JustAnotherHuman said:
Just read through this thread, really deep stuff I must say.
I personally think that the entheogenic path is a completely valid path to spirituality, just as valid as meditation, yoga, Tantra and all the other well-accepted spiritual practices.
I think when it comes to spirituality, it's less about the specific practice you employ and moar about how you use the spiritual practice to improve your own life and the lives of others.
Anyway, that's just my two cents.
(I apologize for the disorganized nature of this post, I have not smoked my morning cannabis yet, it's hard to keep my mind focused on a single topic, so I end up jumping around quite a bit in terms of content...)
That's fairly close to how I see these things...
Though, I feel the Entheogenic path is the
most valid.
It's the only spirituality that is not based on dogma, political hierarchies, books and churches, and so on...
... these traditions
talk about spirituality, while entheogen users actually experience spirituality first hand. No books, no priests, no ritual, just you, an entheogen, and an experience, the entheogen is the priest and teacher, the entheogen is the book, the entheogen is the church...
Those who claim it's "escaspist" or "hedonistic" are kidding themselves, this is the only path where you forced to confront and face spirituality at its core, whether you like it or not...
terence McKenna said "We can tell shit from shinola, it's just that we don't always prefer shinola"
...people know that the Entheogenic experience provides true spirituality, yet they prefer yoga, or meditation, or something softer, something which speaks about itself like it is the Entheogenic experience, but never presents any risks of actually causing life transforming change...
I love to dig at the 'Yogans' by saying “nobody ever went into an Ashram with their knees knocking in fear over the tremendous dimension they knew they were about to enter through meditation.” -terence McKenna
Experience is the source of true spiritual practice...and experience is the core of Entheogenic shamanism...
It can happen by many means, though I feel entheogens should be the preferred route, they are the most effective, the most reliable, and the safest means of inducing these experiences.
Mircea Eliade claimed that Entheogenic shamanism was in a state of decay, when in fact I see, and so did R.E. Schultes, ordeal shamanism as being in a state of decay, they must resort to sweat-lodges, fasting, poison, stranding oneself in nature, and so on, to achieve what the Entheogenic shaman can safely and more powerfully and reliably acheive through Entheogenic plants.
I just don’t resonate with believers in anything. I get insulting to Buddhists for God’s sake. It’s just something about their smugness and their whole bit, I just want to squash it. So you can imagine how I behave in the presence of scientologists and the rest of it. Belief is again, it’s a form of infantilism. There are no grounds for believing anything.
-terence McKenna
And belief is not needed here, all you need to do is experience, observe and interpret.
At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.
The metaphor of a vehicle--an after-death vehicle, an astral body--is used by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it through ignorance.
Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth--the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment--a crisis of passage--and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position...
What psychedelics encourage, and where I hope attention will focus once hallucinogens are culturally integrated to the point where large groups of people can plan research programs without fear of persecution, is the modeling of the after-death state. Psychedelics may do more than model this state; they may reveal the nature of it. Psychedelics will show us that the modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted so that we can know mind within the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all experiences of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed throughout light-years of three-dimensional space, and the interior mental universe. They are adumbrations of the same thing.
We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low quality of the code we customarily use. The language we use to discuss this problem has built-in dualisms. This is a problem of language. All codes have relative code qualities, except the Logos. The Logos is perfect and, therefore, partakes of no quality other than itself. I am here using the word Logos in the sense in which Philo Judaeus uses it--that of the Divine Reason that embraces the archetypal complex of Platonic ideas that serve as the models of creation. As long as one maps with something other than the Logos, there will be problems of code quality. The dualism built into our language makes the death of the species and the death of the individual appear to be opposed things.-terence McKenna
As the esoteric traditions say, life is an opportunity to prepare for death
ND: You have said that an important part of the mystical quest is to face up to death and recognize it as a rhythm of life. Would you like to enlarge on your view on the implications of the dying process?
TM: I take seriously the notion that these psychedelic states are an anticipation of the dying process-or, as the Tibetans refer to it, the Bardo level beyond physical death. It seems likely that our physical lives are a type of launching pad for the soul. As the esoteric traditions say, life is an opportunity to prepare for death, and we should learn to recognize the signposts along the way, so that when death comes, we can make the transition smoothly. I think the psychedelics show you the transcendental nature of reality. It would be hard to die gracefully as an atheist or existentialist. Why should you? Why not rage against the dying of the light? But if in fact this is not the dying of the light but the Dawning of the Great Light, then one should certainly not rage against that. There's a tendency in the New Age to deny death. We have people pursuing physical immortality and freezing their heads until the fifth millennium, when they can be thawed out. All of this indicates a lack of balance or equilibrium. The Tao flows through the realms of life and nonlife with equal ease. -terence McKenna
It's been a long time since I've read through this thread, and I hope I'm not just repeating myself...or just re-quoting terence.
( I don't mean to.quote terence so much, and most psychedelic enthusiasts will be able to tell you similar things, I just feel McKenna says it best, here is an example:
The world of DMT is incredibly vast. What DMT opens in us is so profound that it is impossible to truly express. I have been making, using, and initiating people into DMT use, for around 40 years. I was the one who first discovered that the free-base could be smoked. It has never ceased to amaze me, nor have I ever felt that one could fairly arrive at any hard and fast conclusions about what was happening during a DMT trip -Nick sand
And:
Any attempts to begin to describe the DMT experience is fraught with the immediate dangers of either over-simplification or a swift flight into metaphor since it is almost impossible to describe with words alone the fantastic swirling multi-faceted gateway visions that are only the beginning of the DMT experience. Intrepid travelers report that past these jeweled-gates can be found mechanical-Elves, Aliens, Egyptian Gods, temples, pyramids, and palaces of pulsating light, and some would say, the entire possible population of the Collective Unconsciousness. A magical place where the totality of phenomenal existence can be experienced in an often terrifying transpersonal flash.
* No two DMT experiences are alike, and no two people should expect any similarity in their individual experiences. (Unless, in one of the many mysteries of the DMT zone, two experiences are indeed shared as One!) It is commonly said that DMT causes far many more questions than it does answers; for it is a flowerbed for all the mystery in the Universe. Mystery is an increasingly difficult thing to find in our Fact-or-Fiction society but the on-going mapping of this tryptamine accessed Inter-Zone may ultimately lead to the birth of powerful new spiritual metaphors for Mankind, and a new Mythology great enough to both resonate within us and encompass the incredible Universe we all occupy. So in this section, you will find collated here a number of DMT accounts as recounted by different psychonauts over the last 40 years, each one mapping out a small piece of this mysterious 8th continent of the Mind.
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Both saying the same thing, right? But I like McKenna's version.
Ok I'm wandering off topic...
-eg
