I haven’t participated in a Santo Daime ceremony, nor in Ayahuasca retreat. And I understand why you ask. There’s night and day difference between the typical psychonautic usage, not to mention recreational usage at parties, and the disciplined setting that you speak of. I can only assure you that my own experiments, even though they have certainly been more on the recreational side in the early years, have then transformed into a fully responsible activity that seeks communion with the invisible depth of reality.Lou Gold wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 6:50 pm Aloha Cleric,
You say, The comments are based on my own experience. Such things become clear as soon as we understand that the invisible world has to be read and not simply beheld as inexplicable and enchanting picture.
I ask simply "Have you personally engaged in a disciplined spiritual practice such as Santo Daime?"
I don't comment on another person's process. I'm only trying to clarify what personal experiential ground you are speaking from?
I don't doubt that one might use psychedelics and still be a materialist as you report about Cameron and with whom I'm not familiar. I do know users of Santo Daime across a very wide spectrum of philosophical positions, with a range of primary serious spiritual practices and with professional roles of high responsibility who report that usage has enhanced their real-time performance in the here-and-now. It surely has enhanced mine and I count it as a highly significant reason that I'm still alive. Yet, despite its tremendously valuable gift in my life, advocacy of the practice for others is prohibited by the protocol and I agree.
So, once again, I beg you to state beyond "I know from personal experience" the nature and extent of that experience.
Let’s be clear: in no way do I challenge the fact that many people have a positive impact in their life through the spiritual use of entheogens. But as your all inclusive diversity philosophy would confirm, such positive impact can be achieved in many different ways. For some it’s enough to eat healthy and exercise regularly, others choose spiritual practice and so on.
To understand what we’re talking about we have to widen the context. In general, we find ourselves as human beings in an Earthly environment. We are born, we struggle through life and we leave. So much we agree on. Then we can ask questions: how can we enhance this Earthly passage? How can we find peace, love, understanding? How can we find health, happiness, abundance? These are the basic things that people are concerned with. As said above, there are many paths through which all of this can be enhanced.
Yet from as long as there have been people on Earth, there have also been more extensive questions like: from where I come before I’m born and where I go after I leave? How does this Earthly passage fit in the bigger picture? What’s the purpose of all this? Should my Earthly life in some way be informed and guided by what lies beyond it?
Needless to say, in the last few centuries these latter questions have gradually come to be considered unanswerable. So the basic philosophy comes to: “Just believe in whatever enhances your life in the best possible way. No one knows anything anyway.”
We have to very clearly differentiate these levels because one and the same thing can have different effects depending on the level. For example we can climb with a helium balloon only to a certain altitude. When the atmosphere becomes so thin that it is no longer heavier than the balloon, then it doesn’t rise anymore. We need other means if we’re to continue further.
So it is in the case of psychedelics. Let us be reminded that after all, the effects are produced through ingesting a physical substance. Materialists are much more conscious of this than most spiritually inclined people. The latter very quickly forget that they have ingested something and act as if they are confronted with some kind of pure experience. And I repeat that as long as certain goals are pursued, this may be perfectly fine. But if we are to investigate the questions of the second kind, then the chemical storm in the body actually becomes an obstacle, no matter how Cosmic and intimate it may feel like.
That’s why I used the analogy with light and dust in that post. For those who don’t know that the light exists, some dust may actually be the greatest benefactor (just as suffering is often the greatest benefactor). Please try to feel how the tides change – in the beginning the dust acts as an enhancer of consciousness because it makes perceptible unsuspected aspects of our light being. But after a certain point, when we are already self-conscious within our light being, it becomes the opposite – it becomes an obstruction to light.
So please try to understand these levels of development because without this whatever we say would sound as nothing but another mindless vs. battle. Think about the second batch of questions. It would be better if you say that you don’t believe that the human spirit can know anything of its supra-Earthly existence or that you simply have no interest in knowing anything about it but at least try to conceive that for someone who tries to penetrate these questions with the light of cognition, it becomes supremely important to be able to differentiate the gross from the subtle. Why? Because only in this way we can comprehend what comes from our body, what comes from our soul, what comes from our spirit. And no, this is not in order to despise the gross and pridefully escape in the subtle but only because our holistic spiritual being can’t operate properly otherwise. Our human body is an example of this. Our intestines separate the gross, which is discarded and serves other important purposes in the world, from the subtle that enters the bloodstream and nourishes every cell. If the gross also begins to diffuse in the rest of the organism we’ll simply become sick. As strange as it may sound, the reason humans today don’t have clear consciousness of the supra-Earthly can be described precisely as such a sickness. There’s no proper differentiation and rhythmic exchange. ‘Differentiation’ of course sounds like blasphemy for those who absolutize the pole of Oneness. They would say “But this makes no sense, we need more unity, not more differentiation!” and then everything is thrown in a bowl and mixed up. But is there anything more miraculous than the human body in our Earthly experience? Even a single bacterial cell far surpasses in complexity and ingenuity all the computers and nuclear plants that humankind has invented. So if Divine Intelligence had to devise the body in such a way that certain processes and substances are nicely differentiated – not in order to contradict and fight each other but precisely to be able to work together in the best possible way – then shouldn’t we humbly learn from all this and conceive that something similar is necessary also in regards to our body, soul and spirit?
So please don't be abstractly caught up in 'higher', 'lower' divisions. Simply consider the gradient of questions (of which only two principle levels were given). If you assume that the second batch is only a matter of personal belief then OK. Whatever we say would be seen as violence. But if you consider as a possibility that the human spirit can finds its way also in the supra-Earthly - not as vague interpretation of inexplicable visions but as clear cognizing consciousness of a new kind, that goes beyond the strictly personal - then it would be understandable that different stages have different requirements and what can act as an accelerator at one stage turns into a brake at another.