MEDITATION IS PSYCHEDELICS IN SLOW MOTION
I often have people reach out to me who are interested in utilizing psychedelics for personal growth. I am able to instruct and guide them in this experience. I have an extensive background in the subject and my track record in utilizing this technology successfully, is excellent. psychedelics, if used thoughtfully and methodically, can bring about great personal transformation. However, psychedelics are not the be all and end all of transformation. They may not even be the best tools to transform one’s consciousness and its relationship to what is eternal and unchanging. The most effective tool for this undertaking is without a doubt, meditation.
Oftentimes when people wish to consult with me about creating a relationship with psychedelics, my first question is, “Do you meditate?” Whether or not, they do, at that point does tell me something about their orientation toward life, themselves, and reality. If they are in fact interested in transforming their experience of reality, it is meditation, not psychedelics that offers the greatest long term benefits. In my experience psychedelics present a doorway of experiencing oneself, and one’s inner landscapes in a new way. Meditation offers the propulsive system that can move one from perceiving the doorway, to moving through it.
The Macdonaldization of Meditation has brought us reams of books about mindfulness. Mindfulness moves one’s attention from one’s thoughts to one’s sensations. This is a good start. But it really is meditation for dummies. To be aware in the moment of what one senses is of course much more desirable than being inundated with thought patterns birthed of suffering, pain, history and neuroses. Mindfulness works to a degree, but it is a band aid, compared to what is really possible with meditation. What is possible is moving from one’s thoughts about life and oneself, and one’s suffering, into the awareness of the intelligence that forms one’s body, energetic systems, and origins. This is meditation’s great potential. It does all the same things that psychedelics do, and it does it at its own speed. Psychedelics can take over one’s consciousness, sometimes at an unwanted speed. Meditation can be risen out of, at will. It is entirely safe, and entirely manageable. Using these tools together increases each of their efficacy.
Psychedelics and Meditation overlap in their ability to peel away the layers of identity. In both cases, we leave our usual manner of thinking and perceiving, which is created out of a mish mash of our immediate environment, our social relations, culture, media, and the historical origins of our thinking and feeling state. As we leave this experience, and the habits it creates, we re-connect with the origins of our experience. As our breath moves through our sensate physical state we encounter structural systems based in history, biography, pain, trauma, and avoidance. Using just the breath, and the more important tool of determination, we can move through these states to what lies beneath. And what lies beneath can be as spectacular as anything one might ever experience on a psychedelic trip.
Beneath the thinking mind, in the realm of sensation, we contact our true origins. We may find our original structure, as created by nature, and the intelligence that gives rise to everything. Beyond history and biography and the sensations they birth, are the formative intentions of the intelligence that gave birth to us in this lifetime. Our actual raison d’etre. These are that kind of depths available in meditation, and they are not as far away as one might think. In the depths of meditation, one encounters one’s karma, the actual dynamics of what has created the structures and purpose of one’s life. The purpose that precedes all experience. The logos of one’s life. It is right there beneath the usual mind chatter and recycled habitual physical sensations. One may find in how they hold their body, a narrative they have spoken their entirely life. But lurking just below these habits is an eternal purpose that gives rise to all transitory experience. Connecting with this can be the most transformative experience available. It returns life to its origins in holism, after life has been experience only in the fractioned aspect of the origins of the ego.
For me, psychedelics are a cypher. People come looking for psychedelics, and what they find is their origins. And once they have discovered their origins, they will never again be confused about what their life is about. This confusion swirls around the illusion that ego is constructed only to maintain a cohesive narrative that begins with our first memories of our life, and will end in our physical system losing its integrity. Between these origins and these endings, lurking below our habits of thinking and being, is the eternal field of our existence. It is this field that has brought us into this life, and it is to this field we will return at its end. Meditation, and to a lesser extent psychedelics, grant us access to this field during this very life.