Imagine you lived your whole life inside a house with white walls. You would very much take these white walls for granted. They had been there with you since the beginning, and wherever you turned, whatever activity you engaged in, these walls remained, and they remained white. You would assume that they are part of "you", and soon you would barely even notice them.
One day, you take DMT, or another strong psychedelic, and, suddenly, the walls change their colour. You haven't changed, you remained the same; but the walls have changed their colour. And perhaps their shape. Suddenly, you realise that the walls are not part of you. That they are different from you. For the first time, in your entire life, you witness something very strange: you are the same you've always been, but the walls have now transformed beyond recognition.
And thus, the true nature of mind and of all things is revealed: emptiness.
Meanwhile, theology plays 3 roles. The first is to supply affective and logical methods for adjusting to the difficulties in your life in a practical fashion: be calm, compassionate, and turn the other cheek; develop your power to concentrate; pray when you are struggling; and so on. The second role follows from this. These methods of adjustment require that you revise your assumptions about other people, the events in your life and the cosmos; therefore this revision changes your premises, it changes your mind, and in doing so, it reveals the mind to you. This was the second role. The third role is to cultivate disinterest in the mind: desire, greed, attachment, materialistic pursuits are declared sins and therefore bad; there is something beyond the world worth pursuing, called Heaven or Nirvana and, by comparison, worldly pursuits are a waste of effort; ascetic fervour is praised; and so on.
The first role is an incentive. The second and third roles deliver an effect similar to psychedelics in the first scenario. It is, therefore, not surprising that psychedelics can change someone's understanding of theology; and that theology can change someone's understanding of psychedelics.
But in the end, no real progress can be made unless one's "karma" has completely exhausted. Until then, the ego will stand tall, relentlessly engaging the winds of destiny with its volition. And perhaps focusing some of its energy, apologetically, on the study of theology. Incidentally, Bodhidharma declared that the Highest of all Truths is: "Emptiness, without holiness."
Imagine you escaped from a sinking ship, and now you are on a life boat. You are stuck at sea. On the life boat, you find a book with instructions for survival: how to organise your food supply; how to deal with getting bored; what to do if there's a storm; and so on. This book is what the sages of the past have passed on. It will help you survive the journey, but it will not help you to reach the continent faster. That depends on the ocean's currents alone; there is nothing you can do about that.
The "karma" is "exhausted" when any interest in worldly pursuits has genuinely, and irreversibly been abandoned. You see, the Original Sin left us with knowledge about what things are good and what things are bad, and thereby it left us with the desire to pursue them; volition is, in fact, the hallmark of karma, and as such it uses the mind. But, what is the one thing that can be attained, which does not involve the mind? The ocean's currents alone determine when the answer to this genuinely and irreversibly arrives.
The task, therefore, is to focus just on surviving the journey. The self-defeating mistake is to be idle. Do engage; do struggle; don't avoid the problems. Don't ignore the projects that come your way, or "God's plan" as it were. Because if you interrupt the unfolding of your karma, then you will also delay its exhaustion.
