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Thread: Drugs in western societies

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    Drugs in western societies

    Namaste to all,

    I have questions about the place of psychoactive/psychedelic drugs from the perspective of Sanaatana Dharma or Vaidika Dharma.

    I have a friend I've known for a little over a year, and it turns out that he's (an American who is not "religious, but spiritual") taken drugs, tons of it in the past, like LDS, Ecstacy (sp?), psilocybin, 'rooms, etc. I wish he hadn't. I won't take the stuff, not only because it feels like defiling the body I live in, but also there is no telling what it would do to a person who was not initially raised as a civilized child (because of my deafness, I did not receive the American education of a child until I was past seven and a half years old and was not exposed to religion until I was eight and a half years old (which was too late by this time)). I simply will not go there.

    This is what I have written so far after reading "Your Brain Is God" by Timothy Leary and in the early part of the book, " The Archaic Revival" by Terence McKenny. I'm very open-minded, and he offered for me to read these books to understand his perspective. As follows:

    -------------------------
    I’ve been reading some of your books. First, the Brain book. The more I read this and the Archaic Revival book, the more I realize that I am not on the straight-jacketed experience of conventional religion and yet not on the psychedelic path, either. It is almost like I’m in a meadow, with conventional religion on one side, a rocky escarpment, and psychedelics on the other side in a thick, dense forest. My path runs right along down the meadow, with no resistance. Most people, on the other hand, are either picking their way through the slippery escarpment of Religion or the forest of psychedelics running along the meadow instead of the meadow that lets you run at full speed. I say that because it is known by people like Terence McKenna that while such drugs can show you the door, it doesn’t open it for you. You have to be willing to let go of your ego, step up to it, and go through it. In the Archaic book, on pg. 38, “Being Monkeys, when we encounter a transliguistic object, a kind of cognitive dissonance is set up in our hindbrain. We try to pour language over it and it sheds it like water off a duck’s back. We try again and fail again, and this cognitive dissonance, this “wow” or “flutter” that is building off this object causes, wonder, astonishment, and awe at the brink of terror…” This is similar to what I have experienced for decades trying to explain with language what it is that I experience. The way I fail is that, “I’m unable to explain it because all this started happening while I still didn’t have language, and I can still remember what it was like, clearly. There are no words to explain it.” And leave it at that; just being able to experience it in its own way. Just wanted to put that out there.

    Anyway, I have some misgivings here, because of a number of things. There’s stuff going on on both sides, the straight-laced side and the psychedelic side. I dug up some stuff on Timothy Leary. He had a bit of a checkered life, having been fired from Harvard for the work he did (though it was done ethically, under a very controlled environment) and having been arrested as a political prisoner for the involvement with drugs. So you can see at the same time the thumbing of his nose at authority and the baggage of the establishment that caused them to be fearful and arresting him instead of listening to what he had to say.

    We need to keep in mind that later in life, he got away from Eastern religion and philosophy BEFORE his Brain book was written. “[He] transitioned from Eastern philosophy and Aleister Crowley to a belief that outer space was a medium for spiritual transcendence as his principal frame of reference. Neurologic also added the idea of "time dilation/contraction" available to the activated brain through the cellular, DNA, or atomic level of reality. Terra II is his first detailed proposal for space colonization." I got this from wikipedia. I have huge issues with this, especially when you consider in the Brain book, on pg. 94 under Akin to Hinduism, he states clearly that, “Our philosophy about the meaning of LSD comes closer to Hinduism than to any other religion. Hinduism is a pagan philosophy that recognizes the divinity of all manifestations of life, allowing for a wide scope of sub-sects. To a Hindu, Catholicism is a form of Hinduism.” I don’t know about the connection of LSD with Hinduism, I just don’t because I have no experience with it. However, some things have to be corrected. First of all, we are getting away from the word Hinduism. That is a geographic word applied to such people by Persians because they lived by a river, the Sindhu. The correct name is Sanaatana Dharma (SD), which means the Eternal Way. What was always there, what is now, and what will always be. Secondly, SD is NOT a pagan philosophy (unless you want to speak from a Christian standpoint[!] because anything not Christian is pagan or heathen). To quote an article:

    "Hinduism at first blush appears to conform to paganism. It seems to worship many gods and seems to do so by worshipping different images. It thus comes across as polytheistic and idolatrous and therefore pagan. This perception fuels the missionary zeal of the Abrahamic religions to destroy such paganism.

    "There is only one problem with this scenario. It is based on a false presumption. It is true that there are many gods in Hinduism and that it abounds in image worship, but while these various gods are considered different gods in paganism as traditionally represented, in Hinduism they represent the various forms of the one and same God. Thus a plurality of gods does not denote polytheism in Hinduism but rather the plurality of the forms in which the same one God might appear. A new word such as polyformism may have to be coined, or an older word polymorphism may have to be invoked, to be set beside polytheism, to provide the corrective. The Hindu situation is characterized not by polytheism but what might be called at best "apparent polytheism," because the reality underlying all the different gods is the reality of one God. Hence, ironically, the situation could also in a sense be described as one of "apparent monotheism," in the sense that the one God appears in various forms.”

    And thirdly, Catholicism is part of Christianity, which in turn is part of the Abrahamic family of religions, meaning that they are history-centric, prophetic religions. This is nothing like Hinduism (SD), Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, and other eastern religions/philosophy simply because if you prove wrong or wipe clean the historical evidence alluding to one of the members of the Abrahamic family members, you destroy the religion right then and there, because they HAVE to be based on historic “facts,” hence all these damn wars and exclusionary behaviors. SD, on the other hand, is not dependent at all on the history of events that led to SD’s development, because what is more important to a Dharmi (person who practices/believes in SD) is #1 the “inner experience” of god, being one with god or being with god (take your pick on unity, dualism, or something else, like atheism in the case of Charvaka, one of the heterodox schools of SD), often passed down from guru to guru, guru to person, who has these experiences and thusly keeps the experience alive, fresh, and #2 the common laws of Dharmis that changes over time, according to the times and circumstances of people’s lives. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike are heavily dependent on “archaeological facts,” to the extent that there is no room for each other’s views. Just wanted to clear this up…

    Now, about outer space… When I was a kid, in my naivete, I was drawn to UFOs, space travel, Star Trek, technology. As I saw the effects of technology over the last 30 years on myself as well as other people, I began to realize that this was a mistake, a BIG mistake because of how fast it has moved. We have even trounced a logarithm plot of technology development! There are many problems. One, we don’t know the effects something would have on human relations, two, we don’t know how it affects the environment, and three, lack of knowledge materials science ends up getting people killed (impure casting of the hull sheets of the Titanic, o-rings in cold temperatures in the Challenger disaster, etc.). To me, this is a mistake, and it is why I wanted to leave the modern world via the rennie world. Again, the extremes of Science on the one hand and Straight-jacketed Religion on the other hand, and cutting a path right in the middle. I feel that I have a more balanced view of needing some technology to make life easier and remaining grounded in nature so as to not forget who we are.

    Here’s an example of someone who is well-versed in SD: "I don't find that most of the Vedic mantras are hard to understand, though some of them remain obscure to me today. What could be more obvious than the dawn and the sun that rises every day? Yet the dawn and the sun are not mere outer realities, they are outer symbols, intimations of an inner reality of enlightenment and illumination that is our true home. The Vedas are the language of Nature not as outer phenomena but as a poetry of the spirit, which is the real meaning and beauty of creation. To me what is hard to understand is not the Vedas but the modern world with its technology that alienates us from nature, its commercialism that warps our minds, its endless desires and sensations that keep us ever restless and disturbed, its artificial dogmas and ideologies which cloud our perception and divide us up into hostile camps, compared to which the Vedic world is indeed paradise."

    One other thing… Time. It doesn’t exist. It is nothing more than the observation of movement, whether it be the apparent movement of the sun across the sky, the shadow of the sun dial across its face, the movement of the second hand on a clock, or even the electrons and vibration of a quarts crystal, if you could see it that fast. Even the act of electricity moving across your synapses is movement. Without movement, there is no life. Because it is movement, it is happening right now, what already was is gone, and what will come isn’t here yet; in essence there is only now.

    I bring this up again because I have a fairly unique perspective on things because in ANY civilization, whether it’s in a developed country or even a tribe in the Amazon Basin, children are rarely, if ever allowed to run around without being taught language, social norms, and especially their religious beliefs even before they are able to physically run. I have not been able to find another person like myself who could communicate/elucidate this well. I was probably less than five years out from losing my ability to learn to communicate at this level permanently. Most people who are discovered too late never adapt to a “normal, civilized” living situation and instead suffer mental problems or die young, which is the case of feral children found living on their own in the woods after they got lost and no one could find them in time. Never mind being able to communicate above the level of a child aged two or three.

    When I was a kid, because I had a pretty clean slate up in my head, I wanted to learn to communicate on a basic level, but rebelled against going further, especially in math, history, science, things I didn’t think were important. I fought my teachers for a good three years before I realized I wasn’t going to get out of going to school (I even tried to run away one time as a freshman in high school, thinking about settling down in Temple with a job), and I was threatened with a crappy life of hard labor in the absence of an education (because Dad only had an eight-grade education from the 30s and experienced what it was like to be without a degree during the time when college was just starting to ramp up). I take that back; I did struggle with my science teacher in junior high because I was hit with all this terminology, and I still hadn’t learned how to use a dictionary efficiently (I didn’t realize that it was organized alphabetically!). I resisted and struggled with college. I went because Dad told me to. I finally made it through after six and a half years with NO IDEA what the **** I was going to do with a degree. I STILL DON’T because I don’t want the life of a docile office worker who STFU and does what she’s told and nothing else. Sure, I do something similar when I work for someone in the faires, BUT I have more freedom to move from job to job because the experience/educational requirements aren’t so steep for someone like me, AND I’m in a less-modern, closer-to-nature setting, the way it was hundreds of years ago.

    Lastly, I think that drugs are a reaction to the civilizing effects and are a means for SOME people to find their way back to the place I have told you about. A place where I can simply be. Where I don’t have to wear a straight-jacket or be stuffed inside a mold that is clearly not for me. That’s why I lose interest in things and many activities because it only colors my experiences, my memories, and my knowledge, but it does not affect me. I guess this started to happen once I had realized on my own the SD model of the Self, which is, there is the outside world, there is your body, there are your memories, knowledge, and experiences that you use to control your body to navigate the outside world, and then there’s you. When your body dies, the outside world goes away, as possibly does your memories, knowledge, and experiences, leaving only you to start over. What may remain attached is your karma that may determine what you are predisposed to do in future lives (I’d have to research this more in SD). It may be because we are connected to one another mentally, and we draw the information from out there, information that in my case tells me that something doesn’t add up in Egyptology, for instance. I have this feeling that, “Ah no… That’s not what happened back then.” Or, it may be that we are connected to information through genetic memories passed down from our parents. I’m inclined to think it’s both.

    This path I have for myself, I must run down this path to see where it takes me, because this is a unique experience, one that is rarely, if ever experienced in modern humanity, and I want to take advantage of it. Remember what we’ve talked about in the past couple of months. Remember that I mentioned how drugs seems to loosen the “caging” mechanisms of civilization, and how I hinted at their temporary ability to unlock and pry open the memory dampeners that normally operate in our brains to hide our spiritual knowledge, past, and true nature ex-mortal (in our natural state outside of this physical world you and I are in right now). However, I want to add to this that because natural drugs were created, and do have an effect on living beings, I’m led to believe that because this was expected or known by the ex-mortal creators of this world, that there had to be a limit as to how far the drugs can pry open the memory dampeners, otherwise to open them up entirely would allow one to transcend hir body entirely and disappear from this world, leaving behind the dead body. (hmmm, what if that’s what deadly poisons do in sufficient doses; put you in a state where when your body starts dying, the dampeners fail for lack of sufficient life-force integrity, and you learn how to leave your body behind in that instant?) I’m going through a gradual reawakening of who I am as a person, but at the same time, I’m marking time in this world, experiencing things in a way I never have before. The feeling I have is, we are all “gods” who participated in the creation of this world we live in, and we created within our brains memory dampeners to hide knowledge from ourselves so that we could experience all over again the wonder of discovery, the joy of doing something fun, and the emotions loving someone, some things we had lost in our eternal state. It is a way to keep us occupied, busy as it were.
    -----------------------

    Now, I just finished reading "Arise Arjuna: Hinduism and the Modern World" by David Frawley today before moving onto "Vedic Way of Knowing God" by Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya. Anyway, I recalled Dr. Frawley stating, "A force inner strength and spiritual guidance for the world is unlikely to come from the countries of the West. The West is too immature, too distorted by the mass media and its culture of self-indulgence. Its spirituality is mixed with a seeking of new sensations and personal achievement, trapped in the body and intellect, and generally far short of any real renunciation or realization." "... Yet Hindu abroad generally appreciate their own traditional culture better than Westernized Hindus residing in India.

    "The reason for this is that Hindus abroad, living apart from their cultural base, have developed a nostalgia for it. They have also seen the limitations of Western culture-its crime, drugs, promiscuity, greed and almost total lack of spiritual values-which is demonstrated to them daily, particularly through the mass media....

    "... I saw that the great intellectuals and artists of the West, the geniuses who were regarded as the highest human types, were still plagued with doubt, depression and uncertainty, often took drugs, or even went insane, or committed suicide. They obviously had not found any lasting peace or ultimate truth."

    These quotes disturbs me because they ARE true. My friend is in trouble, even though he claims to have studied SD (the question I still have is, did he study "Hinduism" or did he study "Sanaatana Dharma?").

    To reiterate, I am sticking with my decision to not try any drugs for the two reasons I stated. I feel that the positions of "drug researchers," especially in the context of western civilization (not just western philosophy, but the ENTIRETY of western civilization), on drugs as a doorway to hyperdimensions, new awareness, to aliens, to information available in 3D format or language-less states instead of 2D, on space travel as the new stage of "progress of humanity" is a mistake, a HUGE mistake that will only end badly. It is the wrong direction for humanity. There IS a reason why the next livable planet is so, so far away, and space travel beyond the heliosphere is so dangerous, inimical to human biology, or any Earth biology for that matter. This reality is designed to keep us here, period. I believe that space colonization is a fallacy that shouldn't be pursued.

    My feeling is that what these westerners seek in drugs can be found in SD, but I do not know enough at this point in my journey of learning about SD to be able to state this. Please advise.

    Dhanyavaad
    Last edited by deafAncient; 16 December 2014 at 08:35 PM.

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