13. Alternative explanations to religious experience are bizarre:
a. Divine Intervention
b. Demonic Intervention
c. Space Alien Intervention
d. Schizophrenia.
e. Intellectual, dialectical theory (aka. Mental masturbation)-----which is
Post by Reginald CarpenterBecause, He was a prince of the "Kshatriya" warrior caste, either His
father the King or He the prince on His own authority could have gotten
"soma" and/ or "visionary plants" for His personal usage anytime of day
or night that He ever wanted to use any of that stuff. What do you
think that they all were used to smoking in those pipes/ water pipes in
the family castle; "duh," "old Yelper"?! LOL. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<
There is so much "bullcrap" that has been said and taught about all of this
for so long, that to separate the fact from fiction takes a lifetime of
study of indology. That's why I have so many damn old books published by
Motilal Banarsidass, in Rubbermaid storage boxes, that I need a crane if I
can ever get them moved into storage to get them out of my hair.
Although they may have been potheads in the Sakya household, pot is not what
I am referring too.
There are a lot of misunderstandings involved with this issue and they are
not my misunderstandings, but I sorted them all out for myself years ago.
Gautama's father, Suddhodana, was a Tribal/Clan leader of just a small
little area centering on Kapilavastu (in Nepal) at that time had been
subsumed into the Magadha Empire, which was still only a small part of the
continent. Suddhodana was the head of the Sakya Tribe, which was now
controlled by another clan. He was not "King of India," as so many people
believe and his influence and "authority" was tiny. This is often
misunderstood and overstated. So lets get that one out of the way first.
King Bimbisara of Biharm is said to have had "conquered" Magadha and was
the "The King." (Elvis) of Magadha a much larger Kingdom, and who lived in
Rajagriha. He was father of King Ajase, who is said to have killed him by
starving him to death in a dungeon. They were of the Harayanka family (not
Sakyas). Truth is, Bimbasara only inheritesd the Kingdom which his family
had already conquered. and next to the Brahaman Priests for the powerful in
the area.
The Brahman/Vedic Ruling Caste priests at the time and for many centuries
before, ruled the roost and were at their height of power. It was a Caste
issue. This time was when the power of the Brahmans was being questioned
byt he various family states. ONLY the Brahmans were allowed to use the
Soma and then only by directive by the high priests. It is not something
they were "smoking in those pipes." The Yogins in the forest were Illegal
and breaking the law. The main leaders who were inspiring people to take
off and "come fly with me" (Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen, sang by Sinatra)
or "fly Jefferson Airplane, gets you there on time," --(Donovan) were the
bands of ascetics who were disobeying the laws and breaking the caste system
rules, were hunted down like animals and they were part of a general
movement that was arising in opposition to the Brahmans stranglehold on the
people--which was all over the continent.
Initially, after leaving his father's house, Gautama followed 2 established
Brahmans in Benares, first Arada Kalama and then Udraka Ramaputra. This was
BEFORE he went into the Jungle and lasted for a longer period then is
understood in common stories, as did his period of acetism in the Jungle.
<<<<<<<<<<<So, the point is that the king's son, prince/ Lord Shakyamuni,
did NOT
even have to ever leave home in search of any d-a-m-ned drugs, "magic
potents", or "visionary plants" in the first place if the attainment of
enlightenment is all based & dependent Upon a person doing that --
that's so ridiculous it AIN'T even funny. Again, it is NOT necessary or
a requirement in Buddhism in general, particularly NOT in so called
Nichiren Buddhism, for anyone & everyone to have a "direct experience"
or a "full Bodhi tree experience" either with or without using drugs to
attain Buddhahood/ enlightenment, period! <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
LOL.
Well I'm sure that were you to understand, then you would already
understand.
Its NOTHING but direct experience that motivated Gautama. That is how it
works. He was leaving the dogma and entering the realm of direct
experience.
All the "bullcrap," passed down as "history of Buddhism," to China and
Japan and even within India, was entirely confused and from La la land.
And no matter how I'd love to be able to say, visionary plant use combined
with the Yogic practice (of chanting) is not a "requirement." I have to say,
"Sorry Charlie," If that was true, we'd already have World Peace and it
would have happened sometime in the 14th century!! OR even in the 2nd---3rd
Century AD....or EVEN a much longer time ago then that. "Good Golly Miss
Molly".....(Little Richard)" So SORRY!
SO no OFFENSE to Nichiren Daishonin, but he was a product of the teachers of
the most hairbrained and confused histories of Buddhism ever, in a most
hairbrained country and even HE was not omniscient and had to TRY to make
sense of what HE knew, was so much confused rubbish.
What we do know is that the Daishonin, as a young boy had had a bizarre
hallucinatory experience of Bodhisattva Kokuzo, when he was praying to
become the "wisest person in all Japan." as it is said, he "fell into a
swoon," and later and just prior to his announcemnt of the Daimoku, while
http://www.us-japan.org/edomatsu/ikegami/revel.html and when it is said, he
looked into a river and saw himself as the embodiment of Ichinen Sanzen,
And at Tatsunokuchi, under severe stress, he had a profound experience that
further changed him. It is NO mistake to say that it was his "direct
experience" that was his prime point and main Motivator that gave him the
"authority" to attempt to revamp Buddhism, as he also had to figure out
just where he personally stood in the Buddhist/Lotus Sutra pantheon and HOW
in "buddha's name," he was going to "save" people.
This establishes that The Daishonin's "prime point" was his 'direct
experience."
The only circumstantial evidence that support the use of Entheogens by the
1. In the 13th Century in Japan, like many parts of the world, people were
experiencing major outbreaks of Ergotamine poisoning. Children were also
more prone to these effects.
2. Beni-tengu-take- the Kinoko--(Amanita muscaria and Amanita pantheria)
were eaten as delicacies for their hallucinogenic/religious visions by
Shamans, buddhist priests, and hindus and Taoists in India, China, Japan,
Siberia, Korea and Tibet. The FIRST question asked by the Emperor of China
when the first Buddhist Preist showed up was, "Do you have the Amrita (the
fabled "elixer of immortality") (Do you know the recipe?)"
3. Accidental Mushroom "poisoning," was common.
4. Psilocybin containing Kinoko were/are plentiful.
5. Eating Lotus was popular in Japan--both the non-psychoactive types and
the most sought after psychoactive strains, which were imported.
6. The name "Nichiren," which the Daishonin explained had a "secret
meaning," meaning "Sun Lotus," is actually the ancient Indian name for the
most Psychoactive strain of Lotus.
7. Priests on Mt. Hei ate Mushrooms for religious visions.
8.Now beyond this speculation as to the Daishonin's use, accidental or
on-purpose, there is the content of his understanding which is Lotus Sutra
based on THAT experience and what Tien-tai also taught. The "Lotus Sutra
Samadhi" where the practitioner chanted both Namu Amida Butsu and Nam Myoho
rengi kyo as part of the meditation ritual, involving the process of
concentration (stopping the mind) and Observing the Mind. (shikan)
originating in even pre-buddhist india and can even be found in Egyptian
teachings in the Sect that followed the god Ptah (Pu-tah). In all of these,
the SAME experience was fundamental.
9. Furthermore, The origin of the myth of Jogyo (Skt. Visishtacaritra) can
be traced
back to the very most ANCIENT vedic teachings regarding SOMA/Amrita and in
fact He--being the first and formost human sage in the world, borrowed later
by
the Lotus Sutra authors, was the main SOMA dispensary!! THAT WAS HIS JOB!
10. The Gosho is peppered with the use of the term "Amrita," usually in the
Daishonin's most mystical and mysterious and poetic passages. Amrita was
known as the "Food of the Gods" and according to the Daishonin, chanting
Daimoku was the Amrita and was feeding the Shoten Zenjins to appease them
and keep them happy. The Daishonin also mentions the "drops of fluid in the
brain." So I think it is sheer idiocy to think he was not very conversant
and much aware of real meaning of Amrita. I am sure that the writings of
I-ching and his explanations of how buddhism came to China, was well-known
to the Daishonin. The "search for the eixer of immortality" was the most
sought after quest!
The real meaning of hindu "Cow Worship" came from the ancient use of
psychoactive mushrooms that grew on COW Pucky ,,,,AND that the Cows
themselves ate the mushrooms and the people drank the COW pee. People found
that Soma is better and stronger after it was filtered through the COW
kidneys and that is what AMRITA was----a heightened form of Soma. Both the
Psilocin and Ibotenic varieties are better when PEED out then in their
pre-eaten state.
It is far easier to prove the usage of Visionary Plants by Gautama, his
early teachers, whether the Brahman ones or the non Brahman sages in the
Jungle, the authors and purveyors of Mahayana, Chinese, Siberian and
Tibetan Buddhism and Zen and Shingon Buddhists, then it is to prove
Nichiren's usage. Regardless, the Daishonin, knew that the fundamental
practice was this Shikan Yoga and he devised a way for the common people, to
practice, by maintaing faith on the Lotus Sutra which he saw in his own
"direct experience."
11. There ARE other ways to change one's brain chemistry to help produce or
accentuate the use of Visionary Plants during meditation. Fasting, whether
on purpose or because of persecution and starving, near-death experiences,
severe disruptive events (forces).
It is not exactly SERENDIPITY-(NOT) that a starving ascetic or exiled sage,
would be nibbling unknown mushrooms, and other plants, while sitting out in
the forest or jungle for years on end. There are over 2000 plants growing
in the wild that contain psychoactive substances.
M.D. Merlin. "Archaeological Evidence for the Tradition of Psychoactive
Plant Use in the Old World". Economic Botany 57 (3): 295-323.
12. DIRECT EVIDENCE. In other more well-known term, "Actual Proof"
a. Divine Intervention
b. Demonic Intervention
c. Space Alien Intervention
d. Schizophrenia.
14. Important to realize that the best Soma Amrita Plants were considered
rare and EXPENSIVE, in all these countries, and there were no very
detailed Mycology Text Books back in the ancient times. No Identification
handbooks for the field. Even today, experienced Mycologists can be
fooled. In those days there were a number of alchemy sources only known
and studied as a specialty by ancient Alchemists and these were later said
to belong to the Brahman Caste. Only the smartest people sought out this
information and people that taught the idientification of these plants
were rare and held in high esteem.
15.
"There are old mushroom hunters.....and brave mushroom hunters......but
there are no old and brave mushroom hunters. "
What do People and Mushrooms have in common?
"being kept in the dark and fed shit."
dc (now continue to read the below please......)
Meditationist Anti-entheogen Propaganda/Taboo
--- by Michael Hoffman
(who is pretty sharp but still not there and I have disagreed with him on
some major issues, but most of what he writes is very true, although he
is hampered by a Christian background and has many misunderstandings about
Buddhist "Direct Experience." -dc)
"An entheogen magazine needs an article. Why not go all the way over the
top, as always? Why hold anything back? That whole attitude of
moderation and holding back is what lets the meditationists steamroll all
over the entheogenists in all the annoying, tepid, and cautionary special
issues on psychedelics in the spirituality magazines such as Gnosis and
Tricycle.
Even the entheogenists strive so hard for moderation, they end up working
against themselves, putting forward such tepid, cautious, self-effacing
theories of entheogens -- because the editors like to publish such
self-depreciating articles. Authors are also wary of a bad type of "other
direction" -- unserious zaniness and kookiness as spaceships and flying
saucers and ESP, avoiding the harmful-joke side of Leary and McKenna.
I believe in a different kind of caution -- caution in grandiose promises
for how entheogens will save the world and teach everyone to be ethical.
I make a promise for entheogens that is more extreme than other writers,
yet also more bounded.
Entheogens *won't* save the world and won't teach people to be ethical,
but they do have a far higher potential for leading to enlightenment and
mystic experiencing than meditation, drumming, hyperventilation,
contemplation, or chanting, and the latter methods should be considered
"alternative" or "augmentation" of the "main" and "normal" method, which
is entheogens.
Entheogens are more reliable, universally effective, and intense, to the
extent that we can say that sitting meditation is practically a way of
avoiding, not attaining, religious experiencing.
*If* entheogenists and meditationists both agree that the goal is deep
mental transformation and intense mystic experiencing, then there is no
contest: entheogens run circles around meditation and make a laughingstock
of meditation, showing it up as what it really is: a travesty of, and an
avoidance of, actual religious insight and actual religious experiencing.
Some people are bothered because today's laws make it impossible to have
this easy, natural, classic entheogenic method of core religious
experiencing and insight -- but that is a separate, distinct problem.
My main focus as a theorist is to set the record straight: keeping the
average person and the practical world in mind, the only way meditation
can be held as spiritually superior to entheogens is by defining
spirituality in such a way as to remove all classic, intense religious
experiencing and the clear insight that goes along with the experiencing.
Such a move is being made now by those meditationists who know that they
don't have a chance of competing against entheogens for religious efficacy
and delivering the promised goods. The last-ditch effort of the
religionists who jealously envy and shun entheogens, proclaiming theirs as
the better and purer way, leads to gutting the religious experiencing out
from religion, leaving today's American Buddhism -- as hollow, empty, and
superficial as their parents' literalist and liberal Christianity ever was.
These strong statements would benefit from grounding by some actual absurd
quotes from e.g. Zig Zag Zen, Gnosis special issue on psychedelics.
Charles Badiner, coeditor with Alex Gray of the book Zig Zag Zen, did a
good job of exposing the inanity of these reigning Buddhist diminishers of
entheogens. Such Buddhist diminishers of entheogens are essentially the
same as low Christian "believers".
Many Boomers abandoned Christianity for Buddhism, but they are like
converts from low Islam to low Christianity, not really converting, but
just swapping the skin on the same old software, going from one
non-religion to a competing non-religion, or from a degraded form of one
religion to the degraded or degenerate form of another religion. It's all
so fake, so false, so empty, that low Christianity and the low form of
Buddhism that has largely replaced it.
Boomers were sickened of low, empty Christianity, but we ought to be so
fed up with low, empty religion of all brands.
I'm not putting high, experiential, entheogenic religion on a pedestal --
life is as existentially meaning-free as ever -- but all I'm asking, and
it is so little to ask, is that bona fide religious experiencing be
recognized and credited, putting an end to the domination of the foolish
and absurd claim that meditation is superior to entheogens, a claim that
only appears to hold up by portraying entheogens in the worst possible
light -- the conditions of prohibition, basically -- and portraying
meditation in the best light, which requires discarding intense mystic
experiencing and deep mental transformation as a goal and instead
substituting perfectly vague pseudo-goals instead, mixed with superficial
emotionalism.
Some example passages are needed; I'm generalizing about the spirit of
what I've read so many times, the style of the tired old refrains of
Buddhist defense and backpedalling.
Low Christians and low Buddhists were both forced to admit that entheogens
are reported by people to cause mystic experiencing often, while
meditation rarely causes it -- such low religion of all brands then had to
go to work on putting a spin on that fact to diminish it with all their
might; the writings of low religionists reek of what they are: false
apologetics and PR, *propaganda*.
Enough of this anti-entheogen propaganda on the part of low religionists
and tepid mid-level religionists -- it doesn't have a leg to stand on, and
I can't respect any entheogen scholar who doesn't firmly treat that
propaganda what it is.
Mid-level religionists such as quasi-official Christian mystics and
American Buddhists damn entheogens with faint praise and diminish them to
death as "providing a glimpse but nothing more" (if they repeat it enough
times, they get entheogenists to concede its truth, for a little while).
At this point, most entheogen scholars, upon finding discovering this
attitude, are taken aback, surprised -- they don't know what to make of
it. They haven't yet seen the vulgar, self-serving, insincere, and
cowardly motives for that attitude of wanting entheogens to disappear.
Badiner's book Zig Zag Zen did a good job of bringing out the nonsense of
the anti-entheogen meditation position in its full absurdity -- it's a
good enough book so that it was unreadable to someone who has had enough
of the bunk status quo among what feels like "official, orthodox,
establishment" Buddhism.
The Boomers vowed they "won't get fooled again", but their switch from
bunk Christianity to bunk Buddhism shows that their new boss is really
just the same as the old boss: from literalist, low-level Jesus to
literalist, low-level Buddha; from a flattened and retarded Christianity
to a flattened and retarded Buddhism -- it's no conversion at all, just
the same old mundane, placebo religion.
Without entheogens, these "religions" are barely worthy of the title, and
to make believe that they are more valuable and authentic than entheogens
is a terrible falsehood of the highest order, a falsehood that any
entheogen researcher with a love for truth and calling a spade a spade
should call out immediately. There is still some work ahead to grasp in
detail just how great a falsity it is to elevate meditation above
entheogens.
It's the most absurd proposal that has been made, that one must spend time
meditating and using entheogens to believably pronounce on this subject.
We are already drowning in data on this point, that according to self
reporting, entheogens very often produce experiences and insights
described as strongly mystical, while most people report no very
noteworthy experiences or insights through meditation.
And this is the population we should care about: the masses of typical
people who are not about to spend 30 years of meditation with a hope of a
fraction of a percent chance of gaining insight or worthwhile experience.
The slow path has been given a chance and the results are in: it is a
failure by any reasonable standard of measure.
How dare the proponents of that path of failure claim that their method is
superior and more effective than entheogens, as though their method had
any satisfactory degree of efficacy at all. The best keyword describing
the typical result of trying the way of meditation is 'disappointment'.
Whatever it is that such meditation produces in the typical real-world
case, it isn't deep mental transformation, profound insight, and religious
experiencing.
Fear of genuine religious experiencing and insight causes spiritual death
of the conventional assumed self and the destruction of the foundation of
its worldmodel, so it's understandable that mid-level spiritual
religionists avoid and taboo entheogens.
But it is time for entheogen scholars to stop being surprised at that
backpedalling attitude, to realize what's going on, and set the record
straight: any anti-entheogen religion is mid-level religion at best, and
cannot rightly claim to be more effective and legitimate than the
entheogen path, which is venerable, proven, classic, and full of great
potential.
If any mode of religion can claim to be best -- keeping in mind normal,
typical people and practical life -- entheogens have a far stronger claim
to be the older, more effective, and more legitimate method than
meditation. What is the right relation of meditation and entheogens,
measured by the standard of efficacy of deep mental transformation and
profound insight and awe inspiring religious experiencing? Using
meditation to augment entheogens.
Only by denying these clearly compelling standards, and by ignoring the
typical person and the limitations of practical life, can one claim that
meditation is "more effective and has greater potential" than entheogens.
It remains to be explained, what the various factors that motivate the
meditationists to portray meditation as superior to entheogens. For one
thing, only certain meditationist statements are published, and only
certain entheogenist statements are published. There's a conspiracy of
the magazine editors to assemble special issues that are supposedly to
"cover" entheogens, but are more like motivated by "covering over"
entheogens and keeping them properly suppressed in their place.
These magazines are founded on the lie, the pretense that meditation is
true and pure and traditional and effective and legit and honorable, while
entheogens are innovative, heretical, dirty, ineffective, illegitimate,
ineffective, inferior. That claim is so extremely and perfectly false, so
opposite from the truth, and so obviously hollow propaganda. Why do the
publishers do this?
Why do the writers that are published go along with this deceitful game,
in which the meditationists pretend to believe that entheogens are
inferior, and the supposed defenders of entheogens pretend to put up a
little bit of a feeble battle, asserting that entheogens "are too" a
legitimate simulation of meditation.
It is as though the only articles permitted are those which, in the end,
prop up the anti-entheogen status quo by admitting that entheogens are
more potent than meditation but then denying that potency is relevant to
religious practice and insight.
It is hard to imagine such a "special issue on the psychedelic path"
including an article that speaks truth, that points out that, in practical
reality, the meditation path -- which has been given all the breaks and
has reached its potential -- is totally ineffective in comparison to the
early reports of entheogens and is likely to be blown out of the water
were entheogens ever decriminalized and given a reasonable chance, given
even one percent of the opportunity the meditation path has been given.
Meditationists are likely motivated by the knowledge that if the story
were ever told straight and started to be accepted, the status quo view of
the quasi-official Christian mystics and the official Buddhist
meditationists ("entheogens are comparatively illegitimate, only a
distorted glimpse of what our truer method delivers") would collapse into
discredit overnight.
This status quo, which tricks even the entheogen "defenders" into
diminishing entheogens and appearing to concede the greater legitimacy and
legacy of meditation and other "acceptable mysterious esoteric paths", has
some marks of a taboo: because everyone knows so damn well that entheogens
*are* undoubtedly enlightenment in a pill, and that religion most
definitely *can* be "reduced" to chemistry, they put a taboo on
entheogens.
"You can, indeed you must, try any path, any crazy esoteric religion, but
whatever you do, don't admit that the real effective method is
entheogens." It's time for entheogen researchers to quit playing along as
pawns in this game of diminishing and taboo'ing entheogens; it's time to
call the meditationists on this and maintain firmly that the evidence
shows entheogens to be the main path, and meditation a weak derivative --
*not* the other way around as the status quo asserts.
Entheogenists must quit being wimps who are afraid to make any strong
assertions, while avoiding the other mistake of going off the deep end by
overpromising the potential of religious experiencing. We must accurately
account for the degree of efficacy of meditation and entheogens, strive to
account for the potentials and risks and hampering limitations on
entheogens, as well as the risks of meditation, such as failing to gain
insight or worthwhile experience after 30 years of meditation.
Legitimacy of entheogens vs. meditation
A common, possibly dominant position today is to grudgingly acknowledge
entheogens as a religious path, though they maintain that drug-free
religion is affirmed as superior, purer, authentic, and traditional; my
position is the opposite: I grudgingly acknowledge drug-free religion as a
religious path, though I maintain that pure entheogenic-based religion is
superior, purer, authentic, and traditional.
Like Mircea Eliade initially said about the Amanita-using Siberian
shamans, most scholars say entheogens are a degraded and recent
degenerated religious technique; I say the opposite, that entheogen-free
religion is the degraded and recent degenerated technique. Entheogenists
such as Ralph Metzner are lukewarm fence-straddlers such as I must not be,
who "defend" entheogens by saying they are *as* legitimate as drug-free
meditation.
Entheogenic religious experience is *not* as legitimate as drug-free
meditation, because the latter falls short in legitimacy. An extreme but
plausible position is to simply assert that entheogenic religious
experience is more legitimate than drug-free meditation. There are five
0. The clueless rationalist or rabid humanist position -- Neither
drug-free meditation nor entheogens are legitimate, because no religious
experiencing has any legitimacy; any mystic state is just psychosis or
hallucinatory. Religion is demonic mixture of psychotic mental breakdown
and an oppressive power game of the witch doctor in collaboration with
Attila the Hun to manipulate and enslave people. This is the Ayn Rand or
rabid humanist position. This actually forms an interesting pair with
position 3, that any approach is fully legitimate. Most such people have
never experienced the mystic state of cognition; this position usually
rests on complete inexperience. This is throwing the baby out with the
bathwater: religion is a bunch of mad lies harmful to humanity, therefore
the mystic state of cognition is a bunch of man lies harmful to humanity.
1. The absolutist orthodox position -- Entheogenic religious experience is
not legitimate at all. Only drug-free meditation is legitimate.
1.1 The extremist-orthodox position -- Drug-free meditation is fully
religiously legitimate. Entheogenic religious experiencing is almost
absolutely illegitimate. Nothing is impossible, so it is hypothetically
possible to have a legitimate religious experiencing via entheogens, but
such is so exceedingly rare, this is not how religious experiencing
generally works. Entheogens could hypothetically work on rare occasion,
but this rarity only proves the basic illegitimacy of entheogens.
2. The pseudo-progressive orthodox position -- Entheogenic religious
experience is moderately legitimate, but less legitimate than drug-free
meditation. The orthodox might consider this a progressive view, though
they very grudgingly concede that entheogens have a little bit of
legitimacy.
3. The pseudo-progressive spiritualist position -- Entheogenic religious
experience is as legitimate as drug-free meditation; they are both fully
legitimate, as is any combination of techniques. Many entheogen
spiritualists believe this. They consider this the most open-minded and
generous position.
4. The radical-progressive position -- Entheogenic religious experience is
more legitimate than drug-free meditation; drug-free meditation is only
moderately legitimate. I venture that it is held by very few scholars --
perhaps Ott, Arthur, and Heinrich. You have to be highly aware of the
history of entheogenic religion to be able to even consider this position.
4.9 The extremist-progressive position -- Entheogenic religious
experience is fully religiously legitimate, and drug-free meditation is
practically entirely illegitimate, with the theoretical possibility of
exceptions that are so exceedingly rare as to only prove the point. To
say that drug-free meditation is illegitimate is not to say that it's an
impossible technique of reaching enlightenment, but only to say it's all
but impossible. Drug-free religious experiencing is almost absolutely
illegitimate. Nothing is impossible, so it is hypothetically possible to
have a legitimate religious experiencing via drug-free meditation, but
such is so exceedingly rare, this is not how religious experiencing
generally works. Drug-free meditation could hypothetically work on rare
occasion, but this rarity only proves the basic illegitimacy of drug-free
meditation.
5. The absolutist entheogenist position -- All drug-free religious
experience is illegitimate, and the only legitimate religious experience
is entheogenic. Anyone holding position 4 must often consider whether
this is true. The other groups are unable to even consider it or conceive
of it as a possible position. It is not clear if anyone has ever held
this position, yet this position remains an important one to theoretically
consider; it helps to define this entire spectrum of positions.
6. The rationalist computer-tripper position -- Loose cognition is
valuable, and can be triggered by entheogens or meditation, but religious
or mystic experiencing is not legitimate, it's just an irrational reaction
of confused fantasy. This position was expressed by an entheogen-using
technologist to me online -- that loose cognition is valuable, but
religious experiencing is not legitimate. I dismiss this as inexperience.
I maintain that if you are an entheogen-using technologist, you will
sooner or later have an experience that you qualify as "religious" (or a
synonym).
You can combine meditation with entheogens. The only question is the
legitimacy of drug-free meditation as opposed to entheogenic-assisted
meditation, or perhaps we should say meditation-assisted entheogen use if
we hold entheogens rather than meditation to be the crucial component of
attaining the mystic cognitive state.
Holders of position 2 are pulled by a gravitational force toward the
simpler extremism of position 1. Why not just ditch all the complex
qualifiers and simply reject any religious legitimacy of entheogens?
Holders of position 4 are pulled by a gravitational force toward the
simpler extremism of position 5. Why not just ditch all the complex
qualifiers and simply reject any religious legitimacy of drug-free
meditation?
But rationality and evidence keeps us in the more complex middle ground,
debating positions 2, 3, and 4 -- which is to say, debating whether
meditation or entheogens is more religiously legitimate. All the thinkers
that matter hold position 2, 3, or 4. Meditation certainly has some
religious legitimacy.
Entheogens certainly have some religious legitimacy. Really I am most
interested in the play between these positions. The most interesting
that meditation is more legitimate than entheogens, or that they are
equally legitimate.
It is relatively radical to adopt position 4, that entheogens are actually
*more legitmate* than meditation. There is little to be gained in
advancing all the way to the extreme position 5, that meditation has no
legitimacy whatsoever -- however, position 4 inherently flirts with
position 5, and anyone holding 4 must be open to considering why 5 could
or could not be true.
In a debate exercise, anyone capable of holding 4 must also be capable of
representing position 5; I could make a reasoned argument that meditation
has no legitimacy and only entheogens have legitimacy.
When we talk of religious legitimacy, there are two senses of the term. A
technique may be "legitimate" in that it can produce the mystic cognitive
state, or "legitimate" in that it can bring the mystic cognitive state so
fully and repeatedly and efficiently that a mind can construct full
enlightenment.
My position sometimes is 4, sometimes 4.9, depending on what goal I'm
assuming; to merely attain the mystic cognitive state, meditation does
work but only on fairly rare occasion -- to attain full enlightenment,
meditation almost never works. Meditation has a hypothetical legitimacy;
one *could* become enlightened by it, but in practice, I don't see that
happening in any significant degree; meditation is the wrong and basically
ineffective way; that it works on such rare occasions proves it has no
significant legitimacy; (drug-free) meditation is "illegitimate" in the
sense of barely working, or working despite its overall ineffective
methods.
Meditation has only incidental, haphazard, crude, indirect legitimacy --
it can work but only despite itself. We can talk of degrees within
position 4: if you hold that entheogens are more religiously legitimate
than drug-free meditation, the question is *how much more*?
I say that entheogens are a thousand times more efficient than drug-free
meditation, and are thoroughly historically proven as traditional beyond
antiquity, while drug-free meditation has no pedigree and is a relatively
recent degenerated mock version of religious technique, a kind of
cargo-cult religous technique that tries to attain the mystic state by
sitting because the successful entheogen-based meditators are sitting.
When I say that meditation is illegitimate, I am not asserting that it's
impossible that drug-free meditation could bring enlightenment -- I'm just
saying that such a technique is the wrong way and works through haphazard
accident and acts to impede enlightenment in practically all cases. So my
position is 4 infinitessimally approaching 5 but never quite hitting 5 --
or my position is 5 qualified.
As a method of attaining enlightenment as defined by the ideas I'm pulling
together, drug-free meditation is practically entirely illegitimate.
Drug-free meditation in practice serves to prevent rather than enable
enlightenment, and in that sense it is literally the wrong way to try to
gain such enlightenment, as it prevents progress toward the goal.
Drug-free meditation is actually a way of *avoiding* enlightenment. The
fact that enlightenment may arrive anyway says more about the profound
power of enlightenment, or the integrity of the ideas constituting
enlightenment, rather than the effectiveness of the technique. Plants may
grow where you have spread salt, but that does not establish salt as a
fertilizer.
Drug-free meditation is basically an ineffective way of seeking
enlightenment. Entheogen use is basically the effective way of seeking
enlightenment --however, rational cultivation of world-models -- a certain
kind of metaphysical philosophizing or theory-construction -- is also
required for attaining enlightenment, according to the ideas and theory
I'm pulling together.
Meditation versus Entheogens
My goal is not to make a difference and not to persuade anyone. My goal
is to precisely define a system, not to show that it is plausible. I
leave it to the future or to others to defend the system against others.
My struggle is only against the ideas in my own head.
It is a full task just to pull these ideas together. And my mental
constitution is that of a frontiersman, not a polished persuader and
editor. A short comic book is the greatest and hardest task I can think
of. In today's political climate, I can't be any more prominent than that
anyway. I guess I'll just keep on like this, it is enough of a challenge.
I despise credibility. I doubt it achieves much. Many people have been
seen as credible, and have only contributed a lot of misguided ideas. I
look out to all the people, but then reflect solipsistically that there is
really no one to convince but me. I'm only writing for myself, and it
happens that other people can eavesdrop on my private reflections and run
with the ideas, writing books that I can then selfishly read.
Consider you & Ken Wilbur on some podium at some New Age Conference, you
are dialoguing from some Contrapuntal positions - "Drug-Free Meditation"
Versus "Entheogenic Immediacy" for instance.
Wilber may know a thing or two about entheogens. His essay in the recent
book Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps is the second-most
entheogen-oriented essay in the book. His main diagram out of all the
diagrams in all his books is on page 43 of his most recent book, A Theory
of Everything.
In that quadrant diagram, the item that stands out the most is the circle
"also: altered states". Underestimate Wilber at your own peril. Do you
think he could possibly be ignorant of entheogens given *his* breadth of
reading? He has even recently praised DanceSafe as one of the most
http://members.ams.chello.nl/f.visser3/wilber/mcdermott2.html -- "...
Emanuel Sferios, founder of DanceSafe, had a meeting with CIIS officials
to discuss a join venture between CIIS and DanceSafe. DanceSafe is the
largest and most effective drug information organization in America, and
Emanuel wanted to partner with CIIS in creating a nationally recognized
center for responsible harm-reduction drug policies. This could be a model
program with a profound and far-reaching impact. Emanuel reports that CIIS
was very excited at the prospect and eagerly set up meetings..."
I build a bridge between Wilber and direct, no-bullshit coverage of
entheogens. He has written interesting points about how peak experiences
interact with a given level of psychospiritual development in his recent
books and essays.
The more I look for points of disagreement with Wilber, the more I think
he agrees with me but is too chicken to go far enough telling things like
they are. I think Wilber agrees with me but I am better at portraying and
pulling together a certain set of ideas that resides at the most important
point in his diagram -- I consider myself to be bringing Watts'
cybernetics ideas to fullness, to fill in the most important part of
Wilber's framework.
Wilber is not wrong, so much as he is a super-broad theorist who has not
focused on entheogens quite as much as they deserve but he is moving in
that direction. But his innovation may be past, and a new theorist is
needed to position entheogens in the center stage. Thus I consider
positioning and emphasizing ideas crucial; styling is everything.
Wilber has the wrong styling. I have essentially found the right styling,
the right way to spin the ideas together to short-circuit the egoic system
of thinking. Wilber does not short-circuit the egoic system of thinking.
It would be hard to pin down a specific point of disagreement between me
and Wilber -- just a different goal and style and combination of ideas,
and way of positioning them. I have been reading him critically lately,
and he is pretty hard to criticize. He is good at avoiding saying wrong
things. He doesn't say the right things in the right way -- but neither
does he say wrong things.
The audience is hostile or indifferent to your position, willing to
dismiss you without really "hearing" you, on the slightest pretext...
I am indifferent to them, so all is fair. Wilber has never given a
millimeter to the pop masses and neither will I. He has never done author
appearances or given lectures.
Wilber meditates and I do not respect him for it. He elects himself as a
great representative and spokesman for the importance of meditation, but
then he falls short in his theorizing. If meditation is so great, how
come such a great theorist does it and dogmatically asserts it is
necessary, but has not come across the idea sets Watts did, about
self-control cybernetics?
A thousand people make a thousand demands of me to meet their incorrect
expectations. I may take the time to refute them, but I do not have time
to waste. Waste *your* time, but don't expect me to waste mine to please
the ignorant 3-year olds out there. I urge them to ignore me if they need
their theorists to meditate.
I have no time for nonsense and pandering. I only write for the
enlightened. I only preach to the choir. Let the choir proseletize, let
someone or no one else I don't have time. It is too much to expect
anything from me but my personal thinking, that other people may eavesdrop
on.
Such are the frailties of the yeaners, journeyers & seekers & worse still
for those that think that they have arrived somewhere!You, Saint Sisyphus,
wish to make a difference.
One of my shocking blasphemies is that enlightenment makes no difference.
It is profoundly worthless. I may criticize, reject, and condemn various
notions, but I am not terribly intent upon changing how people think. I
do not take it for granted, or automatically assume, that I'm out to
change the world.
Will Truth change the world? Maybe, but maybe not. Do people even want
to know the truth? Do they even want to take the red pill, offered in the
movie The Matrix, and wake up to a different mental model with different
pro's and con's?
"You talk about a revolution... you better free your mind instead." It is
enough of a challenge for one philosopher, to put forth a systematic
hypothesis about ego-death, much less persuade skeptics of its truth and
also improve the world.
In the context, forcing Ken baby to concede some points would be a major
victory! :-)
What points? He should concede or admit that drug-free meditation is
*not* the key to direct realization. The problem is, we don't know what
Wilber believes, and one of his hallmarks is to evolve his ideas and leave
his static-minded audience in the dust.
We know what Wilber has written in his most recent postings and books and
online essays, but he is very much a moving target, headed rapidly in the
direction of writing about "altered states". What does the term "Ken
Wilber's ideas" mean, or "his position on entheogens"?
Remember how absolutely and radically Huxley's view on entheogens changed.
He wrote the most bone-headed, clueless, misguided, propaganda-riddled
worthless rot about altered states, immediately before his Mescaline
epiphany.
The old Huxley attitudes died completely, and new Huxley attitudes were
born in a new life. So with Wilber; he will be just another one of those
"as nothing" theorists: "All my previous theorizing was put to shame when
I finally experienced fully the mystic altered state." But would he admit
it?
I suppose he is independently wealthy now, but in today's ongoing war, it
would be dangerous for him to admit that entheogens are the most effective
enabler of the "direct experience of the divine" he keeps talking about --
and the meditation he kept endorsing is the wrong way, serving to actually
block the direct experience that he said it was intended to produce.
Forcing him in front of an audience, in particular. At a very deep...
I hope to read and reply to the remainder of Kurt's posting (not the arbn
Kurt of course--dc). I am printing the thread.
Complicity of Western Buddhism in prohibition persecution
dc:The simple truth, is that historically, when a person who has had a
deep religious experience triggered by either Entheogen use, or due to a
practice of a severe austerities (trying to make endogenous psychedelics
to be manufactured in large quantities in the brain), when they go to try
to explain this to the people around them, people tend to doubt their word
or dispute.
MH:One of my main themes lately is beware, Western Buddhism is just the
same old bunk Christianity -- medium-level, liberal, nothing-more-than
moralist Christianity -- dressed up in Buddhist drag. Take off the
Eastern costume, and you find a non-mystical liberal Christian there.
Have Western religionists *really* made any progress since moving from
liberal Christianity to popular Buddhism?
Everyone is on guard against Christianity -- they ought to be on guard
against its supposed replacement, Western Buddhism.
"We won't get fooled again... Here comes the new boss, same as the old
boss." -- The Who, with album cover showing the band of artists zipping
subsequent to saluting the spiritual monolith. They have a question for
us: Who's next?
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=A2d27gjvrj6ic
Official mainstream religion is guilty of a massive cover-up of the
entheogenic nature, origin, heart, and spirit of religion. The world of
magazine Buddhism says that meditation is more effective, original, and
legitimate than entheogens, but that is a lie and an untruth and the
opposite of the truth -- a falsity propped up by decapitating religion and
presenting the body as though it is the spirit.
If you haven't read materials such as the anti-entheogenists' arguments in
Zig Zag Zen, then you need to, to judge my claims and know what has
motivated this discussion. Here is a false self-serving teacher, Meher
Baba, page 21, in the totally debatably titled "The Spiritual View of
Psychedelics". I'd say the "debased, neutered spirituality view".
http://www.erowid.org/library/books/psychedelic_monographs_6.shtml --
"If God can be found through the medium of any drug, God is not worthy of
being God! ... No drug... can help one to attain the spiritual Goal.
There is no shortcut to the Goal except through the grace of the Perfect
Master; and drugs ... give only a semblance of 'spiritual experience', a
glimpse of false Reality." Spoken like a good Catholic authority.
This Catholic authoritarian in Eastern drag continues with page after page
of intense and unrestrained disparagement of entheogens and fantastic
elevation of the professional gurus such as himself; I regret I don't have
electronic text. Substitute "bishop" for "Perfect Master", and you have a
ready-made Catholic screed against the gnostics and their sacrament.
"All so called spiritual experiences generated by taking 'mind-changing'
drugs ... are superficial and they add enormously to one's addiction to
the deceptions of Illusion which is but the Shadow of Reality." That's
the type of flat-out point-blank assertion, unfounded by any argument.
"But there is no drug that can promote the aspirant's progress --nor ever
alleviate the sufferings of separation from his beloved God. ... how every
impossible it is for an aspirant to realize God without the Grace of the
Perfect Master, and therefore it is of paramount importance for a genuine
spiritual aspirant to surrender himself to the Perfect Master who has
Himself realized God." You see what an embarrassing ally this virtual
Catholic authoritarian is for entheogen-diminishing meditation proponents?
This article has bucketfuls of such authoritarian false assertions --
falsely belittling the potential of entheogens, and falsely elevating the
efficacy of surrender to the guru. Do you still doubt my portrayal? Here
is the nail in the coffin of this demon in priestly dress: "...if the
student world continues to indulge in the use of LSD, half of the USA
would soon become mentally deranged! Hence, a check must be strictly
enforced and the use of these drugs be prohibited, particularly among the
rising generation..."
Meher Baba turns out to be a shill for the prohibition-for-profit scam.
He's essentially on the payroll for the nefarious scheme of
prohibition-for-profit, elbowing aside actual religious experiencing and
inserting himself as a paid middleman instead -- like the worst of the
classic priestly strategy, he sets up a scheme of artificial scarcity of
primary mystic experiencing, with a placebo substitute doled out by the
quarter teaspoonful on the installment plan.
It is up to you -- which story rings true? You have only your ears. I
play a tune, he plays a tune: which one is a horrible cacophony, in your
own opinion, and which one rings true harmoniously -- or is it yet some
other tune?
There are two positions I must refute: that extreme position ("real
spirituality is against entheogens; they should be illegal") and a
compromised position ("entheogens are only a tenth as effective as
meditation and should be put aside for the more effective method") or the
mild compromised position ("entheogens are equally effective as
meditation").
Entheogens are a hundred times as effective and relevant for truly
religious goals, of primary religious experiencing. You might not think
this argument is important -- but every entheogen respecter ought to care
about this debate. The non-entheogen users tell me not to worry about
it -- while people are being oppressed in the name of prohibition. Should
we not consider the popular Western Buddhism magazines to be complicit in
jailing people, poisoning crops, and shooting down supposed suspects?
Does not this type of meditation school contribute to prohibition to some
degree by adding its own scorn of entheogens, by smothering entheogens
with faint praise? Substitute religion -- mid-level religion posing as
the main form of religion -- shuts out entheogens, shuts out the potential
ergonomic access to actual religious experiencing. Instead of classic
intense religious experiencing, we are given a watered-down, alcohol-free
wine, placebo "religious experiencing" in heavy quote-marks.
It feels spiritually lofty, like a Mass, all pomp and grandeur, in its
finery. We learn to talk about enjoying nondual awareness while doing the
laundry. Doing laundry during non-dual awareness is not all that it's
cracked up to be, although the squeaking, creaking, echoing hinge of the
drier can be interesting.
Congratulations, the Western world has converted from placebo, mid-level
Christianity to placebo, mid-level Buddhism. It's no surprise that this
only amounted, in the end, to a change of decoration in the same old
church. You can't do a deep change of Western culture so quickly. We
"changed" from liberal Protestant belittling of psychoactives, to
mid-level Western Buddhist belittling of psychoactives -- but it's really
just the same old software underneath this change of user-interface skins.
http://www.serendipity.li/baba/gb_art.html --
"In the 1960s Ganesh Baba spent much of his time in Varanasi (also known
as Benares), the holiest city of North India. He was there when the first
hippies arrived, and he and they discovered that they had something in
common: they liked to smoke charas. The hippies would come down to the
holy Ganges River, sit by the burning ghats where the dead are cremated,
smoke hashish and meditate on the impermanence of worldly life. Ganesh
Baba was there and liked to talk. He discovered that they had brought with
them something they called "acid". He tried it and was very favorably
impressed with its effects. Thereafter he would often expound on the
virtues of psychedelics as an aid on the spiritual path. Many hippies
first met Ganesh Baba in Varanasi, or later in Kathmandu, and carried away
with them fond memories of their talks (usually while stoned) with this
psychedelic swami."
There is some crazy wisdom at that page -- I don't think treating
initiates harshly is ergonomic, and I advocate kindness of all kinds. I
reject "crazy wisdom" as inefficient and unnecessarily against
conventional morality. I advocate reasonable conventional morality and
decent treatment of others.
Motivations of anti-entheogen meditation proponents
From what I've read, Salvia is so perfect, so efffective, like taking the
peak window from a twelve hour altered state session, that it gives
insights that take years to play out. Melding into frozen spacetime,
primary religious experiencing on tap.
I haven't read much on Salvia and my thinking lately tends to be
universalist and unconcerned about particular species; what is most
important is entheogens in general and the mystic altered state of loose
cognitive binding. Mixed wine contained a diverse assortment of active
plants, used together as an entheogen. The sadly missed young researcher
who drowned on Ketamine wrote a book about combinations of psychoactives.
Cannabis seems to be a good general multiplier of other plant effects, and
opium is a great stabilizer for nausea often caused by magical plants.
Exhaling salvia, you can see the breath of God, the holy ghost, turning
the zodiac.
I've set the record straight on the status-relation between meditation and
entheogens, clearing the way to put entheogens on the pedestal of religion
where they belong, as surely as the lifting of the Eucharist during the
Mass. There remains a frustrating seeming lack of explicit literary
evidence to support my principle of the constant rate of entheogen usage
across eras and locales
.
Studying the suppression of drug references in 1960s-70s Rock may provide
a good model to explain why there is so little explicit and undeniable
evidence for the central role of entheogens in religions. If everyone who
matters knows of a psychoactive lotus plant, then every icon with a lotus
counts as an explicit declaration that Hinduism is supported by, and rests
on, an entheogenic foundation.
Similarly, if the religionists who matter recognize some Amanita halos,
then to them, who have eyes to see, it is plain as day that what makes
saints holy is entheogens -- the message is obscured to those outside, and
plain as day to those within. I should write in more detail the many
parallels between entheogen encoding in Rock and in religion -- the same
dynamics and strategies are used in both, resulting in the same permanent
controversy between the entheogen-literate and the entheogen-illiterate.
People are almost cleanly divided regarding recognizing entheogen
references, in either field. This clean division indicates the presence
of a classic paradigm shift or pattern-locking two-state system. Either
religion is against entheogens and has nothing to do with that, or it's
caused by, and rests on a foundation of, entheogens and has everything to
do with that. Either entheogen references are rare and isolated in Rock,
or they are just about everywhere, constituting the house religion.
Bob Daisley of the Ozzy Osbourne Band wrote a song about this, rejecting
conventional prohibitionist religion in favor of acid rock, "'cause rock
and roll is my religion and my love - may think it's strange - you can't
kill rock and rock, I'm here to stay". Ego death through LSD with THC was
literally the house religion of Rock, from 1965 to 1990, and much of the
best rock is spiritual. But popular entheogen religion would be better if
it were more well-informed about religion, philosophy, and psychology.
Suppression has caused the best thinkers to avoid publishing, so that only
the uneducated entheogenists are available as popular representatives of
the mind of the entheogenic community. Political suppression distorts and
hides the fact that entheogens are associated with the more intelligent
people, and it suppresses the potential of the entheogenic Rock religion
to be integrated intelligently with world religions.
Scholarship about the entheogenic nature and origin of religion is stifled
and suppressed by the phony, profit-driven enterprise of prohibition. The
result is inferior and deeply hidden entheogenic encoding, like the bulk
of bad, ridiculous alchemy. Profit-driven suppression of genuine
entheogenic religion ends up producing what we have ended up with: junk
Rock, and junk religion, worthless and uninspired, with the distinct
presence of inspiration buried under layers of dissimulation.
In the slightly more open drug climate of the mid-1970s, symbolically
encoded acid allusions were communicated to a certain degree. But those
same lyrics and allusions, heard in the deeply oppressive climate of the
turn of the millennium, almost completely fail to communicate the
mystic-state allusions. Only in such a foolish dark-ages climate could
anyone like me have discovered, or rather rediscovered, what was barely
hidden in its own day.
Wilber lately holds that there are 2000 variables constituting one's
psychospiritual development. His early works tended to paint a simple
picture of collective progress in psychospiritual development; lately he
is almost qualifying that.
I'm certain that the Hellenists were far superior to his low assessment of
their "mere mythic level of development", and I don't care what everyone
says in these anti-Christian times, I know what I see when I look at the
iconography and writings of the Middle Ages: they speak from within the
mystic's garden of sacred plants, as surely as the sophisticated
iconographic language of the Central American Catholic artists. And I'd
like to know what percentage of Revivalist Christians have used sacred
plants.
Again, we can understand how the entheogenic nature of Christianity was
suppressed in the past by matching it to recent history, looking at how
entheogenic Christianity was suppressed in the aftermath of the 1960s.
By a sheer miraculously improbable coincidence, at the same time as
Boomers dropped acid and smoked pot and turned on to Buddhism, giving the
middle finger to their parents' version of Christianity, so too did many
of the Boomers become Jesus Freaks, now euphemized as Jesus People,
providing the old story, "I used to do drugs all the time, but now I get
high on Jesus", which is the same as the post-acid, American Buddhist
story.
It must be certain that a fair number of Christian Rock musicians have had
Christian experiences of the Holy Spirit through LSD -- but we don't hear
about that. Why not? The socio-political suppression of psychoactive
drug use doesn't stop people from using entheogens, but it does stop them
from communicating their use of entheogens. Similarly, earlier Christians
had compelling reasons to use entheogens, but they have at the same time
had compelling reasons not to communicate that unambiguously.
As we have been forced to do with acid allusions in Rock, we may have to
learn to accept that mainstream religion inherently prevents explicit,
certain, and unambiguous references to sacred psychoactive plants.
We may have to accept in religion, as in acid allusions in Rock and in
alchemy, that the study is inherently encoded, and never explicit, so that
the only way we can receive communication from those who went before is by
learning their latin, their specialize encoded language, because they were
always prevented from speaking in the vernacular of plain English.
It is a shame that explicit mentions of entheogenic species probably
aren't forthcoming in religion, but this doesn't stop scholars from moving
forward with learning this latin, learning the symbolic encoding system of
allusions to magical, divine plants. One Jewish legend holds that the
grape vine used to produce something like 113 psychoactive products, but
now it only produces one.
Today's meditation religion is bullshit substitution for real, intense,
direct, simple, no-nonsense intense religious experiencing and magazines
like New Age know it; they are not transformative and do not shed insight
on religious myth. The most impoverished form of religion, by some
measure, is middle-level religion -- they have removed the supernatural,
while replacing it with oversold psychologism that cannot possibly deliver
on its promise.
An outdated theory of religious myth is that it is primitive explanation
of natural mundane phenomena. Actually, that description fits
conventional archetypal psychology well (Jung/Campbell & pre-psychedelic
Watts): Jungian psychology is a primitive, uninformed attempt to explain
religious myth, without recognizing that the myth originates from intense
entheogenic mystic experiencing. Middle-level, Jungian mythic-psychology
is unsatisfying except when compared to Freud's low psychology.
Jungian psychology is only halfway toward the Integral pinnacle. Just as
the ordinary baptized Christian has only experienced John the Baptist's
water-baptism and has yet to experience fire baptism by the Holy Spirit --
the baptism in Jesus' name -- so is Jungian psychology only halfway toward
the full realization of psychology. Here my thinking clashes with Ken
Wilber's way of thinking, residing in a different framework.
It is hard work defining what's wrong or distorted in Wilber's framework.
*Because* Wilber is such a good theorist, it becomes all the more
profitable to leverage him by looking for systemic flaws, distortions, or
limitations. How must his theory be adjusted? Does it err in making high
human development overcomplicated and irrelevant, etherial and
disconnected from practical reality? Wilber's theory is wandering lost,
without a clear enough sense of what matters more and less.
My style of theorizing has always put different principles first. Perhaps
his theory is simple and focused in its own way, and mine is in a
different way. It is most puzzling: how can his theory be so damn good,
yet totally miss the boat on my dirt-simple, rational entheogenic model of
ego death? I want to change my .sig to contain the whole of my theory in
two sentences, such a simple core that it breaks Wilber's system. What
would Wilber not agree with?
Nutshell Summary of the Simple Theory of Ego Death & Religion
Religion is originally and essentially an expression of the
entheogenically triggered intense mystic altered state, in which the
ultimate insight is rationally, simply, and coherently realized, causing a
network-shift of meanings and flipping the mental worldmodel from the
egoic version to the transcendent version. The ultimate insight is
no-free-will, realized in conjunction with no-separate-self.
The ego is largely illusory, and the ego is the imagined controller agent,
so self-control is largely illusory and must be deeply reconceived to fit
with the worldmodel of a frozen timeless block universe in which the near
future, like all spacetime, already timelessly exists. This model is no
more certain than anything, but is elegantly coherent and its coherence is
comprehended and experienced during the mystic state of loose
cognitive-association binding.
This conception of religion is the essence of religion and enlightenment,
and is that which all religion-myth and archetypal psychology ultimately
points to.
Wilber has written only a few words about free will and entheogens. His
worldview of what's most important is quite different than the view
expressed above. An increasingly common move of the meditation promoters
is to admit that entheogens thoroughly surpass meditation in
effectiveness, no contest, but then to play a game of switching and
redefining what meditation is for. Now they say that meditation isn't
importantly associated with tangible altered states -- this is a defensive
move into fog.
Now they say that meditation is for mindfulness and lovingkindness that
causes an enduring state of ethical good behavior. That's an invented
false system of priorities, saving the patient's body by chopping off his
head. Nothing is more New Age, in the worst sense, than inventing a
religion of worshipping nebulous haze and fog, escaping into empty,
meaningless dangling pointers.
This is the same choice as Quantum theory offers: either physics can't be
comprehended and visualized, and it's all essentially abstract; or, it can
be explained rationally and visualized, through hidden variables and
nonlocality.
There are two choices we have now: either religious practice of
contemplation/meditation is about feelgood haze and fog and dangling
pointers such as 'mindfulness' and 'lovingkindness' leading to a
"spiritual transformation of character" that amounts to ongoing ethical
good behavior; or it is about intense mystic altered-state experiences,
such as entheogens definitively trigger, that causes a specific change
from one specific mental worldmodel to another specific worldmodel of
self, space, time, and control.
The American Buddhist magazines are fully committed now to promoting the
conception of Buddhist meditation as being not a method of triggering the
intense mystic altered-state experience, but rather, about lasting
mindfulness and lovingkindness. If those terms mean anything, they should
be seen as incidental to religious insight and religious experiencing
proper. Such Buddhism commits the offense of proferring incidental and
hypothetical side-effects of meditation as though they were the main
purpose.
As entheogens are understood and respected increasingly, such an escapist
New Age Buddhism will be forced to retreat even more and concede
additional territory to entheogens, just as it has already conceded the
intense mystic altered state to entheogens. Everything significant that
non-entheogenic, mainstream Buddhist meditation can achieve, entheogens
can trigger much more effectively and reliably, no contest.
Is realizing no-separate-self the goal? Entheogens work extremely well
for realizing no-separate-self, while non-augmented meditation barely
works at all. More data will only confirm this more. So then
entheogen-disparaging Buddhism may say, "Well, then, the main goal of
Buddhism was never really to realize no-separate-self; the truly important
thing is attaining the ongoing state of mindfulness and lovingkindness and
ongoing good ethical conduct."
That is already happening; there is less and less emphasis on rational
realization of metaphysical principles, and ever louder emphasis on the
hazy fog of New Age lovingkindness, emptied of rational content as well as
emptied of intense religious experiencing.
Then Buddhism may redefine the terms, taking the position that entheogenic
ego death is nothing at all like meditation-derived ego death, and that
the stopping or speeding of thoughts in entheogenic experiencing is
unrelated to the much more desirable quietness and mindfulness of pure and
natural meditation.
The defenses against the manifest superiority of entheogens over
non-augmented meditation have become this absurd, twisting and turning and
redefining the goals and the terms, doing anything at all to erect a
paradigm that shuts out the obvious uncontested superiority of entheogens
by all measures.
If entheogens win the religion game by all measures, which they
incontrovertibly do, then such New Age Buddhists make the ultimate lame
defensive move that is every bit as bad as literalist Christianity, of
redefining the goal of religion and redefining the measures of effective
religion. What will they do when entheogens prove vastly superior at
producing 'lovingkindness' and 'mindfulness' and ongoing good ethical
conduct?
It will become embarrassingly clear, as clear as the movie Traffic which
exposed the groteque futility and misguidedness of prohibition, that such
New Age Buddhism is simply defending an a-priori, jealous bias against
entheogens and is, like official Christianity, even willing to abandon
religious experiencing and religious insight if those must be sacrificed
to save face in their commitment to denying the perfect efficacy of
entheogens and the historical predominance of influence and inspiration of
entheogens in religion.
It's like it would kill such anti-entheogenic Buddhists to admit that
there is a lightning path to religion and it is, by any reasonable
measure, the best path we have ever and always had. At that point, we
leave the explicit points of debate and begin, like Richard Double's study
of the motivations behind the free will defenders, or like Dan Russell's
book Drug War, inquiring what the real, underlying commitments are that
lie behind the intellectual arguments being put forth.
Who benefits, in what ways, and how much, by defending the
entheogen-disparaging view of religious meditation? McKenna proposes that
conventional religion serves as an ego defense against the threat posed by
real religious experiencing. In that case, the conventional religion of
anti-entheogenic meditation defenders is the religion of demons of
darkness; that kind of Buddhism has become regressiveness disguided as
progressiveness, wolves in sheep's clothing.
Substitute, ersatz religion, a false gospel, milk religion falsely
marketed as meat religion. I have no reason to loathe literalist
Christianity -- it's dead as a serious contender. Not even believing
Christians really believe in such Christianity any more -- that was only a
temporary, modern-era distorted conception of Christianity, anyway. All
eras except the modern probably took Christianity to be almost entirely
symbolic, reflecting entheogenic psychological archetypal experiences.
More and more, it appears that the darkest of the dark ages, in the field
of religion, was the modern -- the only era to wholly lose any grasp of
the essence of religious-myth, in conjunction with losing the connection
between entheogens and religion. Modern Christianity, which is to say
literalist Christianity, had its short time but the reigning religion of
the parents to be thrown off now is anti-entheogenic American Buddhism,
which is debated in the good but too-frustrating-to-read book Zig Zag Zen.
I haven't seen such a perversely and determinedly warped and biased
distortion of entheogens since the Catholic theologian Zaehner. One
reason I dislike electing a small handful of scholars as representing the
scholarly investigation of entheogens is that they become targets for such
distorted rebuttals and dismissals.
Huxley and Grof and the Good Friday Experiment are treated by
anti-entheogen religionists (fearful propagandist apologists who know well
how baseless their position is) as though they are the perfect and final
word on what entheogens are all about, as though we've given the scholars
a chance to investigate and write about entheogens when we in fact have
not.
This brings us back to the distortions caused by the politics of
suppression of entheogens. If entheogens were given a fair chance to
compete against non-entheogenic religion, everyone knows as a public
secret that entheogens would totally blow away substitute religion, on all
counts, by far. Everyone knows this, and knows like the drug war, that any
tiny loss of the battle against entheogens would be total, cataclysmic
defeat.
Ego, the defender of anti-entheogenic religion, knows full well what a
futile and unwinnable battle he faces. The religion of the lie knows it
rests on a foundation of sand and has no hope against the entheogenic rock
in any fair contest. Anti-entheogen religion, like prohibition, can only
be defended through unfair methods of lies, distortion, inconsistency, and
incoherence.
In a fair debate, which is impossible in this political climate, with
competent defenders, entheogenic religionists would certainly win the
debate against the anti-entheogen meditation promoters, and everyone knows
it, as surely as the prohibitionists refuse to engage in refereed
intellectual debate with reformers.
That's why the rebuttals of Huxley and the Good Friday Experiment all reek
of propaganda, deliberate and ill-willed distortion, and prior commitments
and investments rather than following Reason and evidence where it leads.
The anti-entheogen meditation proponents have no real case and are playing
a purely defensive game to save their public prestige and avoid admitting
that their religious practice is nothing of substance, not transformative
but just a lifestyle accessory and mundane coping mechanism, certainly not
a worldview-inverting, ego-threatening Religion that deserves its capital
R.
Substitute religion, called spirituality, is the Church of Ego, and I
would not call it "narcissism" as in Wilber's definition of Boomeritis,
but simply and plainly, the egoic, unenlightened worldview falsely
labelling itself as the transcendent, enlightened worldview. I follow the
simple description of Boomeritis as Elizabeth Debold wrote in her article
"Boomeritis and Me", in the magazine What Is Enlightenment (wie.com).
Today I received a special issue responding to her article. The
professionals, of all kinds, always profit from telling how difficult
progress to enlightenment is, not from telling how easy it is. They are
inherently in the business of selling enlightenment on the installment
plan, not the short, lightning path that makes their own expertise look
mundane.
Real gurus show genuine humility by highlighting how simple and rational
the important core of enlightenment is, and how easy it is to trigger the
intense mystic altered state. There's really little to it, and the best
gurus are the guides who deliver the most goods with the least
inflationary nonsense that would seek to blow up enlightenment into
something bigger and more alien than it is.
Professionals define religion as something incomprehensibly difficult and
laborious and rare, something you certainly need years of professional
guidance to make any progress in. Psychedelic psychotherapist Grof, being
a true teacher in the lightning-path tradition, is the better kind of
professional, like the better part of the shaman tradition.
You can count on magazines like What Is Enlightenment to commit to a model
in which psychospiritual transformation is rare, laborious, never-ending,
complicated, etherial, endlessly subtle, and challenging, rather than
simple and finite and straightforwardly attainable in a short time.
60s lame fallout: evidence against entheogen potential?
I thought--even assumed that this awakening of society would have to
happen now thay such a powerful agent for understanding had been
unleashed in the world.
In my case growing up in the So Cal area and seeing many of my
contemporaries, friends etc., as well as famous rock poets, using
entheogens, and exploring consciousness, during a three year explosion of
brilliance and then to see it all come crumbling down so easily, was
clearly a lesson. The 2-4% of people gaining lasting benefit, later
seemed to be a pretty accurate appraisal. Even the rock lyrics reverted
back to mundane boredom as most of the former heroes turned into drunken
stooges for commercial enterprise and former friends became PCP, alcohol
and cocaine statistics or retreated into cultish anti-entheogen thinking.
I saw a pretty widespread cross-section in my realm of things.
Data can be interpreted into different interpretive frameworks.
Entheogens appear to have expanded consciousness for a few years, and then
appear to have petered out. Supposing that this pattern or apparent or
effective pattern happened, it remains to debate why it happened and what
it means regarding the potential of entheogens. I'm far more interested
in the potential of entheogens than the accidents of history of the late
1960s.
No matter how much anecdotal evidence there is from the 1960s, that is
just one source of data, one scenario, and one that is completely
complicated and dirtied as trustworthy evidence by the deceit-driven drug
prohibition enterprise. We really must reject *equating* the accidents of
the late 1960s with the whole of entheogen history and entheogen
potential.
In the U.S., LSD was legally prohibited October 6, 1966. Before it was
prohibited, it was apparently good and expansive of consciousness; after
it was prohibited, it was apparently bad and not expansive of
consciousness. Did LSD change? Can we let the systemic foolishness of the
people during a period of five years in the late 1960s put a permanent
negative stamp on entheogens, which have been the source of religion and
higher philosophy for a thousand thousand years?
It is impossible to make a fair scientific conclusion about LSD and
entheogens based on the mass of anecdotal and research data collected
since the mid 20th Century. It is way to early to say that we know the
limits and potentials of the entheogens. What little we think we know
since the late 60s is corrupted as data by the darkening force of
prohibition.
Most of what is written about entheogens now, by kids online, is an
embarrassment to any claim of entheogens being enlightening and
consciousness expanding -- but why? That's the question. Entheogens were
shot down before they were given half a chance in the 1960s, and if the
result was unenlightenment and disparagement of the entheogens, what is to
blame -- the lack of potential of entheogens? Heaven forbid.
People's actions and responses through the late 1960s and beyond may have
been lame, but it's completely a matter of debate over whether this is the
fault of psychoactives or of the culture that prohibited them. We've
taken one pathetic shot at entheogens. We should not let one foolish,
short era drive us permanently to a false conclusion about the potential
of entheogens."
-Michael Hoffman