophobia and Drugs

Since childhood I have been conscious of a sense of constriction as though I functioned through only a small part of my total being and was living in a world that had a 'top' to it.  It was as though a kind of psychic ceiling cut me off from a fuller, more expansive reality.  I can remember as a small boy looking up at the sky and seeing it almost like a cork in a bottle, keeping out the greater reality. The sun was key to that greater life which poured through it to a certain extent. When the sun shines fully something of divine reality pours into the world. When it is obscured so is that life.

I believe that we humans are beings of multi-dimensional consciousness stuck in a three dimensional mind. This is why we feel that constriction. It's why some of us take drugs, as an attempt to recapture the higher consciousness. But drug taking is a serious mistake because it seeks to bypass limitations placed on us as part of our evolutionary development. These limitations force us to focus on the material world so we can develop those parts of our being, moral, intellectual, the sense of being an individual with free choice, that would not develop, or not develop in the same way, in a purely spiritual state. Drugs will dismantle the barriers in the mind so that we can become aware of higher dimensions but we are not here to do that and so this is illicit, whatever excuses might be put forward for it. It is, if you'll forgive the rather banal analogy, a bit like a small boy dreamily gazing out of the window during school lessons. Only worse because drugs also damage the mind, actually rendering it less sensitive in the long run, and they encourage lazy, self-centred behaviour. If you take drugs you are trying to cheat God.

But the higher consciousness we chase on such occasions is real. More real in fact than any drug can show for these only provide a simulacrum or even a degraded parody of the true higher reality. It is also one tinged with danger because when the mind is opened artificially in such a manner both the good and the bad on the psychic level can flow in. What is revealed is true but the mindset behind the drug taker is that of the voyeur who tries to see the beauty of a naked woman without her permission. He is an interloper who has no right to be there and he is violating something sacred. 

We come to this world to learn. The principal lesson is to acknowledge God in a situation in which he is not obvious. We are tested to see if our heart is true. Will it turn to God of its own volition, out of love, when it does not have to or will it reject him? But we are also given chances to develop intellectually and creatively, to start to become a real individual, free and self-determined. Here is a paradox. God wants full individuals, able to exercise their own God-given talents, but they can only really do this properly when they let him work through them. As always, Jesus is the perfect example. We see from the Gospels that here was the most individual person who ever lived, the person who was most completely himself. But here also was someone who was totally open to God. In him God and self were perfectly integrated.

The spiritual limitations we experience in this world are there for a reason. To seek to overcome them by any means other than growing towards God through the heart and mind in a natural way is just the material self trying to capture the goods of the spiritual self for its own egotistical ends. We must use the sense of spiritual alienation we feel in this world as a force to drive us towards the truth of God so that we conform our being to his in order to know him. Heaven is a gift from God not something we should try to steal.