Lou Gold wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 4:09 pm
I'm sorry for my ignorance. Has Cleric ever posted about his direct experience with spiritually disciplined use of entheogens or have his comments been speculative?
But, yes, I do believe the danger of idolatry lurks along all paths and demands an ever-vigilant awareness.
The comments are based on my own experience. Such things become clear as soon as we understand that the invisible world has to be
read and not simply beheld as inexplicable and enchanting picture.
I know that this 'reading' is usually immediately misconceived for
intellectual interpretation. To understand how the higher reading is different we can use an analogy borrowed from technology.
We know that various devices which can store and retrieve information, often have a part called the 'head'. For example,
head of a hard drive or
head of a cassette player and so on. Coincidentally or not, we also have a head and the common understanding is that this head 'reads' the inputs of our perceptions. Devices convert the information in the storage medium into electric impulses, we turn perceptions into meaning in our mind, so to speak.
In the psychedelic or other altered states, our head is infused with unfamiliar stimuli. Yet we still try to read them, we try to fit them in our familiar slots of meaning (concepts). When the stimuli become so bizarre that our head can't grasp anything familiar, to the extend that the head loses the ground under its feet, people usually call this ego death. In fact the ego doesn't die, only our intellectual activity loses grip and the ego simply stops fighting to fit the experience in meaningful concepts.
When this happens, usually the experience attains such a high resolution and fluidity that we're intuitively clear that no patchwork of intellectual concepts can ever capture this infinite richness. This is usually the point where people lose confidence in thinking and see it only as something that may have practical value for sensory life but it utterly butchers the richness of reality. For many people this leads to state where they feel that normal life and its thinking is only a burden that keeps them apart from the infinitely hi-res wonderland and thus seek ways to return there from time to time.
This produces a chasm between the intellectual state and the inexplicable state where the intellect dissolves. Upon returning to intellectual cognition we can of course think about the experience, we can conceptualize it, speculate about its true nature and so on. This is what is normally understood as 'reading' into the experience. And in a way this is correct because that's what almost everyone is doing anyway. If we follow the advent of psychedelics in the 20th century we'll clearly see that nothing new has really been discovered. Certain old wisdom has been revived but the intellect hasn't made even the tiniest step towards deeper understanding of reality. The intellectual head remains confronted with the wall of imagery and reads into it. Yet whatever it does, it still feels that it exists on its own side of reality. This is a very clear fact when we consider that there are many people with lots of psychedelic experiences who nevertheless hold materialistic beliefs (btw I recently found out that James Cameron is actually quite experienced too, yet you can see from
this interview that to him the physical world still feels as the ground of reality. More specifically after 23:20).
To grasp the kind of reading we have to deal with, we can extend the analogy by saying that
the head itself must change its configuration. It must transform in order to be able to read the novel 'wavelengths' of the medium into corresponding meaning. Please note the difference - not squeezing the higher experiences and reducing/explaining them away through the characteristic slots of our present head but
evolve our head to make it compatible with the higher order wavelengths. This meaning can have very different 'geometry' and can grasp in clear cognition even the states where ordinary thinking dissolves. So ordinary thinking indeed dissolves but we keep something of the meaningful currents in the head and evolve them into resonance with the otherwise infinitely rich and inexplicable environment. Then we begin to understand that this whole environment is structured along higher order Thoughts, which no longer resemble simple words in the head but actual lines of intentional force that meaningfully weave the structure of reality. We don't grasp these Thoughts by intellectually interpreting the wiggling of our environment but our head itself must transform in order to become resonant (self-similar) to the higher Thoughts.
That's the reason why in order to penetrate reality we can't allow ourselves to 'lose our head'. Instead, our head has to transform, just like a head of a device must be transformed if it is to read new kinds of mediums. Later our whole body becomes a head. We read the meaningful curvatures of reality with our whole being. The analogy can go even further when we consider that the head not only reads but also writes and modifies the environment but let's leave that for another time. This meaningful reading/writing activity can only grow from the seed of concentrated intellectual thought. If we ignore the currents of meaning in our normal head, which read and write reality, we'll search in vain for them elsewhere. No matter how 'one' we feel with our environment, it will remain inexplicable language to us, even if we sensually merge with its incomprehensible sounds.