This is to rehash a few problems with using drugs as an aid to spiritual discovery, in a new thread to avoid antagonizing anyone else's thread.

Consider a hypothetical drug that makes you feel really, really good, never stops working, and has no bad health effects. Given that making personal relationships work is hard, and that taking the drug is easy, there seems to be no compelling reason to resist taking the drug. Such a drug would be the most destructive of them all, because it draws you into an emotional condition where nothing matters except what facilitates procurement of the drug.

Suppose this drug produces no spiritual insight, just a good feeling. Now add the insight. From what I've read on this site, the primary thing that people gain from hallucinogen use is the experience of a fractal-like oneness. The experience of oneness isn't new or novel, in various qualified forms it underlies all human social behavior. Quasi-fractals are evident everywhere in nature, but were brought more to the forefront of human awareness with the development of computer graphics and related math beginning in the 1980's. But drug users experience these two ideas in an accentuated way while high.

So we have the experience, and we acknowledge that it is beautiful. Now what? In the long run, does the drug user have more such beauty in life than would be possible without the drug? The drug does not bestow wisdom, or compassion, or self control, or insights that are actually new. It is not what heals your heart after a bad childhood, and it doesn't help create better formative experiences for the next generation. To the contrary, many of us who hurt the most from an early age suffered abuse or neglect by drug using parents, or parents who otherwise pursued pleasant experiences at our expense.

The drug user's answer to all of this is that those other, destructive people were using the wrong drugs, or were not using them responsibly. But theirs is a selective picture that largely ignores the net experience of the generations that came before. To me its very much like how Christians tend to be pretty good at seeing the flaws of Buddhism or Islam, while explaining away all of the analogous flaws of Christianity. And its very much like how Christians credit the Christian faith with all that is good among Christians. In truth, we can have the Golden Rule without the authority of the Church or its claim on salvation. And we have remarkable transcendent religious experiences without drugs. But you don't know that if you started young, so that for you the two were always blurred together.

Drug users imagine they're breaking new ground, ignorant that they're repeating the same experiences as previous generations of users, over and over again, without any better results in the end. Again this is like Christians who for 2000 years have prepared for a second coming that's always a few years away. But the drug experience doesn't give you that kind of knowledge. Worse, it undermines the mental virtues that would show you those things, because it delivers what it seems to deliver without those virtues.


By some measures, my dream life has been somewhat adrift for the last year or so. I have strange dreams every night, but I don't understand what they mean, and do not have them directed to a clear purpose. This seems to be the same as what I see from people here, I'm not seeing people posting new ideas. Also like most people who post in these subforums, I have had my experiences of oneness, cosmic fractals, astral projection, etc., and can revisit them in my mind insofar as I can use them. But I never had to pay the price of drug use, though I see others pay, and in that sense I pay. And it is not lack of exotic experience that is holding me back in any case, or holding any of us back, as far as I can see.

My concern is for the health of the fabric of our collective soul. And I don't feel drug experimentation helping at all with that. Quite to the contrary, though maybe I'm not helping very much either.

We all came to where we are however we did, and most of it was fated. So if your way was drug experimentation, I don't blame you one bit. But I think there's another way. If there is a way forward at all, that's not just a big circle that returns to where we are now, I am sure it is another way. I do not wish to return to where we are now. For another tomorrow, I wish we can find a vision of that also.