I believe the drug is less important than your intent. You can take acid to party and you can take amphetamines to open up your awe at life.
Of course, each has its proclivities...
Psychedelics seem the most poignant for this topic and certainly they appeal to me the most. You can of course take them for (psycho)spiritual purposes. The approach may be disciplined and ritualistic, or it may be loose and individualistic. There are approaches you can take to benefit more from it, and others that are not so useful. Alan Watts spoke of the proper way to integrate psychedelics into your life. He sought to encourage people to engage with the substances mindfully, so they would look past the fleeting profoundity of the experience and understand what it can REALLY show them. Most people never make it past this first step. It's very easy to be misled. In philosophy you will find many delusions have arisen from people taking what they saw on hallucinogens at face value.
However I would seldom discourage someone who seeks to learn about herself and the universe from taking psychedelics. Because as long as that is your intent, you certainly will. I do believe this branch of substances is quite predisposed to that inclination.
ForEverAfter said:
Amanita Muscaria taken in the proper way in sufficient quantities causes lucid near death experiences.
I have become increasingly curious about them lately.
Ninae said:
I think psychedelics like weed can make you less grounded and remove you from reality, though. Thankfully I've never used it because I'm bad enough as it is. It's like I've never really landed, or don't have both feet on the ground, and I find it hard to take reality really seriously.
You and me both. In anthroposophy there is a duality of meta-demonic forces that Steiner names Ahriman and Lucifer. Lucifer is the adversarial god of the spiritual dimension. He tempts people to dissociate from the real world and their purpose in it, and to instead keep their heads in the clouds. People of more Luciferic temperament are frequently in their own thoughts. They are dreamers and not doers. Their potential is squandered. It is to take the virtues of creativity and twist them into flaws. You may notice a distinct impression from as far back as you can remember that you have never been comfortable in your own skin or in a material form at all. Steiner would claim that our spirits did not incarnate properly during the early development of our etheric and astral bodies. The defect may have occurred in early childhood or before your life on earth, but either way it has deep karmic resonance.
Ahriman is his polar opposite, and curiously, Steiner proposed we are just now entering the dark age of Ahriman, where people will blind themselves ever deeper to the things they cannot see with their own senses, trusting in a misconstrued vision of what science should be, and forsaking all meaning for emptiness and rigidity. It is almost as though some of us are inclined to go the other way in instinctive repulsion of this quite observable trend.
Ninae said:
Most would assume I've been using psychedelics but sedatives are enough for me. Even though they're not really psychedelic they create a small split between your body and consciousness so you're not so trapped and can "go out".
That doesn't surprise me (see above) - if you're already inclined to it, it won't take much.
i'm of the contention that drugs that cause fiending and withdrawals are toxic to a spiritual existence. you can't be devoted to both God and crack or heroin (for example.) leaving out buddhism and other non-God based religions, but buddhism for example is strict on this matter.
Buddhism is not spirituality. Buddhism is a method of accessing your own spirituality. You cannot be hooked on drugs and apply Buddhist teachings effectively. But being hooked on drugs does not preclude you from spirituality.
Similarly, there are religions that prohibit drug use and so if you wish to devote yourself to their image of God, you cannot do it effectively while breaking those core tennants.
Of course in both these cases, you can say the same about lying, cheating and stealing as well, or of any other addiction that forms a barrier between you and the higher planes of truth. No person is infallible.
A lifestyle of strictest asceticism can be its own problem. If you do it for the wrong reasons, or without recognising that it is not the GOAL but the METHOD to what you're trying to attain, you're probably better off being a hedonist.
In truth all life is a spiritual experience - there is no real distinction between 'spiritual' and 'mundane'. So many people go off the rails looking for supernatural experiences to break the montony, not understanding that the true wonder of the world is all around us. The most loveless, drug-crazed, belligerent, malevolent, shallow individual is in fact going through a spiritual experience - unconsciously, but nonetheless. The moment we place ourselves higher than someone else on a ladder of spiritual development we are, ironically, blocking our own spiritual development. For all you know the next stage of your growth in the cycle of Samsara is to BE that broken and misguided indiviual.
The real question is how CONSCIOUS you are choosing to be about the profoundity of life. People have all sorts of ways to go about this. There is nihilism, which emphasises personal freedom from societal constructs of any objective meaning or morality. There is Satanism, which emphasises personal empowerment and the rejection of authority. There is occultism which, broadly, emphasises the potential of one's own mastery over his reality. There is Hinduism, which emphasises, amongst other things, one's submission to fate, and the karmic duality of good and evil. There is Islam, which emphasises humility and trust towards the brightest and purest force you can imagine. All these may be construed as what you believe reality to be, but this is the religious approach, and I feel it is less effective at opening your spiritual awareness. They are better applied in that sense as models, or metaphors, to help you access deeper truths. This is the meaning of esotericism. Which, fittingly, is frequently missed.
I hope that I am not lecturing and that I am rambling minimally. I say these things as much to affirm them to myself as to anyone else.
