--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <richardhughes...@...> wrote: > > Funnily enough it was TM that stopped me smoking dope. I > used to be a fairly heavy user but right after I learned > TM I tried it once and disliked the way it interfered with > my new found clarity of consciousness. Like a good boy I > had also stopped smoking for the two weeks before teaching, > as requested, and assumed afterwards that that was good > advice considering how bad being stoned made me feel. > > I had always assumed it affected everyone like that because > it really fogs things up, maybe these kids were right OTP > or perhaps it was the low quality hashish we get over here. > I should get myself to Amsterdam and do some proper research. > You never know what you might be missing.
OK, I didn't mean to become an advocate for getting stoned or anything :-), but since it seems that I'm one of the few here who is willing to talk about these things openly, I will. I, too, dropped drugs during my whole TM period, and during most of the time since. But on my first trip to Amsterdam, I had a "What the fuck" moment and decided to see what the staid but efficient Dutch had managed to achieve in the cultivation of high-class weed. What I found surprised me -- in a pleasant way. I expected my clarity of mind to vanish and be replaced with what others here have called a "fog." It did not. What I found was a *different* clarity of mind. The closest I can come to describing it is to use the phrase from Castaneda -- it was a shifting of my assemblage point. The nexus of energies that I associated with "me" *shifted* somewhat, and thus I was able to view things from a *different* perspective and point of view. And that was a very welcome and pleasant experience. I had been wearing the old perspective and point of view for SO LONG that it was a major epiphany to let it go and see things from a *radically* different POV. I found it a fascin- ating experience. And, just to put the "spiritual" spin on this that some say is lacking from pot experiences, this happened when I was in Amsterdam setting up a free public meditation talk for my spiritual teacher at the time, Rama. After all the prep- arations had been made for the talk, me and the guys who were there with me had a couple of "days off," during which we could kick back and enjoy Amsterdam as tourists. The other guys, celibate for years and horny as a cowboy in a men's shower room :-), were drawn to the Red Light District, and its wares. I was not. I had a girlfriend back home, and was not tempted by the women in windows. What I *was* tempted by were the coffeehouses. But at the same time, I knew that in two days I would not only be seeing my spiritual teacher, but be sitting across the table from him at a few dinners. He did not recommend marijuana use. Would he be able to tell if I "toked up?" Would it fuck up my aura so much that he'd be able to tell, and tell me to take a hike from his teaching? So I did it anyway. I went to a good coffeehouse and sat and talked to the guy behind the bar for a while and got his advice on the different weeds and hashs they sold, and what their "known effects" were. Unlike a lot of the tourists, I was not looking for "heavy and stoneful." I was looking for lightness and clarity and psychedelic qualities. He pointed me to the right blend. I had a delight- ful experience, one that I would call *profoundly* spiritual. I repeated the experiment using dif- ferent weeds over the next couple of days. And two days later I found myself sitting opposite Rama at the dinner table and he looked at me and said, "This place agrees with you. I have not seen you this light and this happy and this spiritually charged up in years." Go figure. Anyway, boo_lives wrote some good stuff about dealing with any of these chemicals that shift our assemblage points with respect, and as a kind of ritual or ceremony. That's how I've treated it ever since. I treat my occasional trips to Amsterdam the same way some people in TM treat "going on a course," or the same way that people in other spiritual traditions treat "going on retreat." Will you ever get enlightened from a bong? Probably not, but will you ever get enlightened doing what you've been doing all these years? And even if you do, will enlightenment be "better," or merely "different." Many spiritual seekers have bought into the dogma that enlightenment is a "better" state of conscious- ness so long that they cannot even CONCEIVE that it might just be a different state of consciousness. I do not seek enlightenment or any "highest" state of consciousness. I merely seek different ones, and try to judge them only as experiences, not on any "scale" of "better" or "worse." Your mileage may vary. Not selling anything here, just telling you my POV on the subject...
