Use (and abuse) of Psychoactive Substances

I would count myself a mystic given I have spontaneous visions of both the visual and non visual ‘intuitive’ kind, none of which have ever been induced by taking any kind of psychoactive substance. Herein lies the problem. Although many people do have spontaneous visions of different kinds, some pleasant, others not, the burgeoning in New Age spiritual movements following from the publication of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ has seen the concomitant growth in psychoactive substance abuse with the sole purpose of inducing visionary experiences, generally completely outside of any formal framework of beliefs or regulating systems. This is commonly allied with recreational drug taking and subsets of the modern adventure tourism industry wherein people flock to the Amazon to take the powerful hallucinogen ayahuasca, ignorant or uncaring of its true purpose and dangerous side effects. Here is what I have to say in my aforementioned report:

“On a wider note and of relevance to our modern worlds and societies, it should be pointed out that many people have, at least at some stage in their lives, experiences of states of altered consciousness which might include involuntary visual or auditory hallucinations, or trance like experiences. Our societies have no understanding of these (outside of the narrow biomedical definitions of mental illness) and we entirely lack the frameworks and contexts for interpreting what it is being experienced. For the generality of people, it is profoundly disturbing to have involuntary apparitions of personages or creatures or the sense of being ‘possessed’ by an invading entity foreign to ego consciousness. People presenting in a standard clinical facility with symptoms of this nature would therefore commonly be referred for psychiatric assessment and management by a regime of antipsychotic medication.

In traditional societies, however, many (not all) such experiences might be associated with people gifted with ‘supernatural vision’ as being a ‘seer’, or a neophyte religious specialist. This in itself is sometimes experienced as a ‘calling’ to undertake shamanic apprenticeship, which, in traditional societies, may take many years of training. The shaman interviewed from Salasaka experienced his ‘calling’ in a profound dream, wherein he was visited by the spirit of the sacred wak’a site where he practises (in human female form) and told to serve her by becoming a healer and that she herself would teach him his craft. This is, in fact, not an unusual initiation to the shamanic profession. Yet anyone from our modern societies who had a kindred experience would have no means to understand it, no ontological or ritual context for structuring it in any way meaningful to them outside of mental illness. Now in western societies people are certainly more open to these experiences and this has resulted in a proliferation in courses and ‘workshops’ in how to be a shaman in recent years. I am highly sceptical of these, that somehow a mere brief course or workshop can teach a person from a spiritually disengaged western culture the complexities of these ancestral systems, the majority of them evolved from very different ontological and epistemological bases. I have interviewed South American shamans who took many years to learn their craft; a shaman from the Shuar community Ecuador who told me he had learned the uses of 500 plants and all their healing properties. This is not something that can be learned in a six week workshop or course! Worse, it leads to a down valuing of this ancient and powerful tradition and causes it to be dismissed by its biomedical judges as a mere manifestation of ‘New Age’ culture. Finally, we now see the burgeoning of a wing of the travel industry wherein foreign visitors flock to the Amazon for ‘ayahuasca tourism’. In so doing, they are exposing themselves to serious and unnecessary risk and distorting the whole ritual and psychological framework for the employment of this powerful hallucinogen, now being exploited by unscrupulous ‘neo shamans’ for profit at the expense of their traditional cultures. Inevitable and tragic deaths of gullible tourists, unaccustomed to the side effects of this drug, with no adequate supervision of its administration, or any professional emergency medical aid on hand for resuscitation, have been the consequence of this.”

In India, hashish is sometimes employed by some traditional religious adherents (sadhus, holy men) for the induction of altered states of consciousness, although the majority of the Yogic traditions abjure the use of drugs, alcohol and substances of this order as a means to induce spiritual experiences. Although not necessarily an easy methodology for beginners, meditation is nevertheless always recommendable as being the truest and safest way and the one most commonly promoted from the earliest Vedic days of Indian religion. However, it should be pointed out that meditation and trance states are not one and the same thing and, as I have observed elsewhere here, masters in the Eastern philosophical traditions regard visual hallucinations as being a distraction to the true purpose of Self Realisation through achieving advanced stages of meditation. My own personal understanding of the difference lies in the two different kinds of visions I have: one of the strictly visual kind, the other of a very different order, which I have described elsewhere as being as though through an ‘organ of apprehension’ which opens in my centre and I ‘see’ a truth, with no visually mediated experience whatever . This ‘organ of apprehension’ is generally understood as the so-called Third Eye (Agna chakra) of visionary insight, considered essential for spiritual growth.

When I was grounded for eight months in Rishikesh last year, I heard many stories of western visitors partaking of hashish for a range of reasons, most commonly it seems for recreational purposes, as the drug was readily available in ‘hippie’ style cafes there, and could even be bought from stalls on the street. However, I am not aware that hashish actually induces hallucinations or mystical visions, but a rather different order of perceptual experiences are reported. Most lately, a group of Shiva Yogis staying in the same guesthouse as I was, considered the smoking of hashish part of their daily spiritual practice, together with mantra chanting and the playing of music. It is not perhaps my place to criticise these dedicated practices given I have no idea of the subjective experiences they give rise to.

However, it cannot be too much emphasised that drugs associated with altered states of consciousness (unless they are the relatively newly synthesised forms now commonly available) evolved within traditional societies as part of a ritual system for experiencing the Numinous, whatever constituted that within whichever culture. For example, in northern Mexico, the traditional Huichol peoples employ an extract of the hallucinogenic cactus peyote for the induction of trance and visionary states. However, use of this drug is restricted to religious specialists or shamans, and available only to ordinary folk as part of the desert pilgrimage cycle where people endure hardships and privations of a journey into the desert, and then take the peyote administered by a religious specialist, culminating in an apprehension of a vision/experience of Divinity.

Outside of such well controlled formalised frameworks, any experience of this nature is functionally meaningless, offering nothing but a ‘quick fix’ or feel good factor, if, that is, it doesn’t prove to be a ‘bad trip’ and induce terrifying psychotic episodes instead. The Amazonian hallucinogen ayahuasca is said to have the ability to induce visions of the more intuitive kind I referred to earlier, expanding the depth and breadth of consciousness and opening the subject’s normally limited conceptualisation of the world to new and limitless possibilities. For example, I have read that people can ‘see’ God after taking the drug. I can offer no comment or guidance on the veracity of this or otherwise, not having made an extensive study of its effects and never having taken it myself. I am only aware of the too many negative press stories that abound.

In short, people who are seriously interested in pursuing a genuine spiritual pathway should be warned early on to avoid these sorts of temptations, if only because to become dependent upon a substance to give you a spiritual ‘high’ will effectively make you a slave of it, when one of the true purposes of the journey to enlightenment is Moksha – liberation. There is an enigmatic saying of Jesus which I believe confirms this:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber.”

If mysticism is the one authentic way to have a direct apprehension of the Numinous, can anyone therefore have one? Is everyone innately a mystic? It seems that many people can lay claim to having had a rare experience such a vision, or some special experience that acted as some sort of personal epiphany. However, I do not think that the generality of people do have or even seek to have these sorts of out-of-body experiences, or even count them as important in pursuing whichever religion they follow. As explained in the essay ‘In Defence of Faith’, I have met devout Christians who never had such a mystical experience and saw it in no way important to the avowal of their faith.