No you can't have an LSD trip through meditation. There was a big load of bullshit back in the 70's when Ram Dass claimed he gave some monk a massive dose of LSD and the monk just sat there as if nothing had happened because "he was so used to the same state from meditation". As if you can just give someone 1000mics of acid for their first trip and they're going to just sit there calmly 8)
It was later revealed the monk had palmed the LSD and conned Ram Dass into seeing him as some kind of fucking superhero (a lot of these monks/holy men are adept at sleight of hand - it's an effective way of convincing some people of your "holy powers". If you took David Copperfield to some village in India he'd be worshipped as a God)
Psychedelics are their own path - trying to say mediation is the same thing is disrespectful to psychedelics. It's usually people who have some kind of anti-drug stick up their ass. "Psychedelics arn't as good as doing it naturally with Buddhism". I think psychedelics are far, far more spiritual than man-made ideas like Buddhism.
I totally disagree, and I hardly think I am anti-drugs! Not at all, I am very much for the responsible use of the wonderful things grown naturally or invented and synthesized.
You make it sound like Buddhism is like a religion composed of man-made ideas comparable to the 'revelations' of christianity of judaism, etc. That isn't necessarily untrue (it's
possible to follow Buddhism as if it were something like that) but then you are totally forgetting that most 'church'-like instituted religions have lost a big part of connection with mysticism which is what this is really all about. In this thread there is the use of a couple Buddhist terms but I only think they are used to describe certain phenomena that are mystical in nature so that we can agree what effects we are talking about. I don't have the feeling we are saying this is just the way it is at all, what I am finding is that connections are discovered between what has been said by Buddhism for a very long time, and what many trippers and people who meditate are experiencing themselves without having previously heard about it! That is what blew my mind. First I experienced these mystical states and later I read about them. That is why I find such metaphysical perspectives most useful to describe these states. I wouldn't think of comparing it to science, but the power of science is the ability to predict outcomes. While none of this is empirical, phenomena described in Buddhism I have experienced myself and thought: WTF is that? For years. Then here and there some Buddhist terms and phenomena came along and I found them to be coherent albeit symbolic.
Like kundalini energy. It's not like I believe it or don't believe it, it's like there has never been a better description of a phenomenon that developed in my teenage years.
Zen Buddhism totally defies itself in the sense of being a structure on man-made ideas. The point is to just experience, which is what you do both on psychedelics as well as with meditation. In my personal experience it IS true that you pass similar stations with both which is not to say that either method is better fundamentally.
Let's consider the conscious experience of impulses that are happening with everyday life that we would call sensory impulses - so they originate outside and are experienced within, as is everything. Then also consider sensory experience on psychedelics. Then consider meditation sober, which is not sensory deprivation but extinguishing thought process complication. There are thoughts but there is no intentional association, only unintentional. You let intentions fade and also your will. In its place comes pure experience and a sense of freedom. Last, consider meditating on psychedelics.
I would only agree with you that achieving mystical experiences is highly catalysed by psychedelics, especially when allowing meditative states. You can go to these peaceful perfect places in your mind and enter a sort of centre of the storm much more easily with them, but because of the unstable nature of the catalysis such a state is much more easily disturbed. Which can be seen in MANY accounts of people falling almost involuntarily into trance states.
With meditation getting to such states is more a more stable process and I really don't care if you call it Buddhist or not, it's not just man-made theory. The stories and koans are tools but they are not the core, the core is just allowing your mind enough peace to achieve psychedelic states naturally.
If you are taking psychedelics and involving yourself in less than ideal set and settings you are actually making this whole process of spiritual liberation harder on yourself because you get even more entangled in the spontaneous ego-driven consequences of perceiving sensory information. Meta-programs or thought patterns run wild as well as natural pattern-recognition mechanisms of the mind. That is where the visuals come from and there can be amplified emotions and other things as we all know.
I think a major point is that during this process you need to break free from thinking in feedback loops, thinking in structures and circles that only consolidate the way you see yourself and reality. If you take psychedelics you can break through a lot of them but when you don't there are a whole lot of illusions and delusions coming your way at high pace, because the process is catalysed. If you are forcing this you can really get sidetracked and deeply mentally confused.
If you meditate you encounter each thought loop at a natural pace and can get past it without feeling a blowing power pushing in your back. That way you can integrate it much better and switch between mystical states and functioning in consensus reality progressively more easy. At some point you will lose the distinction between them and the states will be there in superposition. For a long time I thought the goal was a state of faraway bliss of everythingness and nothingness. Eventually I realized that is not the goal, the goal is to realize bliss just sitting here drinking a cup of tea. Peace is found not by escaping what and where you are but by embracing it and totally surrendering to it until there is nothing left holding on to either thing.
Just to be clear: I feel this is a revered place to be but I am not there. I have no illusion of being developed very far and I have lost a lot of my meditative skills if I ever had much. But I have seen glimpses, both naturally and artificially - and they have shown me similar ways and directions. Yeah I am a narcissist, what of it? But I don't mean to brag when I ask if you have ever tried the natural way ismene? If you have meditated hardcore for about a week or more and found little worth in it, then I feel you are more entitled to your opinion on the matter than if you are judging without personal experience, sorry.
For me it's a matter of personal experience that while these are beautiful experiences you can learn from, in a spiritual sense they are rather distractions. Intense euphoria can very well hold you back from coming into deep balance.
Sorry, but I think you are really looking at this the wrong way. It takes a long time to become good enough at meditation to experience effects that resemble those produced without effort by LSD but just because Ram Dass was cheating does not mean that the paths have many similarities! Anyway I heard another story about the same attempt of making a monk trip, which I found quite believable: the monk had a good trip but after that he said there was nothing he had not seen before sober. And that is something I can subscribe to myself. If I had meditated for 3 weeks instead of 1 I would have gone through even more seriously trippy shit than I already had.
I LOVE psychedelics, but you can say what you want - meditating your ass off for a ++ psychedelic experience is still qualitatively more natural-feeling to me than taking acid and getting a whopping +++. And not only that, it has stayed much longer with me as well. If you catapult yourself into nirvana with acid and return that was a temporary mystical state that to me is abstract to integrate. Going there very slowly just makes more sense and it's logical that it's more natural isn't it? It's not because drugs are bad mmmkay? It's just because your endogenous neurotransmitters are natural and psychedelics other than something like DMT are not natural in that respect.
I have spoken with many people about this in the time when I tripped a whole lot, and they were vague about it and just said something is not completely right with forcing such experiences. I always denied it, but I was missing the same subtle things you seem to be missing. The way I see does not mean I think psychedelics are deeply flawed and they are not 'the right way'. I think they are both great ways but given the choice which of the ways is more natural, stable and sustainable - then definitely meditation. Forget Buddhism, that is just one of the crutches to make oneself explainable in terms of the whole process. What useful terms does psychedelic science have? OEVs? CEVs? ++++ ? Wow. Those don't impress me at all as useful. So you need another metaphysics to approach this. Perennial philosophy, taoism, Buddhism and similar subjects hold keys to make more sense out of the whole picture. They are not true or false. They are useful in some discussions and not useful in others. I really think we are finding common ground with things like Buddhism here so it is useful. There is quality in the communication it allows, that is what matters. Don't get hung up on absolute truths, you'll drive yourself crazy.
Don't reject that dynamic aspect of shifting between metaphysics and dont make the mistake of equalling such things with religion. Religion is a derivative of these things, morals extracted from third-person revelations of these mystical processes. That sucks ass. You have to find out for yourself through deep experience and not listen to someone else making allegories that you take as prescription dogma.