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Adi Da Samraj
Drugs and Entheogens “To take a drug does not yield any great capacity for recognition. Neither does conventional meditation or the shocks of life. If your entire attention is reduced, or expanded, to the perception of a radiant spot or a great field of light, you can realize the experience to be not fundamentally different from the ordinary experience of the waking state in which you are seeing others and environments. In The Knee of Listening I have described this recognition or realization in my own case. I experienced all kinds of great yogic phenomena, but always there came the tacit recognition that having a subtle, mystical vision was not fundamentally different from perceiving in the ordinary way. Nothing different happened in meditation from what happened in ordinary awareness. The features of the phenomenal appearance changed, but the fundamental pattern or structure of awareness of phenomena was the same in the abstract and subtle states of awareness as in the gross states of awareness. Nothing was changed fundamentally by changing the features of the objects of awareness. This recognition made it tacitly clear that Realization has nothing whatever to do with the changes of experience that can be attained by any means. God-Realization is the recognition of the habit of association with phenomena. In the course of my own spiritual practice, therefore, this disposition of recognition became primary and ultimately consequential, and all the other media or means of attaining experiences became unimportant. Thus, in the history of my Teaching Work with people I have constantly criticized that disposition in us that is fascinated with the possibility of an alternative reality or the possibility of subtle or abstract phenomena. Nevertheless, in the Way that I Teach, we do not prevent such phenomena. In fact, in the devotional and meditative exercises that we engage, all kinds of gross or subtle or abstract phenomena may arise. All of you can report such experiences. The spiritual process is not a means for attaining those experiences, but it is the process that can, that must, go on in the midst of those experiences. If now, presently, the experience arising is essentially the pattern of gross awareness, or gross phenomenal existence, you must recognize that. If now you are having a vision of a subtle being or subtle environments, the Spiritual Master in a form of light, heavenly worlds, gods, goddesses, you must recognize that. If now you are seeing white light, yellow light, blue light, a spot, a field of light, radiance, you must recognize that. To recognize all phenomena, all experience, is the Teaching. We must recognize that whatever is arising, even this moment of gross perception, is a non-binding modification of the Radiant Transcendental Reality, what is called the Buddha Nature, or Nirvana, or Brahman, or Parabrahman, or Very God, or the Ultimate Divine, or the Truth. Whatever the name given to the Ultimate Realization, it is That which must be Realized on the basis of the recognition of whatever is arising. Therefore, it is not necessary to achieve an alternative reality or an alternative state of experience in order to be Happy or to realize the Truth. Rather, Happiness or the realization of Truth is a matter of recognizing whatever happens to be arising.”
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