This is a serious topic, because there’s a lot of misinformation and romantic notions of spirituality, mysticism, and awakening, which are associated with drugs.
And why it is serious is, drugs do have a capacity of harming you, both mentally and physically, and even killing you, so obviously many people have died.
So I don’t know if you’re watching the news, last month there was this man in Sydney who ingested LSD and then he jumped from the building and he died.
There are many more cases of people using drugs and irreparably harming themselves, either mentally or physically.
So we need to understand the good and the bad, and if psychedelic drugs do actually help us realize, so we’ll unpack that as we move forward.

A Seeker’s Story

Years before, when I was seeking, I met a seeker who had a very interesting story about their awakening.
Now this person had met in a horrible car accident and he had lost his right hand because of it.
He was in a coma for a couple of days and had to go through all those physiotherapy, etc., for a long time before he could recoup.

He says when he saw the car, so he had a head-on collision, and when he saw the car approaching in front of him, he said before it struck him, just a few seconds before, he knew he would be in a head-on collision.
And he says for a few seconds, just before the crash, everything slowed down. He knew he would die. There was no escape from it.

And at that moment, he said there was acceptance, complete total acceptance.
And he says that moment felt like eternity. And there was love, there was total acceptance, love, and a gratitude to be there.

And obviously he got hit. And once he woke up from the trauma, it was a big transformative experience for him wherein he saw life from a different perspective.

The Dangers of Recommending Dangerous Paths

Now imagine that person becomes a teacher and recommends a car crash for everyone to awaken.
It will be really not only irresponsible, but very dangerous. See, the millions of people who are going into a car crash every day,
how many of them are having experiences which are really spiritual and awakening? Maybe, I don’t know, one out of a million.

So is that model of awakening with so much of danger attached to it worth pursuing?
Now this has to be kept in mind whenever anyone is planning to dabble into any kind of psychedelics.

Personal Stance as a Teacher

For those who have been coming to my satsang for a long time, I am open, I accept everyone.
I have no issue if you have encountered your awakening through drugs, through a car crash, through meditation, through sex, I don’t care.

But as a teacher, I would never recommend car crash or drugs for people to try to awaken themselves. I find it very irresponsible as well as dangerous.

The Words of Sam Harris

And for many people who have been coming here, many of them are inspired by Sam Harris.
And I do understand Sam Harris has his own opinion on trying different psychedelic drugs, etc.

But I would like to read a few lines which he has written about psychedelics. These are his own words.
I will just read two of his famous lines on psychedelics.

So he says, if you are lucky and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible.
If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. So if you are lucky, you might get a glimpse of that. But if you are unlucky, you will see what insanity is.

How different is it from a car crash? If you are lucky, you see an awakening experience. If you are unlucky, good luck to you.
But there is a real danger of going into psychosis or stumbling onto delusion when you are experimenting with these rather powerful chemicals.

Another line of Sam Harris which is really frightening is, he says, I cannot account for when my adventures with psychedelics became unpleasant, but once the doors to hell opened, they appeared to have been left permanently opened.

So he says, once the doors of hell were opened for me, they were permanently left ajar. And this is a theme I have heard from many seekers. I met hundreds and thousands of seekers across India when I was seeking.
And many, most of them had these horrible experiences. Some of them did have the good ones, but majority had those demonic experiences which haunted them even for many, many, many years later on.

Questioning the Risk

So my question is, are the risks, are all these dangers, are they required? Or is there a better way to find what you are looking for?

If psychedelics was a way for enlightenment, don’t you think Buddha would have talked about it?

The Tradition of Teachers

You see, there is this Buddhist tradition and the Indian tradition, two old traditions, thousands of years old, which have hundreds of books.
So there is Advaita tradition which I come from, there is the Zen tradition, the Chan tradition, there is a Buddha tradition.

In any of these traditions, all these teachers, have you read someone coming up and saying, hey, why don’t you take a psychedelic?
I can’t see in any of the books, from the Upanishads, to the Dharmapads, to the Zen tradition, to the modern teachers like Raman Maharishi, J. Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta, all the old teachers, so there is a huge tradition of teachers coming in.

There is no talk about it. And this phenomena of psychedelics is quite recent. It’s obviously come to the scene once LSD was discovered.

And in the last few years, I have seen it really grow up with Ayurveda. So now you have these organized trips to the Americas to take Ayurveda, which has become a big business.
And if you are reading, you would find that many of these places have become institutions of abuse, cult-like institutions.

Final Recommendation

So if you are planning, so my recommendation is obviously, psychedelics are to be avoided, drugs are to be avoided.
But if anyone wants to tread on the ground, you will have to take all these dangers into account.

And then ask yourself, am I willing to leave the hell, the gates of hell open permanently, and can I live with that?

So that is the first aspect of psychedelics, which I wanted to talk about, is the dangers. Now coming to the more deeper aspect of it.

The Nature of True Spirituality

Now everyone in the group who has tried psychedelics would have different experiences. You know, I experienced this, I experienced that, there was this mystical experience or whatever.

True spirituality has got nothing to do with experiences. It has got nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of experiences.
It can be the most incredible experiences of seeing the universe open up, or it can be the mundane experience of driving to work.

All our experiences. True spirituality is understanding the experiencer behind the experiences.

And unfortunately, most of the drug-induced states are experiential states. And they are amazing because they are new, they are fascinating.
But can any amount of experience take you to the experience-less state?

So I have all these experiences, and through them I am looking for a state which is beyond experiences.
No.

So that is the major reason neither of these teachers have ever recommended psychedelics for realization.
And neither can psychedelics work for realization. You might have incredible experiences, I am not saying that.
You might have tremendous insights, I am not arguing with that. Possible, yes, I agree. Obviously with the dangers.

But then is spirituality just experiences? Or we are seeking something much more deeper, which transcends the very need for experiences.

The Experiencer Beyond Experiences

And this is one aspect of teaching which very few teachers would touch upon. Most of the teachers are talking about the content of this consciousness.

Experiences, getting better, seeing, feeling. But no one is interested in the experiencer. Who is the experiencer?
What is the quality of the experiencer? How does it come into being? Can I have an experience when there is no experiencer?

And unfortunately, no chemical can get us there. Chemical can affect the brain, which can affect the mind, and the content of the mind.
But the consciousness that I am talking about is not dependent on these two things. It is independent.

As such, no amount of LSD can get you to that reality that you are seeking.