Maybe I'm picking the question up by the wrong end, but it never occurs to me when I am on
psychedelics to say reflect back on my life, that is something I tend to do when drinking alone.
There is such a fullness to the present moment when I am on psychedelics, that I am not
even in the mood for such things.
I did psychdelics regularly, but infrequently from the time was 16 till I was 24 and I went off of them,
meditation, yoga, and non-meditation such as Dzogchen and Mahamudra made me lose interest.
BUt about 8 years ago after talking with some practitioners I respect, 4 of them actually were talking
about psychdelics being helpful from time to time. It was funny the presideing lama teased us
about the retreat when we were done, "So what did you guys do then for 3 months
just go to the market and buy those mushrooms and sit around here having a good time?"
And he had this knowing look like, "Yeah, I do that too sometimes!" This was in Nepal
where they are sometimes available in the market for tourists. So I was genuinely interested in checking it all out again.
Though I think now, my sense of yoga and meditation not psychdelics was based on a wrong and a false opposition
I assumed based on its frequency in discussions on psychedelicsa and meditation, are psychdelics a kind of charlatan's enlightment,
or is it cheating and therefor not as well earned and so fleeting and puts you back where you started eventually and that is probably
detrimental, though if you talk to people, people who are highly regarded in Buddhism, I dont know about Islamic or Hindu
or even Christian and Jewsih variants, they are not really particularly allergic to psychdelics as much as their often quite puritanical
western followers and their obnoxious nanny minding, if you have ever been to anything with a western Buddhist Sangha
you know the style, rather sanctimonious I might add, they should join a church.
No, as I was saying to my wife last night, she is Thai and raised in a household where even though they were poor
extremely hard working farmers were pushed by their mother to practice dharma and also do sitting meditation. Last night, she was asking me
about witches on the west, to which I said, well, what do you want to know you are married to one. And she mentioned the riding on brooms
thing that we have in the west and I said, you know that actually is not just nonsense, they used to apply a paste made with nightshade
and some other things and that nightshade is seriously fucking psychdelic, and often associated with flying
and transporting ones body literally, there are many claims of being about being able to sort of teleport I said. And she, who does not have any
interest in the strongly psychdelic mushrooms that often appear in our garden of their own accord said, "Psychedlics are fake.
they are for fake people who want fake enlightenment. That's what we say in Thailand."
OK, I was being called out, but I had an insight to put an end to the attack and I said, "No they are not fake mediation or enlightenment
they just are their own thing. You dont say peach pie is fake apple pie, no peach pie is peach pie."
Which she respected, because I have been a daily formal meditation practitioner for decades and for the entire time I have known her
and she knows I get into those mushrooms in the garden from time to time, so that I know something about what is up.
So, I think that is the most important thing, well for me anyway, or insight perhaps you could say, after all of these years into psychedelics: they cannot be compared
or reduced or dismissed, as the establishment is always trying to find ways to do, as artificial schizophrenia, or enlightened mind.
Yes they are enlightened mind in one sense, in that all mind is enlightened, has a self-liberating seed and core, but the psychdelic
states are I think just another thing and it is difficult to label them all probably in the same way. I say that based on what I have experienced of
LSD, about 15 trips in my life (I know not very many but they were profound most of them) or 40-50 mushroom trips coupled with a light
pot smoking habit, I like smoking pot as a kind of psychdelics light experience about once a week, if I do it too often, there isnt the insight or different
visual and auditory perpective on things that I get, it just becomes like a cup of coffee or something, something routine, which to me
is defeating the prupose, it is to get outside your ordinary mind even if for a little bit . Meditation does not do that it just puts you back
into perspective perhaps with regard to ordinary experience, makes you less enslaved and conditioned by it.
But while I feel pot is psychdelic for me, there is none of the feeling that what I am experiencing
is so monumnetal as it often is on psychdelics and not of the first there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is effect of mediation.
I think I said its very difficult to say what mediation is and does, and not difficult to at least get in the general ballpark of what psychdelics are and do
There can be profund relaizations on pot and healings and even confrontations, I am presented
sometimes with uncomfortable realities about myself or my situation, though not so much anymore, pot seems to like to talk to me
more like a caring elder brother or friend these days and I sometimes question how much I might getting buttered up and overly validated.
But psychedelics are still very much on a conceptual level, you are really kin dof rivetted. or I am anyway, to this sense of an ego experiencing
all of these amazing and intense things and thoughts even so-called ego death, yes you need a sense of ego for it to die. Meditation
is truly I think of the ineffable, its very difficult to conceptualize what its doing beyond some vague suggestions, I like to say it liberates,
it helps you emerge from your nightmares, your emotionality literally as though you have woken up from a bad dream you realize, god
that wasnt even real what I have been tripping on my whole life. And to say the feeling is one of relief is perhaps among the worst
kind of understatements I could make.
