About mind-altering experiences
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I’ve been reading a forum about Ayahuasca recently, and its been very interesting. There was one topic about “claridade”, which seems to be a phenomenon where people have been exposed to a mind-altering vision and have come to the conclusion that ‘they know the truth’ and go about talking about it to all kinds of people as if they should acknowledge it too.
Now I can think of some people who have come to this experience without any kind of psychoactive substance, mostly religious people. It is certainly not restricted to Ayahuasca tea drinkers. But I find it very interesting that it is such a common phenomenon that they have a word for it. It seems to be so that the mind can be overpowered by religious and other experiences to accept ‘truth’ at a deep level.
Now it seems some kinds of mind-altering experiences function to break down boundaries and belief structures, like some forms of psilocybin mushrooms, and I think also my own hypnagogic experiences. Terence McKenna used to talk about this a lot, and he once said “the people who need it the most, don’t take it”, referring to politicians and people in positions of authority.
It seems to me to be kind of true, that people who have been used to breaking down their ego structures are more trustworthy, more wise, because they have seen more of their minds and the weird stuff that arises.
Comments
The only weird stuff ( if it can really be called weird) which arises in my mind is this persistent sense of self at cushion time....
The body sits, the lungs take in and let out air, as things/phenomena settle down, awareness arises of "I AM (this psycho-physical sense of self) experiencing this moment", then this awareness departs becoming entangled/lost in amongst the I AM thought...
The next moment, awareness breaks free of the thought/dominates the thought... and so the cycle of awareness continues....
And when the body leaves the cushion, this entanglement of awareness & thought (psycho-physical phenomenon call the self) continues...However, for the most part it's now on Awareness's leash, which helps to keep it in check so to speak...
There comes a realisation that this experience is..."Nothing Special..." it could all just be in the Mind
All that arises (within awareness) passes away (within awareness)
Not sure Boris Johnson on mushrooms would be a good idea.
It’d probably do him a world of good. At the moment it is rather sad how he is seeking reapooinment.
Boris Johnson on mushrooms?
Andrew Tate on mushrooms?
Donald Trump on mushrooms?
Hmmmmm . . .
You misunderstand, me thinks. The experience of being on mushrooms should be compulsory for politicians, because I think it would give them quite a shock.
In Australia in NSW they are trialling psychologists microdosing some patients with long term depression with MDMA. As you can imagine, within the medical field there is long and furious debate about how to go about it, whether it's a good idea and who is a good candidate. As a healthcare worker myself, I can see both sides of the argument and I am still on the fence about it myself. Personally, I'm pretty black and white about the 5th precept so I am sitting with this in meditation. Lucky for me as a pathology worker in another state, I do not have to be directly involved in any decision making.
From what "I" gather....back in the trippy times of the 1960s & 70s many Westerners who had 'experimented' with psychedelics began to realise that there's more to life than what meets the eye/I (Things are not quite what they seem once awaken from the dream) it would seem they were drawn to Eastern philosophies & spirituality ...
The seeds were planted ie, the psychedelic drug mind blowing/opening experience), and then cultivated and nurtured by Eastern philosophies and meditation practices...deepening experiential understanding of the mind
I guess for many, Eastern meditation practices and philosophies are the psychedelic/mind opening experiences one can have without taking the drug ...
What I note here is that without some sort of indoctrination before hand, all these "truths" contradict each other unless they happen at the same time and influence each other.
I used to "trip" quite a bit when I was younger and there were a few of us that really liked exploring the spiritual side of things and every time we thought we "had it" we forgot it by morning or it just didn't make sense any more when the trip wore off.
That's a big distinction and a tricky bit. Psilocybin, for example, can help break boundaries and belief structures but it can also help build them. One can lead to a breakthrough and one can lead to a delusion.
From a certain perspective, it can sometimes be hard to tell one from the other.
From one meditative perspective...
The limitation of having drugs being the primary creator of mind-altering
experiences is that such experiences usually occur in the absence of a practice that can adequately prep one for a complete digestion of such a journey.
Traditionally this is spoken of as a "storming of heaven" that short changes the full spiritual potential that any path walker might have otherwise had when all conditions had ripened enough to allow it to occur naturally when the individual was truly ready to digest it.
On the Buddhist path towards suffering's cessation, much emphasis is placed upon knowing how to accept such spiritual inheritances in such a way as to minimize it becoming subject to the habituated influences of the human ego.
While few experiences can be compared to such graces, the mere experience of it does not dictate in itself that it will spiritually result in more benefit than
deficit. Prematurely unearthed by the unprepared can often make it look more like a short cut into a minefield.
The most intractable and compounded delusions that I think I've witnessed have occurred from those on the far side of such attempted "stormings of heaven".