slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
Mind-altering drugs can open us up to the amazing possibilities of the universe — but true self-discovery is harder
The cactus skin arrived in the mail in a packet marked “for botanical examination only.” We whizzed it up in a blender. Two truant teenagers in an empty kitchen. We tried mixing the resulting green powder with water and drinking it. The taste was so foul it was all we could do to stop ourselves vomiting. In the end we mixed it with Cherry Coke to ameliorate the flavor and then we drank it all up.
The skin contained a naturally occurring psychedelic drug called mescaline. Soon, everything seemed to vibrate. It was as if the walls, windows, even the chairs were humming a low, beautiful melody. Then I noticed that we were speaking in colors. My friend’s words were blue swirls and mine were green. Our conversation curled and twisted in front of my eyes like smoke in a vacuum chamber. Later I held a glass of water, gazing at it for what seemed like an immensely long time, its utility swallowed up in its beauty and it seemed that the whole Earth existed within that glass and the thought occurred to me: “I’m in the presence of God.”
Ten years later I was staying in a tiny monastery deep in a Thai forest. I had been living and meditating there for close to a month. My mind was still — still in the way a tuning fork rests after being struck for a long time. I sat outside watching the fading light graze the trees, feeling egoless and empty of thought. Butterflies erupted from the green foliage in a movement that seemed so excessively beautiful I was thunderstruck and as I looked, I thought: “Damn, this is exactly like mescaline.”
It’s not just me who has made the link between psychedelic drugs and meditation. Indeed, the link between psychedelics and spiritual experience was the first line of inquiry Timothy Leary and his cohorts pursued in their 1960s Harvard experiments. In the 1990s, Dr. Rick Strassman ran a series of experiments using a powerful psychedelic known as DMT, and he too noticed the similarity: “[The effect of] DMT has a similarity with experiences that are possible with a lot of meditation,” he said.
Scientists are currently conducting separate studies on psychedelics and meditation — both are being trialed to treat the same conditions. A review study by the Journal of the American Medical Association, released in March this year, found that meditation may be as effective as medication in treating conditions such as depression and anxiety. Hot on the heels of this study was the Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study at NYU’s Bluestone Center for Clinical Research, which found that Psilocybin (the active drug in “magic mushrooms”) was effective in treating anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients. There are now dozens of studies that document how both meditation and psychedelics can treat depression, addiction, anxiety and PTSD.
So if psychedelics produce similar effects to long periods of meditation and other austere religious practices, could we have stumbled upon what Strassman calls “the spirit molecule”? Are psychedelics an alternative to spiritual practices?
Hardly, say the Buddhists. The second noble truth of the Buddha is that “the origin of suffering is the attachment to desire.” Psychedelics are by their nature an experience, a strange and beautiful one but often elusive. This creates a craving to have the experience again. It is this craving that is the Buddhist definition of discontent. Rather than freeing the mind from attachment, psychedelics create more.
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/tru..._are_they_everything_theyre_cracked_up_to_be/
The cactus skin arrived in the mail in a packet marked “for botanical examination only.” We whizzed it up in a blender. Two truant teenagers in an empty kitchen. We tried mixing the resulting green powder with water and drinking it. The taste was so foul it was all we could do to stop ourselves vomiting. In the end we mixed it with Cherry Coke to ameliorate the flavor and then we drank it all up.
The skin contained a naturally occurring psychedelic drug called mescaline. Soon, everything seemed to vibrate. It was as if the walls, windows, even the chairs were humming a low, beautiful melody. Then I noticed that we were speaking in colors. My friend’s words were blue swirls and mine were green. Our conversation curled and twisted in front of my eyes like smoke in a vacuum chamber. Later I held a glass of water, gazing at it for what seemed like an immensely long time, its utility swallowed up in its beauty and it seemed that the whole Earth existed within that glass and the thought occurred to me: “I’m in the presence of God.”
Ten years later I was staying in a tiny monastery deep in a Thai forest. I had been living and meditating there for close to a month. My mind was still — still in the way a tuning fork rests after being struck for a long time. I sat outside watching the fading light graze the trees, feeling egoless and empty of thought. Butterflies erupted from the green foliage in a movement that seemed so excessively beautiful I was thunderstruck and as I looked, I thought: “Damn, this is exactly like mescaline.”
It’s not just me who has made the link between psychedelic drugs and meditation. Indeed, the link between psychedelics and spiritual experience was the first line of inquiry Timothy Leary and his cohorts pursued in their 1960s Harvard experiments. In the 1990s, Dr. Rick Strassman ran a series of experiments using a powerful psychedelic known as DMT, and he too noticed the similarity: “[The effect of] DMT has a similarity with experiences that are possible with a lot of meditation,” he said.
Scientists are currently conducting separate studies on psychedelics and meditation — both are being trialed to treat the same conditions. A review study by the Journal of the American Medical Association, released in March this year, found that meditation may be as effective as medication in treating conditions such as depression and anxiety. Hot on the heels of this study was the Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study at NYU’s Bluestone Center for Clinical Research, which found that Psilocybin (the active drug in “magic mushrooms”) was effective in treating anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients. There are now dozens of studies that document how both meditation and psychedelics can treat depression, addiction, anxiety and PTSD.
So if psychedelics produce similar effects to long periods of meditation and other austere religious practices, could we have stumbled upon what Strassman calls “the spirit molecule”? Are psychedelics an alternative to spiritual practices?
Hardly, say the Buddhists. The second noble truth of the Buddha is that “the origin of suffering is the attachment to desire.” Psychedelics are by their nature an experience, a strange and beautiful one but often elusive. This creates a craving to have the experience again. It is this craving that is the Buddhist definition of discontent. Rather than freeing the mind from attachment, psychedelics create more.
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/tru..._are_they_everything_theyre_cracked_up_to_be/
