DisEmboDied said:
This is an incredibly important and powerful topic and question. My hat is off to DisEmboDied. I'm especially touched by your other post about Bible Thumpers and DMT, and ruminating deeply how you will reconcile the tensions you feel between traditions, love for family, and forging your own metaphysical path.
The responses here at the Nexus are amazing. Anamnesia, I hear your passion and poetic insights, and I definitely resonate with many of your thoughts, loved this: "And that is what really ignites my fire, because I want to do everything I can to show people that we need to learn from our children, not try to teach them." To me that's about returning to the child like AWE to the Mystery of the World, being Inspired and Enlighted by it, like the Wonderment Reflected in a kid's eyeballs. But please forgive me, I'm not sure you've had kids or have raised children yet? I could be wrong, but I hear some other Nexian voices here that Yes they definitely have kids.
I think most would agree that real wisdom comes through experience. I cannot imagine a better teacher for me to the most important lessons in life than having come from raising a child. And we're just getting started: to learn what my parents went (what I and my siblings put them) through. I know kids aren't going to be everyone's path, but SO beautiful to read how Doc Buxin and his wife adopted three children. Saintly words, saintly advice.
What parents impart to their children, no matter their age, seems to me literally the unfolding of the world that we want the world to become. In my opinion, even more so, this is for our children that we do not yet know: our grandchildren, our great grandchildren and on and on.
I’ve had the opportunity to break bread many times in Chasidic households. While I may not agree with many things promulgated by religion for religion's sake, I have been fortunate to have had a couple wonderful and deeply mystical teachers, one of whom was a Lubavitcher Rebbe. During the Sabbath meal, candles lit, we stood around the dining table altogether, a table surrounded by the arrows of his quiver, six sons. We would all hold hands and sing together. Joyous, sorrowful, other worldly wordless melodies. And something magical would happen.
Clearly these sons had their father’s mystical vibe. For me the singing conjured a nearly instantaneous altered state, resultant from invoking some spiritual substance that rained down into the room. It was palatable, beautiful, even hair raising. The edges of all forms glowed: the chairs, their hats, even the book shelf, and the air felt rarified and sparkly. The songs had no words, just melodies. I was told the melodies were very old, likely dating back to the early 1800’s at the start of Chasid movement in Eastern Europe. Call it proto-Fiddler on the Roof meets Timothy Leary meets the Secret Order of Black Hats.
The Rebbe and I had many conversations about this. He would ask himself, aloud, addressing me, and I paraphrase him, “So how do I know I’m right? That this Knowing is the Only and True Way, as I have been spoon fed these esoteric traditions from my childhood, the same way I am teaching my sons. I have not known anything else.”
I can plainly say that they were evoking if not a psychedelic state, certainly an altered state of consciousness. We can speculate and theorize that some sort of sympathetic resonance tied in with sound and cymatics tickled and awoke some deep cultural and even physiological DNA; and so released all sorts of wonderful and mysterious neurotransmitters, our genes expressing all aflutter in electrical clouds, and giving rise to rarely sequenced metabolites and a fireworks of triggers. Literally our brains were brimming in a psychedelic cholent. Powerful, powerful stuff.
So is there a difference between what we seek and do with psychedelics and what my mystical Lubavitcher friend does with his sons? This expression of a personal self and a Collective Self, the family, and the world that emerges from there: what is it that this Rebbe was doing with his sons and this state consciousness? He may tell you that they are putting the shards of light that had broken and rained down from the First Light, the Ein Sof, back into their proper shells. Or orbits. Or robes. Or whatever metaphor is most poetic and meaningful. All in order to Restore the Universe back to its Original state. And these ideas were intimately woven in with their whole way of being in the world. What they practiced and prayed, what they ate, what they read, what they studied - and how they related to the world around them.
Did it make them better people in the world? In their eyes, yes. The rebbe would tease me and say, “Oh, you’ve had a taste. You’ll be back. I may not be here, but someone else will be here in my stead, and you’ll be back.” In the end wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but there was an understanding.
So will there come a day when I will share a psychedelic experience with my son, who six years old now? I think we already have, not a psychedelic one, but a self-aware and mutually shared and powerful, peak and entactogenic experience. Boogie Boarding! This was the summer my son ventured out further and further into the waves with me. And his lessons had him finally turned around, facing the shore, while the swells were approaching from behind us.
And then it happened.
One beautiful wave blossomed up behind us, just right: “Jump!” I yelled, and the wave came crashing down. We both caught it! And we raced it into shore together, hanging forward from the edge of our boards, airfoils atop the cresting white water and tumbling fury beneath us. We kept looking over to one another, smiling, exhilarated and laughing, caught in a paradox both incredulous and overjoyed. When we got to shore, we both said, “Best ride ever!” That was the peak experience, definitely an altered state of consciousness. Every endorphin and dopamine receptor must have been firing off. I kvelled, I was elated, I was in heaven (I might have been my Dad at that moment)! So was my boy.
We give our children the world. In my mind, all things considered, and that my son and I should have our health, I think there is a natural progression that one day I will be sharing my spiritual practices more so with him. That may include psychedelics. My rite of passage into psychedelics though was self-initiated. It certainly was not a part of my parents world. Now I had an older brother who was something of a mystical dude, took me to my first rock concerts, performance art, and meteor showers (I was like eight, nine years old when we started); and who sadly passed on when I was a teen. No doubt though my induction to the Other Side of the Mirror, vibratory and experiential, it came through him. Now I would like to have the sort of relationship with my son that if he does want to venture into psychedelics some day, that he will come to me first, and not to his friends. Hopefully that is what I am cultivating.
To close, I think I've mentioned in some other posts or private messages recently, there may come a time when I may shroom with my aging parents. I’d like to have that shared experience with them. Perhaps. Maybe the question DisEmboDied asked could be reversed? Should children introduce psychedelics to their parents?
Honor thy Mother and Father...I plead the Fifth.
