Dthoughts,
Thanks again for your thoughtful post. I want to say a lot more, and think about it longer, but I have a lot of work to do this week with very short deadlines. I will get back to it later, because what you're talking about is important to me.
In his brand of Theosophy, H.W. Percival modeled everything using a zodiac. In his scheme of things (http://thewordfoundation.com/PDF/T%26D_14th_ver01.pdf), the top half of the circle is unmanifest, the bottom half is manifest, the left side is 'nature', and the right side is 'intelligent'. Life proceeds counterclockwise from the top, and becomes increasingly conscious as it descends then ascends back up to the top. What Percival calls nature is in some sense conscious, but not to the degree of being conscious of itself. It is blind in that regard, and the power it has is more like the weight of moving water and less like a conscious mind. I don't believe Percival's zodiac scheme, I think its contrived, and I doubt that nature is inert in quite the way that he envisions. But I think there is an element of truth there, or at least it agrees with my experience. In Percival's worldview, LSD would put you in freer contact with nature, but it that would be almost exclusively the stuff on the left hand side of his zodiac. And its really the stuff on the right hand side that we need more awareness of for our redemption. In his view, becoming clairvoyant or otherwise more powerfully open or developed in regards to nature imprisons you more, until after you've completely corrected the issues with identity on the intelligent side and become something much more than human. I think he overdid this point, and that its natural to develop on the 'nature' side now. But I don't think he's all wrong either.
For myself, I'd say that transcendent experiences have both helped and harmed me. I think its a net gain, but I can imagine that the harm would outweigh the gain for a lot of other people. There's a conceit among spiritually inclined people that says that other people are too primitive or fearful or dishonest or hard hearted or lost for spiritual aspiration. But it seems to me that most people are doing pretty much what they can, and those walls are there for a reason. You can't push too hard to tear them away, its like tearing off a scab too soon. Sometimes you've got to tear the scab off too soon anyway though, such as when its infected, so I can't say that what happened in my life was bad for me, given whatever came before. We have to proceed from where we are. And so maybe your drive with psychedelics is necessary for you also. But I worry about it too, and maybe I can help you find a modified approach that's better for you, by sharing more of what happened to me. Time is in short supply though.
One risk with going too far, is that when you get more of a glimpse and feel for how glorious life could be, our own world can become more dark and horrifying in contrast. The vision inspires, but it also adds a weight. Whether the weight takes you down or not depends a lot on who you are in your heart, and the degree of wisdom in your sense of who you are. But this isn't something that just flashes into maturity overnight. You're pretty much limited to what you were born with, with minor developments.
As an example, when you kill an animal to eat it, or when you let someone else kill it for you, it tries to run away if it can. Most people don't have much of a problem with this, they're numb to it, and degrade the value of the animal so that it seems OK. But when you open your heart more, and remove some of those blocks, so that you can feel what the animal feels, it gets harder. Maybe you're OK with this, you can just avoid eating meat, but this is just an example of one area of difficulty.
I mentioned human sacrifice in an earlier post. I feel a burden of guilt in relation to this, more guilt than I feel about anything in my own life experience. I don't understand this. But it is a result of opening myself more. Probably I'm ready for this, I need to dig into it and deal with it. But its like pulling on a thread, once you get started with digging into yourself its hard to stop. You can't unlearn what you learned and go back to a formerly comfortable place. To an extent I have to trust fate to measure it to me at a speed I can handle. Sometimes you have to slow down though.
I worry I would have if using hallucinogens, is opening one part of my mind in disproportion to other parts that balance it out. Strength of reason is important, as is a strong sense of personal identity, but from what I've seen the hallucinogens don't really help with that. You have to be able to keep from getting lost in the currents of other people's thoughts that you find within yourself.
One thing I have learned in life is that providence can do a lot to your mind if it wants to, and that presence or absence of ingested hallucinogens isn't necessarily a significant barrier. If you push yourself hard, you create or put yourself in relation to spirits of like character. But the better, wiser spirits are patient. If you ask a prayer, they may respond immediately or not for 50 or 500 years, its mostly the same to them. But they'll give you what you need the most when its most effective. Some of these spirits are also scare-the-shit-out-of-you powerful. I don't experience much of this sort of thing recently, but I think its because its better for me now if I don't, even though I needed a bit more a couple of years ago. I think that if you can trust that they're already there for you in the way that you most need them, maybe this helps.
I have to go to bed. More later when I get time.
By the way, if you want strong medicine for creating exotic or deep experiences, that book I linked to is the strongest I've seen by a fairly wide margin. There's some nonsense mixed in with the deep truths though, and I've seen that it is dangerous if it connects with you and you buy into it too deeply, so be careful.
OK, one more thing....Its a lot easier to get transcendent experiences if you have a mental relationship with someone else what has had the same ones. I've listened to a lot of acid rock, and that has probably influenced my later experiences, so I'm a bit of a hypocrite in that regard. Reading Ramana Maharshi (Be as you are – The teachings of sri Ramana Maharishi) probably also contributed to my ability to 'move' my identity. He teaches it with the aim of discovering the 'Self', but I don't totally buy that vision, and you can do other stuff with it also. My empathetic/psychic ability comes largely from that, as well as my ability to move my conscious perspective around and see life differently.
I think another part of my 'talent' is born of social stress, I was very lonely and isolated as a teenager. It seems a part of my subconscious sort of split off and learned to hang out in other times and places and identities in secret. Having partially torn down my own internal wall, I now I have this ability as a sort of general purpose tool, without being quite sure what to do with it that's constructive. I can't really say how much of what I am now can be explained this way, its interrelated with all of the other stuff. The order that these experiences occurred doesn't really say much about that, it transcends that.
Maybe this is another way to look at your condition. The part of you on the other side of the wall wants you to partially tear down the wall, and that's what drives the drug experimentation. But that part of you may not understand the most healthy way to do this, even though it feels what it seems to need. For some people, the man on the other side of the wall doesn't even care if the process kills the man on this side, because the subconscious side doesn't care about life in the same kind of way. But we don't want to just tear down the barrier, we want to heal too, so he needs to learn to care about that. How to find the answer? It seems we make it up as we go along, but we have help.
OK, I think I'll finally stop. I'm OK with talking about this stuff publicly, but if you prefer a private conversation, we can do that instead.
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