Human Development
Drug use for transcendent experience
Description:
Independent tests show that, in a religious setting, drugs may enhance experience, possibly but not necessarily triggering what then requires considerable effort to integrate into everyday life.The use of drugs to alter consciousness chemically as an aid to achieve mystic experience is common in religious and other traditions. In particular, psychedelic drugs may open the unconscious and superconscious levels to consciousness, including the archetypes and symbols of the collective unconscious. The apparent contact with mythical beings and the out-of-body experiences reported after ingesting psychotropic substances may be illusory but their effect is to transform and empower the shaman and their psychic effect is not an illusion. Similarly, reports of witches flying on broomsticks and indulging in orgiastic practices may have been influenced by altered states due to the absorption of hallucinogenic substances through the skin from so-called "flying ointments" or even from lysergic acid ingested with rye affected by ergot fungus.
The use of drugs with the intent of altering consciousness and experiencing transcendence is one of several techniques used by mystics, said (Aldous Huxley) to be no more artificial in itself than some ascetic practices taken to extremes to achieve the same purpose (lack of food, flagellation, breathing exercises and continual chanting all having marked effects on body chemistry). However, others assert that the following of ascetic practice is necessary to prepare the person for religious or mystic experience which then arises spontaneously rather than to order and, some believe, has more long-lasting effects. For example, it is said that drugs interfere with the natural unfolding of experience arising from yogic practices and cannot replace the integration of intellect, emotions and intuition inherent in the experience of [nirvikalpa samadhi] - or even that the apparent mystic states arising under the effect of drugs are actually illusory and are still erroneous perceptions arising under [maya]. In a western setting, the use of drugs to alter consciousness in the practice of high magic is said to be inferior to creating such a state from within, for only in the latter case can the magician retain control.
Broader:
Psychedelic drugs