Cleric K wrote: ↑Mon Sep 13, 2021 2:55 pm
Adur,
my interests were truly sparked by cannabis but I have experiences with psilocybin too. I grew both cannabis and mushrooms back then.
Gradually I began to feel certain inner division. It's more than clear that any substance is a physical substance and as such affects primarily the physical body. Everything else is a spiritual reaction to this. So there were two beings in me - one was perfectly aware that my spiritual core is the actual Cosmic essence of reality and the bodily sheaths are only like filtering and mirroring systems that reduce the infinite potential into limited time-flow perspective which experiences itself in relation to all the other potential. The other being was eager to have 'experiences' and would agitate the bodily sheaths through a substance in order that something higher may refract through. The only reasonable thing to do was to continue on the slow but certain path where the bodily sheaths themselves are transformed through my own spiritual activity.
Since the time I began writing in this forum I had to address more and more topics dealing with psychedelics. Through the years my previous psychedelic experiences had become completely transparent from the perspective of higher cognition. Yet I was owing it to the scientific side of me to verify this, even though I already knew what the result would be. So I grew mushrooms again and did experiments (the most recent only few weeks ago). Everything was confirmed. So a bit of warning for those who embark on the path of higher cognition: If you enjoy going on rollercoaster rides, this no longer happens. These rides happen only because the sensory self is ejected into completely unknown territory and is being tossed around. Through spiritual development this
same territory is gradually traversed through the unsuspected forces concealed behind our thinking activity. In meditation we can freely move along the gradient of the gates. Five grams dried don't really do anything except pushing us much more towards the astral body, so we are functional in the astral body and operate in the physical, although there's much more time-distance between them. It is as if we have to stretch across time-thickness from the Imaginative consciousness towards the physical body.
These are things that we naturally do in higher development but the process is entirely under our control. It's like breathing, we can breath in and out of the sensory organs. The important thing is that in an instant we can attach firmly to the senses and intellectual thinking and be fully 'normal' in our daily life. This is practically one of the more important differences with psychedelics. With the latter we are
not free. We're being pushed towards the Imaginative realm and we can't reach for the sensory organs as tightly as we could otherwise. This is the reason for the time-distance mentioned. We can use our intellect, we can use our body but from a greater distance, so to speak. We can achieve that distance through transfiguring our spiritual activity too, but we also have the ability to squash the distance on demand.
Btw I fully agree with your characterization of cannabis. It really has a much more somatic feel, which causes what I call disproportionate thoughts. It's very common that some idea fills our consciousness accompanied with strong eureka emotion as if we have found the solution to all riddles in the universe - only to find out later how trivial or simply wrong that idea really was. I can confirm that these effects are still somewhat present even when we have gone through higher development. From that point of view cannabis has more intoxicating effect. In contrast, with psilocybin we are completely sober (except for the time-distance between our Imaginative standpoint and the physical organs, which makes it more challenging to operate physically as if nothing is happening).
I say the above things not to give the impression that higher development makes us immune to substances. Not at all. We're fully dependent on our physical and etheric body for our conscious experience on Earth and substances most certainly affect these processes. For example, it's not possible to undo the CNS depressive effects of alcohol. We can still be quite in control but nevertheless our consciousness dims down more and more and ultimately simply blacks out. For this reason alcohol is very detrimental for spiritual development. It practically ruins everything that we are slowly building. What we build with one hand we demolish with the other.
In this sense, what I say about psilocybin is not meant as if one can have 50 grams dry without passing out but only that the opening up towards the astral body is nothing that we don't already have direct experience of in much more harmonious, higher resolution and self-conscious way.
And of course the fact remains that this psychedelic opening towards the astral doesn't
at all give us the concepts and finer discrimination that can only be attained through patient and rigorous study and training. Without this we look at a flattened Imagination of our supersensible nature and simply can't discern anything. The reason is that this discernment happens through
cognition and doesn't arrive ready-made through visions. I repeat it again because it is so important - the greatest illusion we can succumb into is that psychedelics give us some objective higher perspective. Some imagine that they give
the same experience as higher development but in an alternative way. This is simply false. Being pushed in the astral body through psychedelics is like a blind man going outside and only feeling the tingling warmth of the Sun. Psychedelics don't give us neither the structure of the eye, nor the cognition to know what we are seeing in the light. So it really makes no sense for someone to say "I got so and so grams dry and completely dissolved into the primordial potential, yet I didn't see neither the soul organs (chakras) nor different bodies, nor celestial beings."
Now I don't want to repeat everything I said in the long post. I think everything needed is already there. Just to affirm - yes, the dissolution at the third gate is not at all the end. In fact Ben has a very good point in his post above.
Think of it that way: we can cross the third gate in two different ways. One is when we cross it by keeping our gaze
downwards. This results in the experience of the void. The ground beneath our feet dissolves, our soul mirror dissolves, there's nothing left to reflect our consciousness - it all becomes nothingness. We enter deep dreamless sleep from within the psychedelic state. It's like crossing the event horizon of a black hole.
The other way is by keeping our gaze
upwards. I already explained that this is not simply geometric 'up' but a very specific soul disposition, where we open up for something much more greater and powerful than us, by virtue of which our ordinary consciousness exists. Here Ben's image is much more appropriate. In this way it's like we are crossing the event horizon of a White hole.
Now here our views with Ben will probably diverge again, because this Spiritual World of potential is not simply a unstructured soup of unrealized potential from which the ego draws its experiences, but actual fractal-like hierarchy of Cosmic Thoughts of spiritual beings, which act like morphogenetic fields (to use some fancy terms) for all that we observe as World Content - the kingdoms of Nature, the planetary spheres, our own being, our bodies, our ideas, opinions, desires and so on.
This is the main point of difference between mystic traditions and Gnostic esoterism. In mysticism the World ends together with
personal consciousness -
irrelevant if we imagine the zero-point as black or white singularity. When the "I" finds its higher nature within the Spiritual World, we can live in full consciousness among spiritual beings and behold how our Earthly self comes together. And this is not to simply confront both in a mindless versus battle. Everything becomes completely clear when we realize that mystic traditions were completely in their right place in the times
before the Christ event. After that something completely new has inflown into the Earthly evolution and it is thanks to it that Gnosticism became at all possible as actual cognitive "I"-experience within the Macrocosm.
We should really take a moment and appreciate this difference. The first thing is relatively easy to understand and imagine because we all know our ego consciousness. All that is needed is to imagine how it coalesces from or dissolves back to the Cosmic background - again - irrelevant if from the black nothingness or white plenum potential. Higher consciousness leads us on the other side of the Earthly self, so to speak. There we witness how spiritual beings shape the Cosmic structure, within which intellectual consciousness is embedded. This is very important distinction. In mysticism the question for the structure of the World is either not addressed at all or is viewed as consensual creation among multitude of personal consciousnesses - much in the spirit of Adur's essays. In both cases it's assumed that everything of significance is in the 'space' between the singularity from which personal consciousness emerges and the perceptual phenomena.
Through the methods of higher development we can gain consciousness beyond the singularity of personal consciousness. In this sense, the spectrum between the pole of personal singularity and perceptible phenomena is a kind of
octave embedded into higher order spectrum. This has always been known in Gnostic schools as Microcosm and Macrocosm. The singularity of personal consciousness is not the ultimate source of the World but a pole of an octave within a higher order spectrum where there's another Macrocosmic Solar singularity (which in its turn is within even higher order octave).
