The symbiotic ecology of the psychedelic realm

[Cleric K]

In your view, what is it that psychedeclics actually provide?(in contrast to the drug-free conscious inner transformation) (maybe there's a thread already about that)

My own crude way of putting it would be that they act as an elevator, giving you a push in some kind of direction, and then happily leaving you there to figure out what the h*ck is going on and how to get back home.

Instead, would you have gotten there "on your own", you would:
1. have exercised the "muscles" you need to get there, thus being able to continue moving in that direction (perhaps) indefinitely.
2. have spent some time getting there, orienting yourself as you go, and thus, when you pass the point that the psychedelics would have dropped you off at you're a lot more oriented and can make sense of the situation in a different way.
3. (perhaps) have no need to get back home.

To answer the question we need to get a better understanding of what happens in the psychedelic state. This may come as a surprise but each one of us passes through an unrecognized 'psychedelic trip' at least twice a day - upon falling to sleep and waking up. Those experienced may have recognized that, especially if we wake up abruptly from a dream, we go through a few second 'trip' as the dream imagery is sill superimposed on our awakening sensory consciousness. Very quickly, though, the dream panorama dissipates and we're left experiencing consciousness only in our sensory and intellectual slots.

Anyone who has been curious about psychedelics but has never had the opportunity to try, has the chance to do it every night upon falling to sleep. What do we do when we go to sleep at night? We usually lay down with buzzing inner world, overwhelmed by a stream of memories of the daily happenings, thoughts about problems, worries about the next day, arguing with persons in our imagination and so on. At some point it all sinks into oblivion, without any consciousness of it. Even on the next day, if we try to remember it, it's hard to tell what exactly happens when we fall to sleep. What happens is what in other circumstances is called the psychedelic 'ego death'. So we have the chance to experience this every night if we try to overcome the chaos of our past reverberations and future projections and instead try to settle quietly in our core (which normally speaks thoughts) and allow sensory consciousness dissolve as we enter the sleep state.

The reason we normally lose consciousness upon falling asleep is because our spiritual activity has to work at different 'wavelengths' when we loosen from the slots of the sensory organs. In our waking consciousness our intellect mimics the dynamics of sensory perceptions. To remember a color, a sound, etc., we need to have developed the inner imaginative gestures to willfully reproduce them. We can think in words because we have heard words and we have learned to replicate imaginative sound-like phenomena with our spiritual activity, through which we symbolize the meaning we weave through. So in this sense, we can only think, imagine, remember things that we have developed the 'slots' for.

Alas, when we drift to sleep all these sensory slots blur out, they spread out and become part of the Cosmic background. If we are to be conscious in this state we need other kinds of slots, which are resonant with the wavelengths of the spiritual activity at that level. For example, we may have acquaintance with someone on Earth. Let's imagine it is a very prolific exchange. In simple words we would say that our friendship with that person has great significance for us. On the sensory level we have a flow of experiences. We see the person, hear their words, we do things together. When we're not together we think about what they said, about what we'll be doing together on the next day and so on.

In general, we would say that all these things happen in our own consciousness. But if we're able to cross the threshold of falling to sleep it is possible that we find our relations with the person in a completely different way. When the sensory spectrum blurs into the background we're left only with our soul life. Now it is possible to recognize the soul (astral) presence of the other person. Now things are not that delineated as we're used to from our sensory experiences. Instead, the other person's presence interpenetrates our sphere of experience. It's like their soul is weaved of fine fragrance which we breathe and it is part of our being. Now this is not some kind physical presence. Consciousness is quite different at that level. This 'fragrance' is like a stream of destiny, so to speak. These exchanges are like complicated karmic flows. When we look at the interference of these fragrances, we don't see some sensory-like substance, like we can see mist with our eyes. Instead, this interference is like a living fluid crystal ball through which we can see the ways into which this potential can play out when decohered to the level of the sensory slots. In other words, to borrow from the metaphor from the other thread, it's like the interference of our flows of destiny, shapes the wavefunction within which our sensory states of being manifest. In our waking life we feel certain sympathy and interest towards that person, we feel that in our exchange something of value is produced but in reality all this is already being shaped in its general lines in the deeper strata of the astral.

Now it can be objected that I stray too far from the topic but these extra details are really important if we are to understand what the psychedelics can and cannot give. We can't speak of what the psychedelic cannot give, if we don't try to build some understanding of that thing, can we?

So our spiritual activity really works on quite different wavelengths of the time-consciousness spectrum in that state. We need to get to a state where we can think our karmic flow so to speak. Now it should immediately be said that at our stage of evolution we're not really free to swirl that flow in any way we like. Unspeakable havoc would be wrecked if we were to will our destiny under the influences of our egoistic ideas and desires. It would be as if we're suddenly to become responsible for consciously metabolizing and moving the substances through our body. Just imagine how wisely everything in the body works, how blood reaches every single cell to nourish it. If equipped with our one-sided interests we're to take upon that work, we'll most probably focus on some organ that we like and neglect everything else. Soon we'll simply destroy our bodily organism. It is somewhat similar with the flow of karma. The karmic landscape is a very very complicated fabric that has to somehow, even in the face of our one-sided egoistic desires, nourish properly the soul organism of all humanity. This is not same automatic self-organizing mechanical process. In fact, this karmic landscape is in itself a form of meaningful language, which hopefully should become music-like - singing (only if we were not sabotaging the process all the time through our explosive soul life). There's meaningful organization within the flow of destiny and if we're to follow these coherences towards their convergences, we would come to know the activity of spirits which in Christian esoterism are known as Angeloi. For these beings the collective astrality of humanity is like the soul substance on which they ground themselves, it's the garden they till and that they try to plant good seeds on (these would be the human virtues that we need to develop).

So what does the psychedelic substances do? It alters our bodily processes in such a way that processes that normally belong to the etheric (life) and astral (soul) spectrum are pressed into the physical. Imagine the meat coming our of a meat grinder. Deeper processes are pressed into our waking cognition and they squeeze out as myriad of sensory-like phenomena. This grinding of the etheric and astral spectrum into the sensory is what allows for our intellect to feel like it is climbing the elevator. In a sense it is like our higher self says to us: "Normally, every night upon falling to sleep you loosen your soul processes from the sensory slots but because the spirit has not developed the thinking gestures which are able to resonate with the processes of destiny's flow at that level, you simply lose consciousness. It's like not having the appropriate antennae to catch radio signals at certain wavelengths. Through the change of bodily chemistry, the sensory slots become more susceptible to the influences of the etheric and astral spectrum. Thus the higher nature of man begins to grind through the slots, coming out as a plethora of visionary phenomena provoking novel cognitive experiences. You can still walk the gradient of falling asleep, where the neural slots through which intellectual cognition is formed, blur beneath you. This happens every night upon falling to sleep but now it is illuminated, so to speak. Yet whatever you experience in this state where the intellect is no longer capable of laying down coherent trains of thoughts, is still comprehensible only as far as the appropriate spiritual gestures are developed, which can resonate with the dynamics of the higher strata."

In other words, psychedelics can indeed pump the etheric and astral into the sensory slots but we're still left with our already developed cognition to make anything out of it. As Terence McKenna famously said: Psychedelics Don't Work On Stupid People. In other words, the psychedelic substance doesn't give us the cognition - it only pumps phenomena into our waking consciousness. It is up to our spiritual activity to make something out of it. The richer our inner life is, the more we can make out of it. If we're tripping at a party, we'll have some kaleidoscopic visuals and twisted thoughts. If we have read and internalized some of Jung's ideas, when we encompass our life, we would spot strange higher order patterns. But all this is still basically an interpretation (divination) of ground down phenomena. It is indeed possible that in these visionary states we may even have some insight about the karmic landscape described above but ultimately this would be only a symbolic wall and the intellect will be asking "Could this be true? Is there really a karmic landscape, acting like a wavefunction for our states of being, or it's all a hallucination in a physical brain?"

This question can be solved only when we awaken to higher spiritual activity and follow from there how it is stepped down through the gradient and expresses itself in intellectual gestures in the sensory spectrum. Only then we can speak of the spiritual world with certainty, in the same way we can speak of the existence of regular thought phenomena with certainty. The reason we're always left uncertain by the psychedelic experience is because our spirit never really experiences itself weaving at the actual wavelengths of the higher worlds. Instead, our spirit still vibrates at the wavelengths of intellectual thoughts and thinks about sensory-like phenomena that emerge through the grinder.

And this is really the point where psychedelics can turn from a stimulus to a real hinderance. The more 'experienced' one becomes with psychedelics, the more the intellect trespasses into a territory that doesn't belong to it. Please note - this doesn't mean that our spiritual activity is not allowed in the higher worlds but only that spiritual activity should take the appropriate form, the appropriate wavelength. Otherwise the dynamics of our higher organization are simply being ground down into the sensory wall of imagery for the intellect to interpret. This is the real danger. That instead of growing into the deeper strata of reality, we mineralize it and try to divine the higher worlds from their precipitations. Thus the chasm between the intellect and the depths of reality is perpetuated. Elsewhere I likened this process to a Cargo Cult.

So this is basically what psychedelics provide. They can indeed pump and grind our higher nature down into sensory fragments. This can serve as a stimulus for some, giving a nudge that there's really something in the depths of this world that we sink into when we fall to sleep. But from that point onwards we need different means if we are to develop the spiritual gestures through which we can weave in the higher orders of reality. This psychedelics cannot give us by any means, in the same way they can't give cleverness to the stupid people who don't appreciate the experience as McKenna notes. Yet McKenna himself chose to remain at a certain level of 'cleverness' where he enjoyed the Cargo. He didn't pursue the spiritual activity which can weave in the higher orders of reality. And these forms of spiritual activity are attained only through inner work, just like regular cognitive skills, such as doing math, are attained through developing mathematical thinking and not by ingesting a pill.

[Cleric K]

My question is: would anyone have any suggestions in which directions I could look to try to figure out more about this feeling of antipathy?

I cannot tell with certainty but the antipathy will surely be transformed into understanding in the course of time. When cattle is shocked by the electric fence they will develop antipathy towards it and try to avoid it. A human being can develop understanding of electricity and instead of feeling antipathy, simply know its effects and avoid being shocked on purely reasoned grounds.

There're could be a mixture of two things in the antipathy. The first is completely healthy. Something which your spiritual guidance conveys to you in a form of feeling "You don't need this for your progress". It is true that for those willing to follow the path of higher development, the use of psychedelics (even if giving some initial boost) turns into an inner contradiction. The "I" is innerly divided that there's something which it is incapable to achieve through its own forces. Basically on the deepest level this amounts to the "I" doubting its own divinity ("And he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God"). But even this is usually wrongly understood. Lou quoted above:

The implicit suggestion is that humans universally share the neurological capacity to enter into visionary states in which they experience interior but transpersonal events of the highest reality, value and meaning. The ways in which people enter these states are rather varied. They can be triggered by (among other things) oxygen depletion, fasting, sensory deprivation, drumming, psychoactive medicines, or most often, some combination thereof.

I would add that these transpersonal events can also be triggered by contemplation, devotion, meditation, dreams, or pure grace. In whatever is the triggering case, the subsequent challenge will inevitably be to integrate the great revelations into one's ordinary life and doings.

This makes it seem like this: we need to lift some weight. Since it is very heavy we have two options: either take the harder and longer road and train until we get stronger or use some kind of stimulant. Some will say that these are all possible paths leading to the same goal - lifting the weight - and no one is more correct than the other. We hear this especially when someone compares psychedelics with meditation like above. These are seen as equally valid ways to trigger altered state of consciousness. But this entirely misses the point which I tried to convey in the post above.

In the case of spiritual development we shouldn't be reluctant to use psychedelics because we're 'cheating' (since God wants us to have hard time and sweat instead of taking the shortcut which ultimately leads to the same place), but because we need to get to a place where only our spirit can lead us. Anything which achieves altered states through physical means, secretly chains the spirit to the body. After all, the psychedelic state lasts as long as the active substance is being metabolized. This is something that is very easily forgotten. One often imagines that the substance only kicks us out in orbit and then we contemplate the objective spiritual world. But what we really contemplate is the altered functioning of our own bodily complex. This we should never forget! And that's why proper spiritual training leads to differentiation of our activity such that we begin to recognize which phenomena belong to the physical, which to the etheric, which to the astral and higher strata. We need to willfully eliminate from our consciousness certain phenomena such that we can learn what the remaining ones contribute. On the contrary, when our whole altered state is triggered by purely physical alterations, we never get the chance to differentiate what the substance contributes and as said, the worst error is to imagine that in this way we arrive at some pristine experience of the spiritual world.

So the right way to think about it is that this 'cheating' simply doesn't lead where inner development leads. It's not like God says "In this world there are many ways in which you can commune with me but because I'm cruel I'll declare the right one to be the most tedious and I'll punish you if you use the equally effective easier ones." Not at all. It's simply that with the easier method we're communing with our own altered bodily processes, through which eventually higher forces are grinded down into phenomena-fragments, instead of growing with our spiritual being into the Divine Thoughts, where true communion is to be found. There are many ways to trigger a flow of letter-fragments but only one direction in which our spirit grows into the Divine Thoughts which through their higher order meaning organize the letters.

This is the one aspect.

Another possible source of antipathy is when there's hidden fear to know ourselves from an unfamiliar and potentially disturbing perspective. Normally we're very good at letting into consciousness only as much as we're comfortable with. Most bad psychedelic trips consist into realizations about ourselves when for a moment we see ourselves from the side. Of course this is not to advocate psychedelics such that we can know ourselves from new angles. Even if we're presented with such angles, there's no telling whose being's perspective that is. For example, if a nerdy teenager takes some shrooms he may see how he looks from the side but from the eyes of his 'cooler' peers. Then the kid may decide that he has to change and go on smoke weed and do everything cool that the others are doing. So we should always strive to see ourselves from new perspectives, such that we don't fall asleep at some level of comfort but we shouldn't be interested in just any perspective. The truly important thing is how we look through the eyes of the Divine. This is what really matters. The Christ also didn't look good in the eyes of the Pharisees. What would have happened if he tried to be 'cool' as them and tried to make himself agreeable in their perspective? But no - the only important thing for him was to be agreeable in the eyes of the Father. That's why we also need the High Ideal, to always pray to see ourselves through the eyes of the Divine, to think about ourselves through the Divine Thoughts, to Love through the Divine Love. Then, whatever is illuminated in this way to be a hinderance in the eyes of the Divine within us, is really worth transforming.

[Federica]

In your view, what is it that psychedeclics actually provide?(in contrast to the drug-free conscious inner transformation) (maybe there's a thread already about that)

My own crude way of putting it would be that they act as an elevator, giving you a push in some kind of direction, and then happily leaving you there to figure out what the h*ck is going on and how to get back home.

Instead, would you have gotten there "on your own", you would:
1. have exercised the "muscles" you need to get there, thus being able to continue moving in that direction (perhaps) indefinitely.
2. have spent some time getting there, orienting yourself as you go, and thus, when you pass the point that the psychedelics would have dropped you off at you're a lot more oriented and can make sense of the situation in a different way.
3. (perhaps) have no need to get back home.

To answer the question we need to get a better understanding of what happens in the psychedelic state. This may come as a surprise but each one of us passes through an unrecognized 'psychedelic trip' at least twice a day - upon falling to sleep and waking up. Those experienced may have recognized that, especially if we wake up abruptly from a dream, we go through a few second 'trip' as the dream imagery is sill superimposed on our awakening sensory consciousness. Very quickly, though, the dream panorama dissipates and we're left experiencing consciousness only in our sensory and intellectual slots.

Anyone who has been curious about psychedelics but has never had the opportunity to try, has the chance to do it every night upon falling to sleep. What do we do when we go to sleep at night? We usually lay down with buzzing inner world, overwhelmed by a stream of memories of the daily happenings, thoughts about problems, worries about the next day, arguing with persons in our imagination and so on. At some point it all sinks into oblivion, without any consciousness of it. Even on the next day, if we try to remember it, it's hard to tell what exactly happens when we fall to sleep. What happens is what in other circumstances is called the psychedelic 'ego death'. So we have the chance to experience this every night if we try to overcome the chaos of our past reverberations and future projections and instead try to settle quietly in our core (which normally speaks thoughts) and allow sensory consciousness dissolve as we enter the sleep state.

The reason we normally lose consciousness upon falling asleep is because our spiritual activity has to work at different 'wavelengths' when we loosen from the slots of the sensory organs. In our waking consciousness our intellect mimics the dynamics of sensory perceptions. To remember a color, a sound, etc., we need to have developed the inner imaginative gestures to willfully reproduce them. We can think in words because we have heard words and we have learned to replicate imaginative sound-like phenomena with our spiritual activity, through which we symbolize the meaning we weave through. So in this sense, we can only think, imagine, remember things that we have developed the 'slots' for.

Alas, when we drift to sleep all these sensory slots blur out, they spread out and become part of the Cosmic background. If we are to be conscious in this state we need other kinds of slots, which are resonant with the wavelengths of the spiritual activity at that level. For example, we may have acquaintance with someone on Earth. Let's imagine it is a very prolific exchange. In simple words we would say that our friendship with that person has great significance for us. On the sensory level we have a flow of experiences. We see the person, hear their words, we do things together. When we're not together we think about what they said, about what we'll be doing together on the next day and so on.

In general, we would say that all these things happen in our own consciousness. But if we're able to cross the threshold of falling to sleep it is possible that we find our relations with the person in a completely different way. When the sensory spectrum blurs into the background we're left only with our soul life. Now it is possible to recognize the soul (astral) presence of the other person. Now things are not that delineated as we're used to from our sensory experiences. Instead, the other person's presence interpenetrates our sphere of experience. It's like their soul is weaved of fine fragrance which we breathe and it is part of our being. Now this is not some kind physical presence. Consciousness is quite different at that level. This 'fragrance' is like a stream of destiny, so to speak. These exchanges are like complicated karmic flows. When we look at the interference of these fragrances, we don't see some sensory-like substance, like we can see mist with our eyes. Instead, this interference is like a living fluid crystal ball through which we can see the ways into which this potential can play out when decohered to the level of the sensory slots. In other words, to borrow from the metaphor from the other thread, it's like the interference of our flows of destiny, shapes the wavefunction within which our sensory states of being manifest. In our waking life we feel certain sympathy and interest towards that person, we feel that in our exchange something of value is produced but in reality all this is already being shaped in its general lines in the deeper strata of the astral.

Now it can be objected that I stray too far from the topic but these extra details are really important if we are to understand what the psychedelics can and cannot give. We can't speak of what the psychedelic cannot give, if we don't try to build some understanding of that thing, can we?

So our spiritual activity really works on quite different wavelengths of the time-consciousness spectrum in that state. We need to get to a state where we can think our karmic flow so to speak. Now it should immediately be said that at our stage of evolution we're not really free to swirl that flow in any way we like. Unspeakable havoc would be wrecked if we were to will our destiny under the influences of our egoistic ideas and desires. It would be as if we're suddenly to become responsible for consciously metabolizing and moving the substances through our body. Just imagine how wisely everything in the body works, how blood reaches every single cell to nourish it. If equipped with our one-sided interests we're to take upon that work, we'll most probably focus on some organ that we like and neglect everything else. Soon we'll simply destroy our bodily organism. It is somewhat similar with the flow of karma. The karmic landscape is a very very complicated fabric that has to somehow, even in the face of our one-sided egoistic desires, nourish properly the soul organism of all humanity. This is not same automatic self-organizing mechanical process. In fact, this karmic landscape is in itself a form of meaningful language, which hopefully should become music-like - singing (only if we were not sabotaging the process all the time through our explosive soul life). There's meaningful organization within the flow of destiny and if we're to follow these coherences towards their convergences, we would come to know the activity of spirits which in Christian esoterism are known as Angeloi. For these beings the collective astrality of humanity is like the soul substance on which they ground themselves, it's the garden they till and that they try to plant good seeds on (these would be the human virtues that we need to develop).

So what does the psychedelic substances do? It alters our bodily processes in such a way that processes that normally belong to the etheric (life) and astral (soul) spectrum are pressed into the physical. Imagine the meat coming our of a meat grinder. Deeper processes are pressed into our waking cognition and they squeeze out as myriad of sensory-like phenomena. This grinding of the etheric and astral spectrum into the sensory is what allows for our intellect to feel like it is climbing the elevator. In a sense it is like our higher self says to us: "Normally, every night upon falling to sleep you loosen your soul processes from the sensory slots but because the spirit has not developed the thinking gestures which are able to resonate with the processes of destiny's flow at that level, you simply lose consciousness. It's like not having the appropriate antennae to catch radio signals at certain wavelengths. Through the change of bodily chemistry, the sensory slots become more susceptible to the influences of the etheric and astral spectrum. Thus the higher nature of man begins to grind through the slots, coming out as a plethora of visionary phenomena provoking novel cognitive experiences. You can still walk the gradient of falling asleep, where the neural slots through which intellectual cognition is formed, blur beneath you. This happens every night upon falling to sleep but now it is illuminated, so to speak. Yet whatever you experience in this state where the intellect is no longer capable of laying down coherent trains of thoughts, is still comprehensible only as far as the appropriate spiritual gestures are developed, which can resonate with the dynamics of the higher strata."

In other words, psychedelics can indeed pump the etheric and astral into the sensory slots but we're still left with our already developed cognition to make anything out of it. As Terence McKenna famously said: Psychedelics Don't Work On Stupid People. In other words, the psychedelic substance doesn't give us the cognition - it only pumps phenomena into our waking consciousness. It is up to our spiritual activity to make something out of it. The richer our inner life is, the more we can make out of it. If we're tripping at a party, we'll have some kaleidoscopic visuals and twisted thoughts. If we have read and internalized some of Jung's ideas, when we encompass our life, we would spot strange higher order patterns. But all this is still basically an interpretation (divination) of ground down phenomena. It is indeed possible that in these visionary states we may even have some insight about the karmic landscape described above but ultimately this would be only a symbolic wall and the intellect will be asking "Could this be true? Is there really a karmic landscape, acting like a wavefunction for our states of being, or it's all a hallucination in a physical brain?"

This question can be solved only when we awaken to higher spiritual activity and follow from there how it is stepped down through the gradient and expresses itself in intellectual gestures in the sensory spectrum. Only then we can speak of the spiritual world with certainty, in the same way we can speak of the existence of regular thought phenomena with certainty. The reason we're always left uncertain by the psychedelic experience is because our spirit never really experiences itself weaving at the actual wavelengths of the higher worlds. Instead, our spirit still vibrates at the wavelengths of intellectual thoughts and thinks about sensory-like phenomena that emerge through the grinder.

And this is really the point where psychedelics can turn from a stimulus to a real hinderance. The more 'experienced' one becomes with psychedelics, the more the intellect trespasses into a territory that doesn't belong to it. Please note - this doesn't mean that our spiritual activity is not allowed in the higher worlds but only that spiritual activity should take the appropriate form, the appropriate wavelength. Otherwise the dynamics of our higher organization are simply being ground down into the sensory wall of imagery for the intellect to interpret. This is the real danger. That instead of growing into the deeper strata of reality, we mineralize it and try to divine the higher worlds from their precipitations. Thus the chasm between the intellect and the depths of reality is perpetuated. Elsewhere I likened this process to a Cargo Cult.

So this is basically what psychedelics provide. They can indeed pump and grind our higher nature down into sensory fragments. This can serve as a stimulus for some, giving a nudge that there's really something in the depths of this world that we sink into when we fall to sleep. But from that point onwards we need different means if we are to develop the spiritual gestures through which we can weave in the higher orders of reality. This psychedelics cannot give us by any means, in the same way they can't give cleverness to the stupid people who don't appreciate the experience as McKenna notes. Yet McKenna himself chose to remain at a certain level of 'cleverness' where he enjoyed the Cargo. He didn't pursue the spiritual activity which can weave in the higher orders of reality. And these forms of spiritual activity are attained only through inner work, just like regular cognitive skills, such as doing math, are attained through developing mathematical thinking and not by ingesting a pill.

Sorry Cleric, it might be my drama queen antipathy speaking here below, but it’s your explanations here that have evoked it! And I know I’ll regret it, but I’ll put it as is.

You are saying that the psychedelic drug is like a grinder that ‘pumps higher nature down’. In other words psychedelics is that thing, belonging to the sensory spectrum, which - once put in motion by human will - finds itself able to take over our higher self and grind it into sensory fragments. It's the sensory that takes over the spiritual - how does this work? Again, I sense this act of curling on oneself, although I don’t know which part is doing it on which, astral, sensory, etheric, or the ego itself. I haven’t come to that chapter yet, I haven't meditated nearly enough, I don’t really understand these four bodies. Still I really wonder, how can the sensory level rebel up this way, and out of nowhere tell the higher bodies “come-on bodies, into the grinder everyone”? Is this reverse mentorship? What kind of higher hierarchy is that? Unless it’s this higher self itself, endorsing that? And why would a higher self be interested in grinding itself into letter-fragments? And I’m putting a real question mark here because, of course, I don’t usually hang with higher selves and I don't doubt you will file yet another mind-blowing explanation to that (no irony).

But for now, I can’t see what body, or what ego, in its right mind (so to speak) would be interested in making sausages out of the higher worlds, and force-feed our cheesed-off senses with it? Why... And imagining that an ego for some ineffable reason would decide to do that, how can this not be a form of self-sabotage or self-harm?

[AshvinP]

In your view, what is it that psychedeclics actually provide?(in contrast to the drug-free conscious inner transformation) (maybe there's a thread already about that)

My own crude way of putting it would be that they act as an elevator, giving you a push in some kind of direction, and then happily leaving you there to figure out what the h*ck is going on and how to get back home.

Instead, would you have gotten there "on your own", you would:
1. have exercised the "muscles" you need to get there, thus being able to continue moving in that direction (perhaps) indefinitely.
2. have spent some time getting there, orienting yourself as you go, and thus, when you pass the point that the psychedelics would have dropped you off at you're a lot more oriented and can make sense of the situation in a different way.
3. (perhaps) have no need to get back home.

To answer the question we need to get a better understanding of what happens in the psychedelic state. This may come as a surprise but each one of us passes through an unrecognized 'psychedelic trip' at least twice a day - upon falling to sleep and waking up. Those experienced may have recognized that, especially if we wake up abruptly from a dream, we go through a few second 'trip' as the dream imagery is sill superimposed on our awakening sensory consciousness. Very quickly, though, the dream panorama dissipates and we're left experiencing consciousness only in our sensory and intellectual slots.

Anyone who has been curious about psychedelics but has never had the opportunity to try, has the chance to do it every night upon falling to sleep. What do we do when we go to sleep at night? We usually lay down with buzzing inner world, overwhelmed by a stream of memories of the daily happenings, thoughts about problems, worries about the next day, arguing with persons in our imagination and so on. At some point it all sinks into oblivion, without any consciousness of it. Even on the next day, if we try to remember it, it's hard to tell what exactly happens when we fall to sleep. What happens is what in other circumstances is called the psychedelic 'ego death'. So we have the chance to experience this every night if we try to overcome the chaos of our past reverberations and future projections and instead try to settle quietly in our core (which normally speaks thoughts) and allow sensory consciousness dissolve as we enter the sleep state.

The reason we normally lose consciousness upon falling asleep is because our spiritual activity has to work at different 'wavelengths' when we loosen from the slots of the sensory organs. In our waking consciousness our intellect mimics the dynamics of sensory perceptions. To remember a color, a sound, etc., we need to have developed the inner imaginative gestures to willfully reproduce them. We can think in words because we have heard words and we have learned to replicate imaginative sound-like phenomena with our spiritual activity, through which we symbolize the meaning we weave through. So in this sense, we can only think, imagine, remember things that we have developed the 'slots' for.

Alas, when we drift to sleep all these sensory slots blur out, they spread out and become part of the Cosmic background. If we are to be conscious in this state we need other kinds of slots, which are resonant with the wavelengths of the spiritual activity at that level. For example, we may have acquaintance with someone on Earth. Let's imagine it is a very prolific exchange. In simple words we would say that our friendship with that person has great significance for us. On the sensory level we have a flow of experiences. We see the person, hear their words, we do things together. When we're not together we think about what they said, about what we'll be doing together on the next day and so on.

In general, we would say that all these things happen in our own consciousness. But if we're able to cross the threshold of falling to sleep it is possible that we find our relations with the person in a completely different way. When the sensory spectrum blurs into the background we're left only with our soul life. Now it is possible to recognize the soul (astral) presence of the other person. Now things are not that delineated as we're used to from our sensory experiences. Instead, the other person's presence interpenetrates our sphere of experience. It's like their soul is weaved of fine fragrance which we breathe and it is part of our being. Now this is not some kind physical presence. Consciousness is quite different at that level. This 'fragrance' is like a stream of destiny, so to speak. These exchanges are like complicated karmic flows. When we look at the interference of these fragrances, we don't see some sensory-like substance, like we can see mist with our eyes. Instead, this interference is like a living fluid crystal ball through which we can see the ways into which this potential can play out when decohered to the level of the sensory slots. In other words, to borrow from the metaphor from the other thread, it's like the interference of our flows of destiny, shapes the wavefunction within which our sensory states of being manifest. In our waking life we feel certain sympathy and interest towards that person, we feel that in our exchange something of value is produced but in reality all this is already being shaped in its general lines in the deeper strata of the astral.

Now it can be objected that I stray too far from the topic but these extra details are really important if we are to understand what the psychedelics can and cannot give. We can't speak of what the psychedelic cannot give, if we don't try to build some understanding of that thing, can we?

So our spiritual activity really works on quite different wavelengths of the time-consciousness spectrum in that state. We need to get to a state where we can think our karmic flow so to speak. Now it should immediately be said that at our stage of evolution we're not really free to swirl that flow in any way we like. Unspeakable havoc would be wrecked if we were to will our destiny under the influences of our egoistic ideas and desires. It would be as if we're suddenly to become responsible for consciously metabolizing and moving the substances through our body. Just imagine how wisely everything in the body works, how blood reaches every single cell to nourish it. If equipped with our one-sided interests we're to take upon that work, we'll most probably focus on some organ that we like and neglect everything else. Soon we'll simply destroy our bodily organism. It is somewhat similar with the flow of karma. The karmic landscape is a very very complicated fabric that has to somehow, even in the face of our one-sided egoistic desires, nourish properly the soul organism of all humanity. This is not same automatic self-organizing mechanical process. In fact, this karmic landscape is in itself a form of meaningful language, which hopefully should become music-like - singing (only if we were not sabotaging the process all the time through our explosive soul life). There's meaningful organization within the flow of destiny and if we're to follow these coherences towards their convergences, we would come to know the activity of spirits which in Christian esoterism are known as Angeloi. For these beings the collective astrality of humanity is like the soul substance on which they ground themselves, it's the garden they till and that they try to plant good seeds on (these would be the human virtues that we need to develop).

So what does the psychedelic substances do? It alters our bodily processes in such a way that processes that normally belong to the etheric (life) and astral (soul) spectrum are pressed into the physical. Imagine the meat coming our of a meat grinder. Deeper processes are pressed into our waking cognition and they squeeze out as myriad of sensory-like phenomena. This grinding of the etheric and astral spectrum into the sensory is what allows for our intellect to feel like it is climbing the elevator. In a sense it is like our higher self says to us: "Normally, every night upon falling to sleep you loosen your soul processes from the sensory slots but because the spirit has not developed the thinking gestures which are able to resonate with the processes of destiny's flow at that level, you simply lose consciousness. It's like not having the appropriate antennae to catch radio signals at certain wavelengths. Through the change of bodily chemistry, the sensory slots become more susceptible to the influences of the etheric and astral spectrum. Thus the higher nature of man begins to grind through the slots, coming out as a plethora of visionary phenomena provoking novel cognitive experiences. You can still walk the gradient of falling asleep, where the neural slots through which intellectual cognition is formed, blur beneath you. This happens every night upon falling to sleep but now it is illuminated, so to speak. Yet whatever you experience in this state where the intellect is no longer capable of laying down coherent trains of thoughts, is still comprehensible only as far as the appropriate spiritual gestures are developed, which can resonate with the dynamics of the higher strata."

In other words, psychedelics can indeed pump the etheric and astral into the sensory slots but we're still left with our already developed cognition to make anything out of it. As Terence McKenna famously said: Psychedelics Don't Work On Stupid People. In other words, the psychedelic substance doesn't give us the cognition - it only pumps phenomena into our waking consciousness. It is up to our spiritual activity to make something out of it. The richer our inner life is, the more we can make out of it. If we're tripping at a party, we'll have some kaleidoscopic visuals and twisted thoughts. If we have read and internalized some of Jung's ideas, when we encompass our life, we would spot strange higher order patterns. But all this is still basically an interpretation (divination) of ground down phenomena. It is indeed possible that in these visionary states we may even have some insight about the karmic landscape described above but ultimately this would be only a symbolic wall and the intellect will be asking "Could this be true? Is there really a karmic landscape, acting like a wavefunction for our states of being, or it's all a hallucination in a physical brain?"

This question can be solved only when we awaken to higher spiritual activity and follow from there how it is stepped down through the gradient and expresses itself in intellectual gestures in the sensory spectrum. Only then we can speak of the spiritual world with certainty, in the same way we can speak of the existence of regular thought phenomena with certainty. The reason we're always left uncertain by the psychedelic experience is because our spirit never really experiences itself weaving at the actual wavelengths of the higher worlds. Instead, our spirit still vibrates at the wavelengths of intellectual thoughts and thinks about sensory-like phenomena that emerge through the grinder.

And this is really the point where psychedelics can turn from a stimulus to a real hinderance. The more 'experienced' one becomes with psychedelics, the more the intellect trespasses into a territory that doesn't belong to it. Please note - this doesn't mean that our spiritual activity is not allowed in the higher worlds but only that spiritual activity should take the appropriate form, the appropriate wavelength. Otherwise the dynamics of our higher organization are simply being ground down into the sensory wall of imagery for the intellect to interpret. This is the real danger. That instead of growing into the deeper strata of reality, we mineralize it and try to divine the higher worlds from their precipitations. Thus the chasm between the intellect and the depths of reality is perpetuated. Elsewhere I likened this process to a Cargo Cult.

So this is basically what psychedelics provide. They can indeed pump and grind our higher nature down into sensory fragments. This can serve as a stimulus for some, giving a nudge that there's really something in the depths of this world that we sink into when we fall to sleep. But from that point onwards we need different means if we are to develop the spiritual gestures through which we can weave in the higher orders of reality. This psychedelics cannot give us by any means, in the same way they can't give cleverness to the stupid people who don't appreciate the experience as McKenna notes. Yet McKenna himself chose to remain at a certain level of 'cleverness' where he enjoyed the Cargo. He didn't pursue the spiritual activity which can weave in the higher orders of reality. And these forms of spiritual activity are attained only through inner work, just like regular cognitive skills, such as doing math, are attained through developing mathematical thinking and not by ingesting a pill.

Sorry Cleric, it might be my drama queen antipathy speaking here below, but it’s your explanations here that have evoked it! And I know I’ll regret it, but I’ll put it as is.

You are saying that the psychedelic drug is like a grinder that ‘pumps higher nature down’. In other words psychedelics is that thing, belonging to the sensory spectrum, which - once put in motion by human will - finds itself able to take over our higher self and grind it into sensory fragments. It's the sensory that takes over the spiritual - how does this work? Again, I sense this act of curling on oneself, although I don’t know which part is doing it on which, astral, sensory, etheric, or the ego itself. I haven’t come to that chapter yet, I haven't meditated nearly enough, I don’t really understand these four bodies. Still I really wonder, how can the sensory level rebel up this way, and out of nowhere tell the higher bodies “come-on bodies, into the grinder everyone”? Is this reverse mentorship? What kind of higher hierarchy is that? Unless it’s this higher self itself, endorsing that? And why would a higher self be interested in grinding itself into letter-fragments? And I’m putting a real question mark here because, of course, I don’t usually hang with higher selves and I don't doubt you will file yet another mind-blowing explanation to that (no irony).

But for now, I can’t see what body, or what ego, in its right mind (so to speak) would be interested in making sausages out of the higher worlds, and force-feed our cheesed-off senses with it? Why... And imagining that an ego for some ineffable reason would decide to do that, how can this not be a form of self-sabotage or self-harm?

Briefly, it may help to remember, the psychedelics are simply an expression of your spirit's desire to remain attached to the familiar sensory-conceptual spectrum while pursuing the spiritual. It is the same thing humanity has been doing to itself ever since the Fall. As soon as the ancient Hebrews were delivered from slavery in Egypt, they started worshipping the golden calf. The 'why' of it is a huge topic, and perhaps Cleric will elaborate on that, but there is no mistaking the fact that this is actually what has been happening throughout human history and continues to happen today, as we see with modern 'naive realism' across all philosophies. The secular scientist looks through the microscope or telescope and feels immense power from the molecules and galaxies he beholds, which are otherwise supra-sensory without the technology, thereby making it a 'thing-itself'. The spiritualist with his psycho-technology does something very similar.

[Cleric K]

Sorry Cleric, it might be my drama queen antipathy speaking here below, but it’s your explanations here that have evoked it! And I know I’ll regret it, but I’ll put it as is.

You are saying that the psychedelic drug is like a grinder that ‘pumps higher nature down’. In other words psychedelics is that thing, belonging to the sensory spectrum, which - once put in motion by human will - finds itself able to take over our higher self and grind it into sensory fragments. It's the sensory that takes over the spiritual - how does this work? Again, I sense this act of curling on oneself, although I don’t know which part is doing it on which, astral, sensory, etheric, or the ego itself. I haven’t come to that chapter yet, I haven't meditated nearly enough, I don’t really understand these four bodies. Still I really wonder, how can the sensory level rebel up this way, and out of nowhere tell the higher bodies “come-on bodies, into the grinder everyone”? Is this reverse mentorship? What kind of higher hierarchy is that? Unless it’s this higher self itself, endorsing that? And why would a higher self be interested in grinding itself into letter-fragments? And I’m putting a real question mark here because, of course, I don’t usually hang with higher selves and I don't doubt you will file yet another mind-blowing explanation to that (no irony).

But for now, I can’t see what body, or what ego, in its right mind (so to speak) would be interested in making sausages out of the higher worlds, and force-feed our cheesed-off senses with it? Why... And imagining that an ego for some ineffable reason would decide to do that, how can this not be a form of self-sabotage or self-harm?

Federica, in our normal sensory consciousness we're already pretty ground up. Elsewhere I used an analogy with aliasing.

The rhythmic interactions between our layers of being (bodies) is indeed complicated. When we sleep the brainwave patterns are different, hormones are released and so on. Think about our physical body. Not as a picture from the side but as the inner experience of the senses. Color, sound, touch, taste, etc. - these are the 'slots' within which we have sensations. Imagine for a moment that these sensations are liberated from their slots, as perfume evaporates from a bottle and begin to diffuse and fill the entirety of the Cosmos. In certain sense, the Cosmos is made not of energies, atoms and so on but of smell, taste, color, sound, etc. While we operate in the physical body it is like parts of these Cosmic sensations contract (are aliased) in their sense bottles. Or seen in another way, we can say that our sensations of Cosmic color, sound, etc. are filtered such that only these parts remain which overlap with the physical processes.

When we dream at night our nervous system and etheric body open up more for this world of color and various processes of our bodily and soul life stimulate dream imagery. Consider again that when we sleep this is connected with certain change of biochemistry.

Now imagine that we alter this biochemistry though a substance and the nervous system becomes more open towards dream imagery beginning to overflow our consciousness while we're still awake. The big difference to a regular dream is that our thinking ego doesn't simply let go and begin to dream along, in the way it happens through the night, but instead it resists the flow of imagery and try to keep its familiar form. In our dreams our ego consciousness is subdued. In the morning we're often astounded when we remember how absurd things didn't make any impression on us (training to be vigilant for these absurd things is a common method for mastering lucid dreaming). On the other hand, in our waking life we're more alert, we have some common wisdom about what kind of sensory sensations we can expect and how we react to them with our thoughts and feelings. When the dream world begins pressing into our waking consciousness, our ego struggles to keep a grip. Yet whatever squeezes through in this way can only be comprehended through the conceptual slots we have developed (sometimes we can develop new concept in the course of the experience but we need to be spiritually active).

So if I was able to sense your objection rightly, it's not that the physical body takes in and grinds the other bodies. Here's another analogy. Imagine our physical senses and the complementary intellectual forms as rectangles, triangles and so on. In our daily consciousness we live in arrangements of these forms. Our higher members can be grasped through their corresponding forms, let's imagine that they are more curvy, fluid forms. In the course of development in this life, childhood imagination subsides and gradually from the vast potential, our physical organism and intellectual thinking can grasp only that which fits the rectangular, triangular 'bottles'. All else is filtered and it simply doesn't exists as far as our consciousness is concerned. Btw this 'filtration' process is well known even in purely materialistic science. It is well known that we start our life with much more neurons and in the course of growing up these are basically filtered down, in a kind of use-it-or-lose-it scheme. Neuroscientists would describe this process as analogous to natural selection - we remain only with those sensory and conceptual slots which make us fit to survive in our environment. Tweaking the biochemistry of the body makes it temporarily open again for the imaginative 'substance' that is always there but simply passes through us without being registered, except in the slots we have retained. Yet the problem is that this imaginative flood is still being formatted by the conceptual slots we have at hand. So the imaginative world, where curvy fluid forms can be cognized (if we have developed the matching forms of spiritual activity) are instead aliased through our sensory and intellectual slots, producing a visionary experience.

If it helps, you can look at it in the other way. Instead of the higher members imagined to come down into the physical grinder, we can imagine the physical slots stretching towards the higher order flow but grasping out of it only that which can be grasped as rectangular or triangular. Another way to imagine it is like the "I" living in the sensory spectrum is like a child which has its sensory and thinking slots - toy, diaper, spoon, etc. Then this child is eager to grow into adults conversations about politics, philosophy, science and so on. The child is capable of only grasping whatever it can grind through the forms of toy, diaper, spoon. It needs to develop new concepts, new thinking gestures, if it is to grow in the actual ideas. So it is with psychedelics and the reason I likened it to a Cargo Cult. It is good that psychedelics have given the confidence to people that there's a deeper level of reality but if we are to grow into that level we need to find the matching spiritual activity. Otherwise we want to continue aliasing everything with our toy concepts or believe that we need to get rid of spiritual activity altogether and simply flow along inexplicable phenomena. This would be analogous to the child believing that it grasps the adult talks in their true essence by eliminating its childish concepts and simply flow with the speech of the adults in pure 'experiencing', in a kind of glossolalia. Then the kid will maintain that there's no such thing as meaning in the higher world but only instinctive glassolalial flow.

[Federica]

Sorry Cleric, it might be my drama queen antipathy speaking here below, but it’s your explanations here that have evoked it! And I know I’ll regret it, but I’ll put it as is.

You are saying that the psychedelic drug is like a grinder that ‘pumps higher nature down’. In other words psychedelics is that thing, belonging to the sensory spectrum, which - once put in motion by human will - finds itself able to take over our higher self and grind it into sensory fragments. It's the sensory that takes over the spiritual - how does this work? Again, I sense this act of curling on oneself, although I don’t know which part is doing it on which, astral, sensory, etheric, or the ego itself. I haven’t come to that chapter yet, I haven't meditated nearly enough, I don’t really understand these four bodies. Still I really wonder, how can the sensory level rebel up this way, and out of nowhere tell the higher bodies “come-on bodies, into the grinder everyone”? Is this reverse mentorship? What kind of higher hierarchy is that? Unless it’s this higher self itself, endorsing that? And why would a higher self be interested in grinding itself into letter-fragments? And I’m putting a real question mark here because, of course, I don’t usually hang with higher selves and I don't doubt you will file yet another mind-blowing explanation to that (no irony).

But for now, I can’t see what body, or what ego, in its right mind (so to speak) would be interested in making sausages out of the higher worlds, and force-feed our cheesed-off senses with it? Why... And imagining that an ego for some ineffable reason would decide to do that, how can this not be a form of self-sabotage or self-harm?

Federica, in our normal sensory consciousness we're already pretty ground up. Elsewhere I used an analogy with aliasing.

The rhythmic interactions between our layers of being (bodies) is indeed complicated. When we sleep the brainwave patterns are different, hormones are released and so on. Think about our physical body. Not as a picture from the side but as the inner experience of the senses. Color, sound, touch, taste, etc. - these are the 'slots' within which we have sensations. Imagine for a moment that these sensations are liberated from their slots, as perfume evaporates from a bottle and begin to diffuse and fill the entirety of the Cosmos. In certain sense, the Cosmos is made not of energies, atoms and so on but of smell, taste, color, sound, etc. While we operate in the physical body it is like parts of these Cosmic sensations contract (are aliased) in their sense bottles. Or seen in another way, we can say that our sensations of Cosmic color, sound, etc. are filtered such that only these parts remain which overlap with the physical processes.

When we dream at night our nervous system and etheric body open up more for this world of color and various processes of our bodily and soul life stimulate dream imagery. Consider again that when we sleep this is connected with certain change of biochemistry.

Now imagine that we alter this biochemistry though a substance and the nervous system becomes more open towards dream imagery beginning to overflow our consciousness while we're still awake. The big difference to a regular dream is that our thinking ego doesn't simply let go and begin to dream along, in the way it happens through the night, but instead it resists the flow of imagery and try to keep its familiar form. In our dreams our ego consciousness is subdued. In the morning we're often astounded when we remember how absurd things didn't make any impression on us (training to be vigilant for these absurd things is a common method for mastering lucid dreaming). On the other hand, in our waking life we're more alert, we have some common wisdom about what kind of sensory sensations we can expect and how we react to them with our thoughts and feelings. When the dream world begins pressing into our waking consciousness, our ego struggles to keep a grip. Yet whatever squeezes through in this way can only be comprehended through the conceptual slots we have developed (sometimes we can develop new concept in the course of the experience but we need to be spiritually active).

So if I was able to sense your objection rightly, it's not that the physical body takes in and grinds the other bodies. Here's another analogy. Imagine our physical senses and the complementary intellectual forms as rectangles, triangles and so on. In our daily consciousness we live in arrangements of these forms. Our higher members can be grasped through their corresponding forms, let's imagine that they are more curvy, fluid forms. In the course of development in this life, childhood imagination subsides and gradually from the vast potential, our physical organism and intellectual thinking can grasp only that which fits the rectangular, triangular 'bottles'. All else is filtered and it simply doesn't exists as far as our consciousness is concerned. Btw this 'filtration' process is well known even in purely materialistic science. It is well known that we start our life with much more neurons and in the course of growing up these are basically filtered down, in a kind of use-it-or-lose-it scheme. Neuroscientists would describe this process as analogous to natural selection - we remain only with those sensory and conceptual slots which make us fit to survive in our environment. Tweaking the biochemistry of the body makes it temporarily open again for the imaginative 'substance' that is always there but simply passes through us without being registered, except in the slots we have retained. Yet the problem is that this imaginative flood is still being formatted by the conceptual slots we have at hand. So the imaginative world, where curvy fluid forms can be cognized (if we have developed the matching forms of spiritual activity) are instead aliased through our sensory and intellectual slots, producing a visionary experience.

If it helps, you can look at it in the other way. Instead of the higher members imagined to come down into the physical grinder, we can imagine the physical slots stretching towards the higher order flow but grasping out of it only that which can be grasped as rectangular or triangular. Another way to imagine it is like the "I" living in the sensory spectrum is like a child which has its sensory and thinking slots - toy, diaper, spoon, etc. Then this child is eager to grow into adults conversations about politics, philosophy, science and so on. The child is capable of only grasping whatever it can grind through the forms of toy, diaper, spoon. It needs to develop new concepts, new thinking gestures, if it is to grow in the actual ideas. So it is with psychedelics and the reason I likened it to a Cargo Cult. It is good that psychedelics have given the confidence to people that there's a deeper level of reality but if we are to grow into that level we need to find the matching spiritual activity. Otherwise we want to continue aliasing everything with our toy concepts or believe that we need to get rid of spiritual activity altogether and simply flow along inexplicable phenomena. This would be analogous to the child believing that it grasps the adult talks in their true essence by eliminating its childish concepts and simply flow with the speech of the adults in pure 'experiencing', in a kind of glossolalia. Then the kid will maintain that there's no such thing as meaning in the higher world but only instinctive glassolalial flow.

Thank you, Cleric. I am taking a little longer time to consider.

[Federica]

Federica, in our normal sensory consciousness we're already pretty ground up. Elsewhere I used an analogy with aliasing.

The rhythmic interactions between our layers of being (bodies) is indeed complicated. When we sleep the brainwave patterns are different, hormones are released and so on. Think about our physical body. Not as a picture from the side but as the inner experience of the senses. Color, sound, touch, taste, etc. - these are the 'slots' within which we have sensations. Imagine for a moment that these sensations are liberated from their slots, as perfume evaporates from a bottle and begin to diffuse and fill the entirety of the Cosmos. In certain sense, the Cosmos is made not of energies, atoms and so on but of smell, taste, color, sound, etc. While we operate in the physical body it is like parts of these Cosmic sensations contract (are aliased) in their sense bottles. Or seen in another way, we can say that our sensations of Cosmic color, sound, etc. are filtered such that only these parts remain which overlap with the physical processes.

When we dream at night our nervous system and etheric body open up more for this world of color and various processes of our bodily and soul life stimulate dream imagery. Consider again that when we sleep this is connected with certain change of biochemistry.

Now imagine that we alter this biochemistry though a substance and the nervous system becomes more open towards dream imagery beginning to overflow our consciousness while we're still awake. The big difference to a regular dream is that our thinking ego doesn't simply let go and begin to dream along, in the way it happens through the night, but instead it resists the flow of imagery and try to keep its familiar form. In our dreams our ego consciousness is subdued. In the morning we're often astounded when we remember how absurd things didn't make any impression on us (training to be vigilant for these absurd things is a common method for mastering lucid dreaming). On the other hand, in our waking life we're more alert, we have some common wisdom about what kind of sensory sensations we can expect and how we react to them with our thoughts and feelings. When the dream world begins pressing into our waking consciousness, our ego struggles to keep a grip. Yet whatever squeezes through in this way can only be comprehended through the conceptual slots we have developed (sometimes we can develop new concept in the course of the experience but we need to be spiritually active).

So if I was able to sense your objection rightly, it's not that the physical body takes in and grinds the other bodies. Here's another analogy. Imagine our physical senses and the complementary intellectual forms as rectangles, triangles and so on. In our daily consciousness we live in arrangements of these forms. Our higher members can be grasped through their corresponding forms, let's imagine that they are more curvy, fluid forms. In the course of development in this life, childhood imagination subsides and gradually from the vast potential, our physical organism and intellectual thinking can grasp only that which fits the rectangular, triangular 'bottles'. All else is filtered and it simply doesn't exists as far as our consciousness is concerned. Btw this 'filtration' process is well known even in purely materialistic science. It is well known that we start our life with much more neurons and in the course of growing up these are basically filtered down, in a kind of use-it-or-lose-it scheme. Neuroscientists would describe this process as analogous to natural selection - we remain only with those sensory and conceptual slots which make us fit to survive in our environment. Tweaking the biochemistry of the body makes it temporarily open again for the imaginative 'substance' that is always there but simply passes through us without being registered, except in the slots we have retained. Yet the problem is that this imaginative flood is still being formatted by the conceptual slots we have at hand. So the imaginative world, where curvy fluid forms can be cognized (if we have developed the matching forms of spiritual activity) are instead aliased through our sensory and intellectual slots, producing a visionary experience.

If it helps, you can look at it in the other way. Instead of the higher members imagined to come down into the physical grinder, we can imagine the physical slots stretching towards the higher order flow but grasping out of it only that which can be grasped as rectangular or triangular. Another way to imagine it is like the "I" living in the sensory spectrum is like a child which has its sensory and thinking slots - toy, diaper, spoon, etc. Then this child is eager to grow into adults conversations about politics, philosophy, science and so on. The child is capable of only grasping whatever it can grind through the forms of toy, diaper, spoon. It needs to develop new concepts, new thinking gestures, if it is to grow in the actual ideas. So it is with psychedelics and the reason I likened it to a Cargo Cult. It is good that psychedelics have given the confidence to people that there's a deeper level of reality but if we are to grow into that level we need to find the matching spiritual activity. Otherwise we want to continue aliasing everything with our toy concepts or believe that we need to get rid of spiritual activity altogether and simply flow along inexplicable phenomena. This would be analogous to the child believing that it grasps the adult talks in their true essence by eliminating its childish concepts and simply flow with the speech of the adults in pure 'experiencing', in a kind of glossolalia. Then the kid will maintain that there's no such thing as meaning in the higher world but only instinctive glassolalial flow.

Cleric,

I can follow the set-up you have deployed, here and in the preceding post, as a basis to facilitate understanding of the main idea to come. Based on how you write I am quite convinced that you are of German mother tongue, I would give it a 95% likelihood, which as language - within the realm of intellect - favors the deductive approach I am most comfortable with, as opposed to the how-to approach. So I’m following. For some reason I don’t have the problem of imagining veils and separated levels of reality on different floors. I easily hold the intuition that we don’t have to move in order to access higher worlds. Your aliasing metaphor was still useful, because now I have tried to meditate on being water, in a mountain stream, a waterfall, the depths of the ocean or the kitchen tap, trying to get to the difference between being water, and water understood as "mineral particles at a specific level of kinetic energy" (end of digression).

So I read “hormones are released and so on” at the top, and I immediately know what you are preparing and where you are headed. Later, speaking of dream state, you say “certain change in biochemistry”. Ok, here it comes. The thing is, you keep walking me through what psychedelics do or don’t do. I understand that, it makes enough sense what they do, and I see that you want to put them in the seamless continuation of what we do and don’t do within our limited sensory state. What I am concerned about, what disturbs me, is not as much what psychedelics do, as what they are, or rather what the gesture of inserting psychedelics in the equation is - the thinking gesture, the feeling gesture, the willed physical gesture of that insertion, of creating that discontinuity. I am interested in why “anyone who has been curious about psychedelics but has never had the opportunity to try” (very strange way to put it) would one day create that ‘opportunity’ for themselves.

“So if I was able to sense your objection rightly, it's not that the physical body takes in and grinds the other bodies”. I know. I asked about the seemingly reversed hierarchy of the psychedelic grinder making amazing higher-world confetti, as a way to point to what it feels to me as an inconsistency in your explanation, or metaphor. Then I added “Unless it’s the higher self itself, endorsing that”, which is my real point. That's what I want to investigate. I get that “tweaking the biochemistry of the body makes it temporarily open again for the imaginative 'substance' that is always there but simply passes through us without being registered”, you keep unpacking what the drug does. Here again: “we can imagine the physical slots stretching towards the higher order flow but grasping out of it only that which can be grasped as rectangular or triangular”. Yes, I can imagine that, the process is clear enough, my question does not lie there. It is instead: what is the good of stepping out of the potential we are centered in, what is the good of abdicating the path we can walk, by shifting or wrenching the planes with drugs, I would even say what is the good of humiliating our human nature that way. “It is good that psychedelics have given the confidence to people that there's a deeper level of reality” does not sound convincing to my ear. To me it seems a very expensive price to pay for that confidence.

[Federica]

Briefly, it may help to remember, the psychedelics are simply an expression of your spirit's desire to remain attached to the familiar sensory-conceptual spectrum while pursuing the spiritual. It is the same thing humanity has been doing to itself ever since the Fall. As soon as the ancient Hebrews were delivered from slavery in Egypt, they started worshipping the golden calf. The 'why' of it is a huge topic, and perhaps Cleric will elaborate on that, but there is no mistaking the fact that this is actually what has been happening throughout human history and continues to happen today, as we see with modern 'naive realism' across all philosophies. The secular scientist looks through the microscope or telescope and feels immense power from the molecules and galaxies he beholds, which are otherwise supra-sensory without the technology, thereby making it a 'thing-itself'. The spiritualist with his psycho-technology does something very similar.

Ashvin,

You unusually say “psychedelics are simply an expression of your spirit's desire”. Psychedelics are not and have never been an expression of desires of mine. Are you granting me a fully embodied Christ impulse here or is this simply a typo?


“It is the same thing humanity has been doing to itself ever since the Fall.” No it’s not the same thing. When naive realists (≅ 99 % of the world population content) stop at the level of appearances and declare the world content existing in itself, they are simply succumbing to the limits brought forward by the human organization itself. They're in a temporary passive understanding inducted by the interplay of social conditioning and characteristics of the waking state. We can accuse naive realists of many crimes, but the fact is, reality presents itself to us as separate, and many are not equipped well enough to holistically encompass it within the scope of their thinking agency. Until we grow out of that naive understanding, we are fully and naturally working within the given of our human organization, and that's the full characterization of the crime. Later we possibly come to question our understanding of reality, be it by personal interest and quest, by epiphany, or by other means.


In my perspective, there is ‘no mistaking’ that this is not at all the case with psychedelic desire. This desire seems to me very different from the condition of naive realism where one is not yet fully awakened to the nature of reality, by reason of being operating at a very natural less-than-full scope of human understanding. Similarly, the scientist excited about extending the reach of sensory perceptions through instrumentation is not tripping, but only expressing at a more structured and extended level what we all naturally express in the act of mapping and verifying our understanding of the physical plane. Those endeavors and that sense of power you refer to is in essence not different from what a baby does and how a baby feels when crawling around, grabbing and tasting all sorts of objects. Conversely, psychedelic desire is not continuous with the desire of growing our knowledge and awareness, in whatever planes it may manifest. It is instead a desire of signing off of a continuous progress, by introducing a fragment of discontinuity on our path. As I tried to convey in the post above, to me it is an abdication of our potential and a distrust in the endogenous evolving capacity with a starting point in the me-now. And in this sense it is harmful to the self.

[Anthony66]

In your view, what is it that psychedeclics actually provide?(in contrast to the drug-free conscious inner transformation) (maybe there's a thread already about that)

My own crude way of putting it would be that they act as an elevator, giving you a push in some kind of direction, and then happily leaving you there to figure out what the h*ck is going on and how to get back home.

Instead, would you have gotten there "on your own", you would:
1. have exercised the "muscles" you need to get there, thus being able to continue moving in that direction (perhaps) indefinitely.
2. have spent some time getting there, orienting yourself as you go, and thus, when you pass the point that the psychedelics would have dropped you off at you're a lot more oriented and can make sense of the situation in a different way.
3. (perhaps) have no need to get back home.

To answer the question we need to get a better understanding of what happens in the psychedelic state. This may come as a surprise but each one of us passes through an unrecognized 'psychedelic trip' at least twice a day - upon falling to sleep and waking up. Those experienced may have recognized that, especially if we wake up abruptly from a dream, we go through a few second 'trip' as the dream imagery is sill superimposed on our awakening sensory consciousness. Very quickly, though, the dream panorama dissipates and we're left experiencing consciousness only in our sensory and intellectual slots.

Anyone who has been curious about psychedelics but has never had the opportunity to try, has the chance to do it every night upon falling to sleep. What do we do when we go to sleep at night? We usually lay down with buzzing inner world, overwhelmed by a stream of memories of the daily happenings, thoughts about problems, worries about the next day, arguing with persons in our imagination and so on. At some point it all sinks into oblivion, without any consciousness of it. Even on the next day, if we try to remember it, it's hard to tell what exactly happens when we fall to sleep. What happens is what in other circumstances is called the psychedelic 'ego death'. So we have the chance to experience this every night if we try to overcome the chaos of our past reverberations and future projections and instead try to settle quietly in our core (which normally speaks thoughts) and allow sensory consciousness dissolve as we enter the sleep state.

The reason we normally lose consciousness upon falling asleep is because our spiritual activity has to work at different 'wavelengths' when we loosen from the slots of the sensory organs. In our waking consciousness our intellect mimics the dynamics of sensory perceptions. To remember a color, a sound, etc., we need to have developed the inner imaginative gestures to willfully reproduce them. We can think in words because we have heard words and we have learned to replicate imaginative sound-like phenomena with our spiritual activity, through which we symbolize the meaning we weave through. So in this sense, we can only think, imagine, remember things that we have developed the 'slots' for.

Alas, when we drift to sleep all these sensory slots blur out, they spread out and become part of the Cosmic background. If we are to be conscious in this state we need other kinds of slots, which are resonant with the wavelengths of the spiritual activity at that level. For example, we may have acquaintance with someone on Earth. Let's imagine it is a very prolific exchange. In simple words we would say that our friendship with that person has great significance for us. On the sensory level we have a flow of experiences. We see the person, hear their words, we do things together. When we're not together we think about what they said, about what we'll be doing together on the next day and so on.

In general, we would say that all these things happen in our own consciousness. But if we're able to cross the threshold of falling to sleep it is possible that we find our relations with the person in a completely different way. When the sensory spectrum blurs into the background we're left only with our soul life. Now it is possible to recognize the soul (astral) presence of the other person. Now things are not that delineated as we're used to from our sensory experiences. Instead, the other person's presence interpenetrates our sphere of experience. It's like their soul is weaved of fine fragrance which we breathe and it is part of our being. Now this is not some kind physical presence. Consciousness is quite different at that level. This 'fragrance' is like a stream of destiny, so to speak. These exchanges are like complicated karmic flows. When we look at the interference of these fragrances, we don't see some sensory-like substance, like we can see mist with our eyes. Instead, this interference is like a living fluid crystal ball through which we can see the ways into which this potential can play out when decohered to the level of the sensory slots. In other words, to borrow from the metaphor from the other thread, it's like the interference of our flows of destiny, shapes the wavefunction within which our sensory states of being manifest. In our waking life we feel certain sympathy and interest towards that person, we feel that in our exchange something of value is produced but in reality all this is already being shaped in its general lines in the deeper strata of the astral.

Now it can be objected that I stray too far from the topic but these extra details are really important if we are to understand what the psychedelics can and cannot give. We can't speak of what the psychedelic cannot give, if we don't try to build some understanding of that thing, can we?

So our spiritual activity really works on quite different wavelengths of the time-consciousness spectrum in that state. We need to get to a state where we can think our karmic flow so to speak. Now it should immediately be said that at our stage of evolution we're not really free to swirl that flow in any way we like. Unspeakable havoc would be wrecked if we were to will our destiny under the influences of our egoistic ideas and desires. It would be as if we're suddenly to become responsible for consciously metabolizing and moving the substances through our body. Just imagine how wisely everything in the body works, how blood reaches every single cell to nourish it. If equipped with our one-sided interests we're to take upon that work, we'll most probably focus on some organ that we like and neglect everything else. Soon we'll simply destroy our bodily organism. It is somewhat similar with the flow of karma. The karmic landscape is a very very complicated fabric that has to somehow, even in the face of our one-sided egoistic desires, nourish properly the soul organism of all humanity. This is not same automatic self-organizing mechanical process. In fact, this karmic landscape is in itself a form of meaningful language, which hopefully should become music-like - singing (only if we were not sabotaging the process all the time through our explosive soul life). There's meaningful organization within the flow of destiny and if we're to follow these coherences towards their convergences, we would come to know the activity of spirits which in Christian esoterism are known as Angeloi. For these beings the collective astrality of humanity is like the soul substance on which they ground themselves, it's the garden they till and that they try to plant good seeds on (these would be the human virtues that we need to develop).

So what does the psychedelic substances do? It alters our bodily processes in such a way that processes that normally belong to the etheric (life) and astral (soul) spectrum are pressed into the physical. Imagine the meat coming our of a meat grinder. Deeper processes are pressed into our waking cognition and they squeeze out as myriad of sensory-like phenomena. This grinding of the etheric and astral spectrum into the sensory is what allows for our intellect to feel like it is climbing the elevator. In a sense it is like our higher self says to us: "Normally, every night upon falling to sleep you loosen your soul processes from the sensory slots but because the spirit has not developed the thinking gestures which are able to resonate with the processes of destiny's flow at that level, you simply lose consciousness. It's like not having the appropriate antennae to catch radio signals at certain wavelengths. Through the change of bodily chemistry, the sensory slots become more susceptible to the influences of the etheric and astral spectrum. Thus the higher nature of man begins to grind through the slots, coming out as a plethora of visionary phenomena provoking novel cognitive experiences. You can still walk the gradient of falling asleep, where the neural slots through which intellectual cognition is formed, blur beneath you. This happens every night upon falling to sleep but now it is illuminated, so to speak. Yet whatever you experience in this state where the intellect is no longer capable of laying down coherent trains of thoughts, is still comprehensible only as far as the appropriate spiritual gestures are developed, which can resonate with the dynamics of the higher strata."

In other words, psychedelics can indeed pump the etheric and astral into the sensory slots but we're still left with our already developed cognition to make anything out of it. As Terence McKenna famously said: Psychedelics Don't Work On Stupid People. In other words, the psychedelic substance doesn't give us the cognition - it only pumps phenomena into our waking consciousness. It is up to our spiritual activity to make something out of it. The richer our inner life is, the more we can make out of it. If we're tripping at a party, we'll have some kaleidoscopic visuals and twisted thoughts. If we have read and internalized some of Jung's ideas, when we encompass our life, we would spot strange higher order patterns. But all this is still basically an interpretation (divination) of ground down phenomena. It is indeed possible that in these visionary states we may even have some insight about the karmic landscape described above but ultimately this would be only a symbolic wall and the intellect will be asking "Could this be true? Is there really a karmic landscape, acting like a wavefunction for our states of being, or it's all a hallucination in a physical brain?"

This question can be solved only when we awaken to higher spiritual activity and follow from there how it is stepped down through the gradient and expresses itself in intellectual gestures in the sensory spectrum. Only then we can speak of the spiritual world with certainty, in the same way we can speak of the existence of regular thought phenomena with certainty. The reason we're always left uncertain by the psychedelic experience is because our spirit never really experiences itself weaving at the actual wavelengths of the higher worlds. Instead, our spirit still vibrates at the wavelengths of intellectual thoughts and thinks about sensory-like phenomena that emerge through the grinder.

And this is really the point where psychedelics can turn from a stimulus to a real hinderance. The more 'experienced' one becomes with psychedelics, the more the intellect trespasses into a territory that doesn't belong to it. Please note - this doesn't mean that our spiritual activity is not allowed in the higher worlds but only that spiritual activity should take the appropriate form, the appropriate wavelength. Otherwise the dynamics of our higher organization are simply being ground down into the sensory wall of imagery for the intellect to interpret. This is the real danger. That instead of growing into the deeper strata of reality, we mineralize it and try to divine the higher worlds from their precipitations. Thus the chasm between the intellect and the depths of reality is perpetuated. Elsewhere I likened this process to a Cargo Cult.

So this is basically what psychedelics provide. They can indeed pump and grind our higher nature down into sensory fragments. This can serve as a stimulus for some, giving a nudge that there's really something in the depths of this world that we sink into when we fall to sleep. But from that point onwards we need different means if we are to develop the spiritual gestures through which we can weave in the higher orders of reality. This psychedelics cannot give us by any means, in the same way they can't give cleverness to the stupid people who don't appreciate the experience as McKenna notes. Yet McKenna himself chose to remain at a certain level of 'cleverness' where he enjoyed the Cargo. He didn't pursue the spiritual activity which can weave in the higher orders of reality. And these forms of spiritual activity are attained only through inner work, just like regular cognitive skills, such as doing math, are attained through developing mathematical thinking and not by ingesting a pill.

Cleric,

The book, "Pharmakia" by Robert Orem (http://pharmakia.org) created somewhat of a stir in evangelical circles. I think you can get the gist of the book from the website - the main concerns being about demonic influence and participating in divination practices condemned by the bible.

Could you comment on your "etheric/astral leakage into an ill-equipped sensory slots" problem vs Orem's concerns?

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

I can follow the set-up you have deployed, here and in the preceding post, as a basis to facilitate understanding of the main idea to come. Based on how you write I am quite convinced that you are of German mother tongue, I would give it a 95% likelihood, which as language - within the realm of intellect - favors the deductive approach I am most comfortable with, as opposed to the how-to approach.

Actually my mother tongue is of the Slavic family But that doesn't matter. At certain stage we begin to live in universal meaning and its lawfulness. If meaning wasn't universal it wouldn't be possible for folks to translate between their languages. It is true that the German language has evolved in a way that it is more fit to express the inner logic of thinking. But today we have all the means work right in the Imaginative domain and use words as in the way a painter uses the brushes

What I am concerned about, what disturbs me, is not as much what psychedelics do, as what they are, or rather what the gesture of inserting psychedelics in the equation is - the thinking gesture, the feeling gesture, the willed physical gesture of that insertion, of creating that discontinuity. I am interested in why “anyone who has been curious about psychedelics but has never had the opportunity to try” (very strange way to put it) would one day create that ‘opportunity’ for themselves.

Let me start with (if it wasn't clear already) that I don't advocate the use of psychedelics. Actually when I got on the forum I had much more romantic view of them. But very quickly I realized that people simply get stuck at the celebrated 'ego death' and that's it. Not only that but this leads to certain pride of the ego which makes it very difficult to explain what alternatives there are. For example in our conversations with Adur he simply insisted that one reaches the Absolute Nothingness and that's the end of it. Basically such a person says "I've been there, saw it all... it all ends there". It's difficult to convey to them that it's not only about going there but what we do in our spirit.

About the opportunity - as explained, in the course of spiritual development we will inevitably know the 'psychedelic' territory, except that it will be in a much more stable and lawful way. My point is that part of the rising interest in psychedelics is an indication that humanity is approaching a stage where a real need to extend life into the supersensible is felt. So my remark above is in the sense "Take hold of that interest in psychedelics. There may be something healthy in it. But it's much wiser to explore that depth in the proper way. Otherwise the risk is great for one to become rigidified and say 'Been there thousand times, there's nothing of what you speak of'."

And I fully agree that this risk is much more serious that I initially suspected. To use another metaphor, modern man is too much prone to venture into that territory with colonialist mentality. We simply want to travel with our ego to the holy lands and eventually meet the natives. Things become really dangerous when this mentality decides to use the natives and their resources for Earthly goals, which is a modern way to say 'black magic'. Little that we know is that in that holy land we should find the higher forces that weave our intellectual ego and desires. This was my great lesson here - that psychedelics in no way predispose one to seek the forces that precipitate as thinking and how that thinking is shaped by our hidden soul nature. It's actually quite the opposite - the intense experience is much more likely to rigidify the ego, in an act of instinctive self-preservation, which additionally blinds it for its spiritual nature.

So I'm with you that these ventures are completely unnecessary and even harmful for those who have genuine interest into deepening their soul life. The thing is to simply seek understanding. Antipathy should become understanding. When we meditate we go past the milestones and then we can say to ourselves "Imagine I was to get here suddenly without any gradient, without preparation. My ego would be twisting and jumping like a fish brought out of the water". So in the course of development we will understand what the psychedelic state is (even though we won't be helpless in it), we'll find the visuals and so on. Our goal should be simply to give the right knowledge to anyone who ventures in these waters. Because one of the greatest and dangerous misunderstandings is what Lou quoted - that psychedelics, drumming, holotropic breathing, etc., all basically lead to the same spirit land. And in a sense these things indeed lead to similar states but today we need to counterbalance all this with the knowledge that we can grow into these regions in fully conscious way, through the appropriate forms of cognition.