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.Martin_ wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 2:48 pm 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.
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.