Intoxication and Religious Experience

so if a person is meditating and has a particular experience (one name for it being samadhi) and another person has taken drugs and has what when compared between the two people seems to be identical-havent they both had the same experience?

What is a spiritual experience if not an intoxication of the soul?

ha ha, has anyone ever said that? If not, can I have the credit?

(I know this is a very old thread, but it is something that has been on my mind.)

I was into recreational intoxicants when I was very much younger. I never took opiates of any kind, and never cocaine, but as for experiences with entheogens, I lost count. I definitely had real spiritual realisations through these. There is a phase you go through where you have hallucinations, intoxication, flights of ideas, and so on. But there is another stage appropriately called Clear Light. At this point I was completely taken by the realisation that everything in life was holy, life itself was holy, there was nothing lacking, nothing to be gained, nothing the matter anywhere. This manifested as being spellbound by nature - saplings, moss-covered boulders and the like (doesn't sound much when you write it....) Particular objects would seem to be extremely beautiful - for the first time, I really saw how beautiful nature was, it was like an artwork, very much like what Huxley wrote in Doors of Perception. It was also realisation of what a uniquely amazing thing it is to be a human. In fact it was a taste of self-realisation, of that I have no doubt.

This was a long time ago now, more than 30 years. And I realised then you couldn't stay in this state artificially. You always would come down and back into the normal mundane existence. So the question was, how to realise that state naturally? Because enough of it remained to know it was real, not just an induced fantasy. Subsequently I studied mysticism and learned to practise Buddhist meditation. (And to be honest, maybe I have a pre-disposition to mysticism which this all was tapping into.)

Of course, dharma completely forbids intoxicants, as it should; I would now not advocate going down that road and I have been a non-user of any such things since the 70's. But I still believe the entheogen experience is real. And maybe that is the reason for the stigma attached to them. It is normality protecting itself. They really did make me realise that the reality of many lives is basically habit and convention. Conventional existence really does have shallow roots, and I think there is a deep realisation of that which we are not allowed to acknowledge. A lot of what goes on in the world is built on that denial.

It doesn't matter any more. I have started to discover the inner truth of dharma and don't need anything further. But in a way it does validate what I saw back then; that state of mind is starting to become more real in everyday life. So I guess when it comes to 'sacred intoxicants', and subject to the above caveats, I have to vote 'Aye'.

What is a spiritual experience if not an intoxication of the soul?

ha ha, has anyone ever said that? If not, can I have the credit?

Hey Salima, how goes?

That's a good question that makes a fine point. I suppose my answer would be two-fold:[INDENT]1. How exactly might they know they even had the same experience? I'm not sure they would.

2. .... but assuming they did (one borne of a bio-chemical malfunction and the other of some spiritual realization or epiphany of thought), that "sensation" (since that's all we're talking about) could have many reasons, many correlations, many possible explanations. Since both might have produced the same, single-instant 'mind tingling' shall we then say they both have equal worth?
[/INDENT]I guess my point is this: Why would I short-circuit my head to try and get just the sensation of otherness or spiritual when I know I've used biology to attain that thrill - to cut to the quick?

In one case someone has their mental capacities about them, likely the emotional and mental foundation that spawned this reaction, without 'cheating biology' to get the tingle. I'll admit I've little experience in this area, so I hope you'll forgive any naivety, but this is how the issue occurs to me.

Thanks for replying - Be well

Actually this term 'biochemical malfunction' is necessarily pejorative, is it not? There has been a lot of studies done on this question, and it is not at all clear that the states that arise from entheogens can in any sense be regarded as a 'malfunction'. Does this amount to anything more than a prejudice? Is it not because there is a stigma attached to the idea - drugs, bad!

And again, my experience was the same as many others from the 60's: some of us beat a path from Haight Ashbury to Rishikesh and Dharamsala to stabilise and validate the things we saw in those states. (Hence the rise of the "hippie metaphysics" of Frithjof Capra, et al. And from there to one of the tributaries of now mainstream modern culture.) And I still feel this would not have happened without those particular experiences.

Anyway as I said I am not trying to evangalise hallucinogens. But they can't be so easily dismissed.

so if a person is meditating and has a particular experience (one name for it being samadhi) and another person has taken drugs and has what when compared between the two people seems to be identical-havent they both had the same experience?

I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. ... I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)

"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is."

Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing - but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.

And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace - cared to look at. The books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.

... if i somehow missed your question in there, could you restate it for me?

Religious experience is something that, by nature, cannot be proven to an individual who did not have said experience. .

I do not understand what you mean by "religious experience".

Never any 'bad trips' during meditation other than the fact that sitting still in a cross-legged position for an hour is painful and often seems pointless. (Sometimes this image of a speedometer comes up with blue on the left and red on the right, where red is discomfort, and the longer I sit, the further the dial is towards the red. At a certain point I have to stop). My whole struggle with meditation is leaving aside what your body and mind wants to keep doing all the time, and learning to be still. But realisations do arise. These are not really 'experiences' but realisations. If you read the Zen literature you will get some idea of the theory but it really cannot be conveyed in words.

It might be different for others. When you start out on meditation, you might have very profound or disturbing experiences. You are shining a light on hidden aspects of the mind, and many certainly do have experiences as a result. (This is why it is good to have a teacher). Also when you do ascend to one of the realms of realisation for the first time (i.e. 'bhumis') then you will usually experience something profound, or rather, the nature of your experience is thereafter changed. But as you know, in all the meditation schools, you are never encouraged to seek experiences or be fascinated by experiences, in Zen these are called 'makyo' or types of delusion, no matter how interesting or important they seem.



Perhaps a good foundational text on this question would be 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' by William James. Pubished in 1901, it is still a classic in the field.

Generally speaking, the idea of 'religious experience' is not much understood or encouraged by evangelical or modern Christianity, except for within prescribed bounds such as those understood by the Pentacostals and in conventional terms such as 'conversion' and 'being born again'.