Chemical Enlightenment?

Author: Steve Taylor

In the 1960s, there was a popular belief – popularised by psychedelic pioneers like Timothy Leary (pictured) – that drugs such as LSD could provide ‘chemical enlightenment’, a way of circumventing the years of arduous spiritual practice which monks and other spiritual put themselves through in order to attain a permanent higher state of consciousness.

Why spend years meditating and practising self-denial when you can just alter your brain chemistry directly, by taking psychedelics? It soon became apparent that this was naive, and that regular LSD usage was much more likely to generate psychological breakdown than spiritual awakening. And many of those – such as Timothy Leary himself – who originally used LSD as a way of expanding consciousness eventually began to use drugs hedonistically, as a way of escaping boredom and discord, after their ‘chemical enlightenment’ project had failed.

Nowadays, psychoactive substances such as Ayahuasca and DMT are widely used with a spiritual intention, as a means of self-exploration and self-expansion. Ayahuasca in particular has a similar status as an ‘elixir of enlightenment’ to LSD in the 1960s.

I don’t think there is any doubt that psychedelics can generate temporary higher states of consciousness (or ‘awakening experiences’, as I prefer to call them). Some writers on mysticism – usually from a religious background – have argued that psychedelic awakening experiences can’t be ‘genuine,’ because they are artificially induced. But this is surely short-sighted and prejudiced.

Psychedelic awakening experiences feature many of the same characteristics of other awakening experiences – intensified perception of one’s surroundings, a sense of connection or oneness to the world and revelations about the nature of reality, and so on. I’ve collected many reports of psychedelic-induced awakening experiences which feature these aspects (some of which I quote from in my book Waking From Sleep).

But although psychedelics can bring temporary awakening experiences, I think it’s very unlikely that they can lead to a permanent higher state of consciousness – that is, a state of ‘enlightenment,’ or in my preferred term, ‘wakefulness.’ The reason for this is that psychedelics are basically dissolutive – that is, they achieve their effect by dissolving away our normal mental structures, and putting our normal  psychological mechanisms out of action. (I like to use the term ‘self-system’ for these structures and mechanisms.)

[More…]

Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk