I am sympathetic to the people who advocate taking psychedelic drugs to enhance consciousness and to explore inner realms. They would say this is especially beneficial in an atheistic society such as ours for it frees us from the iron grip of materialism and shines light into the dark clouds that obscure the modern mind. We are given the direct experience of something beyond standard physical plane consciousness and we can know for ourselves that we are not body but mind and that mind has multi-dimensional aspects. As a teenager I took LSD a few times so I know the transformative effect psychedelics can have, especially if you take them in a reverential frame of mind rather than for kicks, humbling yourself before the majesty of the universe.
However, sympathy does not mean approval. I believe that the use of drugs, which is very ancient, came about when early human beings began to lose natural contact with the spiritual realms as the material world closed about them. This was in line with the evolution of consciousness which requires the development of a solid centre, the self, and a rational thinking mind that can become a co-creator with God rather than a passive participant in the general spiritual flow of life. A lot of people try to get back to this flow but that is like a reversion to childhood and it is spiritually immature. We must go forward into a new and higher awareness, one in which we do not merge into the all but become full spiritual individuals, mature, responsible, creative. Sometimes people need a cold shower rather than a warm bath in order to wake them up. Drugs were and are an escape. Early man resorted to them to try to recapture what he had lost but his spiritual progress demanded that he move on and did not revert to what he had known in the past.
Drugs are not recommended and never have been recommended by any proper spiritual teacher. The reason is they are attempts to break the barrier God has placed between this world and the next by artificial means. This barrier can be broken but it should be broken by natural spiritual development if the encounter with the next world is to be authentic and psychically healthy. Drug takers may encounter non-material beings in their experiences and these beings may seem to offer guidance and advice but there are many denizens of the inner realms and you will not encounter true higher beings if you seek to take heaven by force. Your experience will be limited and you may well only experience the world of the demons, albeit often dressed up to resemble what seems a deep and exciting mystery to the unwary.
We are not here not to experience the glories of the spiritual world but to learn the lessons of the material one though with the understanding that the spiritual is primary. It is possible that in this benighted and ignorant age drugs can help guide one towards a previously dismissed and rejected higher reality but anything other than brief use will take you off the true spiritual path which is not about experience but the sanctification of the soul.
Since the Fall we have been cut off from Paradise. To attempt to recapture the paradisiacal state by artificial means, whether that be a drug or technique, special breathing, prolonged fasting or even excessive meditation, is an irreligious act that seeks to put you above God. The experience gained will be tainted and a counterfeit one to true mystical experience because it will be lacking the humility and purity of motive which alone guarantee truth and ascent to higher realms. It will lead the individual away from God as he really is and towards one of the many imitations that exist both in this world and the next. The fact that so many people who advocate psychedelics report encounter with pagan deities or similar supernatural beings confirms this. These, if not demons and they may well be, are leftovers from previous cycles of evolution. They continue to exist in the inner worlds but not on proper spiritual levels.
Consciousness is a spiritual thing but it is squeezed into a physical body to learn lessons which can eventually take it beyond the physical and beyond the spiritual as normally considered to the divine. In a physical body consciousness becomes severely restricted but can also be focussed and express greater powers of self-will and motivation than when not so restricted. To seek to escape this through drugs is to seek change from without but change to be real must come from within. You reach the divine by becoming inwardly divine yourself not from attempting to steal what is not yours. A truly spiritual consciousness is not the result of what you experience or even what you feel or what you know. It comes from what you are and that to be of the right stuff demands humility, love of God and openness to the spirit of Christ.
This post follows on from the one about ancient civilisations in that Graham Hancock, the most prominent mainstream proponent of that idea, is also an enthusiast for psychedelic exploration of consciousness. I just want to say you can be right about one aspect of the esoteric/mystical but completely wrong about other aspects. This is actually quite common and simply shows the importance of real spiritual discrimination and correct understanding of what the spiritual truly is. It is not higher consciousness. The devil has higher consciousness after a fashion. It is orientation of the heart to goodness, beauty and truth in their higher aspects and a humble dedication to bring one's own soul into line with that regardless of what this may cost in terms of personal sacrifice and renunciation. A tall order perhaps but that is what it is and we are all called to that path. There are no short cuts.
7 comments:
@William - That all sounds very convincing to me.
I had a long term professional interest in psychopharmacology; and even from a materialist perspective it seemed clear to me that the drugs associated with spiritual experiences all worked by (sometimes globally by lowering or 'clouding' consciousness, more often somewhat selectively) *impairing* brain function.
This functional impairment then affected the experience itself. For example, memory may be impaired so that a drug experience is poorly remembered, or not remembered at all. (e.g. extreme alcohol intoxication can wipe the memory for subsequent events; and the same can happen with the diazepam/ valium group of drugs - i.e. benzodiazepines.)
But from a spiritual perspective - functional impairment will probably mean impaired discrimination between good and evil, truthful and lying, spiritual 'contacts'. If so, this would mean that individuals are much more likely spiritually to be misled when their spiritual experiences are induced by brain-impairing agents.
Just another aspect that seems to reinforce your 'message'.
There is a tendency amongst educated (over-educated?) Westerners in our materialistic society to think that shamans in traditional cultures have a special insight that they lack because of the debilitating effects of civilisation and the emphasis on moral behaviour in Christianity that can become regimented and spiritually dry. Especially among Protestants I would say. This all goes back at least as far as the noble savage idea of Rousseau. Drug use is often part of these people's religious rites but that doesn't make it a good thing for reasons given in the post.
A traditional religious perspective well-articulated.
The shaman typically learns to heal and divine through the contact with plant intelligences, or the real living Spirit of the plant, so there is a direct knowledge that they do have that Westerners typically are very disconnected from both experientially and theoretically.
There may be a great divide between what is used, plants or drugs, and whether they are cultivated.
The shaman who grows his plants from seed is connected to something deeper - Life in its ancient restoration as the plant grows again.
The biggest problem is that external sources of authority cannot be trusted so there has to be a way to connect to higher truths.
I am not convinced by traditional perspectives. Modern teachings are clearly corrupted severely. Truth must be found in some degree of connection that bypasses human language and culture and is not just an abstraction, a set of philosophies.
Shamanic plants are the middle ground.
The Pharaohs of Egypt, the descendants of the survivors of Atlantis, had traces of tobacco and coca leaf in their systems so we can see the power of plants over great periods of time.
You call this a traditional religious perspective and I suppose it is but I'm not coming at it from that particular point of view. As far as I'm concerned this is just how it is. I agree that shamans do have powerful connections to plants and the intelligence behind plants but this is not God for it relates to the inner workings of creation rather than to the Creator. It may be devas or nature spirits, it may be other discarnate intelligences, it may be demons, but fundamentally it is psychic rather than spiritual in the more elevated sense.
Westerners are certainly disconnected from that kind of world now but they weren't always, druids and the like were the same thing, and it's possible that we moved away from that state of consciousness in order to evolve. Going back to it would be regressive, spiritually speaking.
The bodies of some Pharaohs did have the plants traces that you mention but I would say a couple of things about that. One, the Atlantis that bequeathed its civilisation to ancient Egypt was degenerate, and two, these are not psychedelic drugs and don't provide any kind of entry to higher dimensions of being. Also, many things the Egyptians did were not particularly spiritually insightful, incest for one and also mummification, to the degree that it was practised certainly.
It may be that at one time plants were useful allies in the spiritual search but I don't believe that is the case now for the reasons I give in the post. For what it's worth the Masters who spoke to me were of the same opinion though I don't believe this just because they said so.
This is a good and valuable post. My long-ago dabbling was initiated by an attempt to recover a lost consciousness of spiritual reality. But this didn't work and my dabbling turned into decadent hedonism. Fortunately, with the spiritual pretense removed, decadent hedonism eventually triggered profound disgust. So, like you, I sympathize but do not approve. I know the pain but know better that this cure doesn't work.
If the spiritual powers do not encourage the active search for mystical experience, and they don't, these things come and go as and when God wills, how much less would they approve of the attempt to take them by force and at the behest of the ego?
What at first may be revelationary becomes spiritually mundane if constantly repeated.
Excellent post. A lot of people misunderstand witchcraft to mean magic wands, broomsticks, and cool superpowers portrayed in television. Genuine witchcraft involves making deals w/ demons on some level. Drugs and perverse sexuality are often involved as the price for entry.
This brought to mind a post about the sobering history of LSD in the 1960s. https://extradeadjcb.substack.com/p/3-the-electric-kool-aid-acid-test
The CIA used LSD for various "projects". There was a real dark side to the hippie counterculture that is rarely discussed. Drugs can create a passive mindset leaving one open to malevolent forces. While it was understandable that the boomers were seeking more meaningful alternatives to the dull 1950s middle class life, it is obvious that something fundamentally went wrong in the 1960s. Even if one hasn't completely assimilated the inversion of good and evil, there is a great passive acceptance of outright wickedness today that would have shocked the most decadent societies of the past. There is nothing natural about today's world.
It gives a new outlook as to why marijuana is now being promoted so heavily as completely harmless. While I don't advocate the War on Drugs approach, mind altering substances affect more than just the physical body. Occult activity and sexual perversions were quite common in elite secret societies and among the aristocracy prior to the French and Russian Revolutions. I believe we have been increasingly inviting demonic activity into our world leading to the current state of affairs.
True spiritual experiences arise by confirming our will to God's design rather than trying to manipulate the supernatural for our own means. That is the fundamentally difference between white and black magic as Bruce Charlton has often posted.
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