What is an "entheogenic" drug? (video)

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly (Wiki edit); Enlightening Channel; Samadhi Meditation

The Buddha in psychedelic colors DMT (and substances or practices that bring it out of the pineal gland) allow one to see the world as it really is undistorted by our mental defilements we accept as "normal" reality (progressivebuddhism). It's not a recreational activity.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule. See full documentary at the Enlightening Channel.

Buddha is beautiful (lilminx16/deviantart)

An entheogen ("generating the divine within") is a substance or practice used in a spiritual, religious, shamanic, or sacred context that may be natural or human made.

Some natural chemicals can induce expanded states of consciousness, whether psychological or physiological, for example, plants, toad or bullet ant venom used by the Satere-Mawe people.

Dope is not reinvention.

Entheogens can supplement many diverse practices for transcendence and revelation (unveiling of a hidden truth), including meditation, yoga, some forms of prayer, psychedelic, chanting, and visionary art, traditional medicine, psychedelic therapy (such as the careful, controlled use of minute amounts of a "magic mushroom" like psilocybin), and music including peyote song and psytrance, even witchcraft (witch comes from the word wise), magic, and psychonautics.

 

Entheogens have been used in a ritualized context for thousands of years. Their spiritual/religious significance is well established in anthropological and modern studies.

Deep in the mind during meditative absorption (jhana) a counterpart sign (nimitta) forms colored by mental defilements. This learning sign becomes the patibhaga sign. Exogenous drugs, even DMT, are not likely to help in this purification of consciousness.

 

Buddha at Thiksey (Ragg Burns Imaging)

Meditation leads to mindfulness and concentration, to sati and samadhi. A nimitta is a mental representation, a sign of concentration. If one focuses on the breath as the object of meditation, eventually a light will form in the mind as the sign of the breath; this is what one concentrates on to gain absorption. Middle Length discourse (MN) 44 tells us that one of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness is the nimitta, which serves as the cause for the eventual elimination of the Five Hindrances (sensual desire, ill will, restlessness, sloth, skeptical doubt) and, beyond that, the arising of the five concomitant mental factors (cetasikas) of the first absorption (jhāna).

Himalayan novice must focus (Dietmar Temps)

And according to AN 9.35, the nimitta as the mental representation of the first absorption is the presence of these same five concomitant jhāna factors. AN 9.35 states that this nimitta is to be developed, pursued, and established. When properly engaged, these five factors work in concert to refine and maintain what DN 9 calls a "truly refined perception of joy and pleasure born of seclusion" (viveka-ja-pīti-sukha-sukhu-ma-sacca-saññā). More

The American Book of the Dead?

Examples of traditional entheogens include psychedelics like peyote, psychedelic-dissociatives like ayahuasca (daime, natema, spirit vine), and Tabernanthe iboga (synthesized as ibogaine), atypical psychedelics like Salvia divinorum, quasi-psychedelics like [CDB-rich] cannabis and Ipomoea tricolor, deliriants like Amanita muscaria (biblical fly agaric or "manna from heaven").

Traditionally a tea, admixture, or potion like ayahuasca (a blend of an Amazonian vine, bark, and leafy plant) or bhang (a cannabis drink) have been compounded through the work of a skilled shaman or apothecary.

 

With the advent of organic chemistry, there now exist many questionable synthesized pharmaceutical drugs with similar psychoactive properties. Many were originally derived from these plants but stripped of supporting elements to presumably get at the most "active" ingredient without the help of other ingredients nature combined as limiters, enhancers, and so on.

Many isolated active compounds with psychoactive properties have been refined from these respective organisms and chemically synthesized, including mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, salvinorin A, ibogaine, ergine, and muscimol. More

(Samadhi Meditation) Isochronic tones for the natural release of DMT, the spirit molecule in the center of the brain (pineal gland), the third eye (dibba cakkhu).

Through the Rabbit Hole with Krystle Cole

Urban Shamans Amber Larson, Xochitl, Crystal Quintero, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Bela, Wisdom Quarterly; Hamilton Pharmacopeia (VICE/HBO, 2012); Krystle A. Cole (NeuroSoup)

"You should get out more," people may say. Maybe people should get in more, like Alice.

TOPEKA, Kansas - Former goth stripper, author of Lysergic, and producer of numerous YouTube videos Krsytle A. Cole talks about her time spent living in an "Underground Acid Palace," a subterranean missile silo converted into a luxurious LSD-manufacturing facility.

She take Hamilton and VICE's cameras on a tour into the rabbit hole. We're not in Kansas any... well, apparently, we still are. And this time it's underground just like Alice in Wyrd (another word for Wonderland).
 
Krystle Cole spent three years of her life running from the DEA, being held partially against her will and used as a guinea pig for strange new psychedelic chemicals.
 

Lysergic, 2nd ed. (goodreads.com)

Eventually her friends-turned-captors were arrested, whereas Krystle herself barely escaped incarceration.

She now makes her living as a writer, sharing her experiences in books and on the Web in her firsthand and Erowid.org-style accounts of experimenting with entheogens and other forbidden substances on NeuroSoup.
 

I wonder, I wonder, I wonder what's down in there! (Alice at the gate of the Rabbit Hole)

 
We can't help but observe how much she looks like someone we knew, both in terms of her features and her mannerisms, who eventually became an expert Buddhist meditator and stream enterer. Of course, people do not believe anyone get enlightened nowadays. They do. How do we know? we'll be asked. That was courtesy of a strange set of circumstances too hard for others to believe. We believe it. We were there. We saw and understood.

DRUG DISCUSSION
Wisdom Quarterly (URBAN SHAMANISM)

The lights, the lights, painting with light (DigitalTurkey-Graph/flickr.com)

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The devas still descend from space.

Is there anything good to be said about any "drug"? Yes, the entheogens, the ones that bring out the "divine" (theos, deus, devas, the "godly") within. So, Xochitl, which drug? Native Americans have "plant helpers," not "drugs." To say that word tosses our minds to grim concrete ghettos and dreary suburbs painted neon. We're leaving that; we're back in nature; we're going to Wyrd or the Spirit World. An entheogen, a sacred plant, root, vine, mushroom, or combination -- whatever -- is all about getting to one thing: DMT (dimethyltryptamine).

(Gnosis) "DMT: The Spirit Molecule," which explores human consciousness, weaves an account of Dr. Rick Strassman's groundbreaking DMT research through a multifaceted approach to this intriguing entheogen/hallucinogen found in the body, brain, and hundreds of plants.

And this DMT is not out there. It's in here, in the center of our brains, behind the third eye, where the pineal gland is enclosed in gray matter with active rods and cones and its own inner-retina.
 
There are many ways to awaken it. "Drugs" are the worst way. People are not ready to see it. Amber, does Buddhism have anything good to say about drugs? I think we all agree with Dr. Gabor Mate that the problem of "drug use and abuse" is that almost no one in the U.S. who sets out to get high is actually trying to get high. They're just trying to get wasted.

 

Befriending Faeries

They are trying to obtund (dull) rather than enhance consciousness, trying to get blotto, blitzed, full of toxins or intoxicated. Right, Seven? That's right! We use the same word to mean exact opposite things -- doped up or wasted versus opened up and trying to see things as they really are.

Whatever there is of substances to get "high" on, that exists within for us to access. Crystal? There are Tibetan lamas who do dream yoga. But look at the yogis of olde, not the ganja-obtunded waste-cases sitting around growing great dreadlocks and clutching hash pipes. Maybe they would have taken or produce Soma and Amrita, the "nectar of the devas."

Yogis sometimes veer off the path (D. Earlotti)

What we call chocolate was something like that, Theobroma cacao, "cocoa the food of the devas." Which extraterrestrial-gods was it who pointed out the pits of that fruit was edible?

 

The subtle little fairies/devis in art (1909)

Serenity-meditation that leads to the absorptions leads to bliss in the first two jhanas, independent of the senses and sensuality. It comes from within. It makes possible the concentration and mental-collectedness needed for successful insight-practice called vipassana. Anyone smoking high-THC/low-CBD cannabis to get lost or wasted will get lost and waste her/his time.

Devas watch as liberator is born.

But if one pursues awakening the pineal gland, the third eye, the seat of consciousness, the "mind door" around the heart may get something else, awakening and liberation. But real liberation is not transient. It does not fall away. Drug experiences, absorptions (jhanas), hallucinations, and delusions do. The Five Precepts warn us away from intoxicants. This is very wise. Mere "knowledge" (ñāna), study (suta), and experience cannot substitute for actual wisdom (Sanskrit prajñā, Pali paññā).

Embodying DMT as "Soma"?

Stephen T. Naylor, Encyclopedia Mythica (pantheon.org)

The devas depicted in Western/Greco-Roman forms (Ilias Flaxman, Gestochen/Wiki)

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Where earthbound devas dwell, Plitvice

Soma is a very difficult deity [deva] for many outside of India to comprehend. He works on numerous levels, all of which are tied together rather strangely. Soma is firstly a plant. 

 

He is also an intoxicating drink which was brewed from that plant [which plant or mushroom, root or vine is disputed]....Though he is never depicted in human form, Soma obviously did not want for lovers [i.e., people who loved it]; poets rarely do.

In one episode, his desires caused a war. He had grown arrogant due to the glory that was offered him. Because of this, he let his lust overcome him; he kidnapped and carried off Tara, the wife of the [deva] Brihaspati. After refusing to give her up, the devas made war on him to force her release, and Soma called on the [titans] asuras to aid him.

Finally, Brahma interceded and compelled Soma to let Tara go. But she was with child, and it ended up that this child was Soma's. The child was born and named Budha (not to be confused with the Buddha). More

There is a "road" (path) to a weird "land" (place) somewhere outside of this illusion.

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Is it Amrita, the endogenous nectar of our divine nature?

Wisdom Quarterly edit of Wikipedia entry

Mohini, female-Vishnu with Amrita pot (W)

Amrita is repeatedly referred to as "the drink of the devas, the "gods," which grants them "immortality."

• Immortality? Perhaps that timeless vision or realization of who we really are, which does not end at death; our personality ends, and self falls away, but something, some whole, some connection to everything else, remains or is reborn, taking and clinging to a new form it immediately mistakes for "self" again. We are not so limited as any expression or manifestation would suggest.

Amrita features in the "ocean-churning" Samudra manthan legend, which describes how the devas, because of a curse from the sage Durvasa, begin to lose their immortality (divine vision of themselves?

 

Assisted by their mortal enemies, the asuras (Buddhist "titans"), they churn the ocean (cosmos, world-system, Milky Way, samsara) and create -- among other wonderful (Wyrd) things -- Amrita, the nectar of immortality.

 

In yogic philosophy (as it found its way from Hindu philosophy into its cognate Mahayana-Buddhism), Amrita is a fluid that can flow from the pituitary gland down the throat in deep states of meditation. It is considered quite a boon: Some yogic texts say that one drop is enough to conquer death and achieve immortality. More

When we were in the Spirit World (video)

Xochitl, Ashley Wells, Seth Auberon, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly Wikipedia edit

The spirit world can appear as weird and strange (Alex Tooth/deviantart.com)

Mother Earth, Father Sky, one a womb, the other a seed, brought together by falling rain.

(KE) The shamans of Mongolia and Siberia who preceded Native Americans illustrate that knowledge of the spirit world is not limited to any culture, group, or period. These Vajrayana Buddhists and animists as well as the rishis (seers) and yogis (hermit-ascetics) of India were well aware of these strange realms and their inhabitants. In northern Europe the spirit world was sometimes referred to as the Wyrd (like our word weird).

Rain Dancing Our Way into the Spirit World

We dance to make it rain calling on spirit helpers and spirit guides. The rain dance of the Navajo Native American was influenced by the Hopi and others (sonocarina)

 

Dryad or "tree nymph" spirit

The spirit world (spirit = breath = an invisible force like the wind), according to Spiritualism, is the adjacent world inhabited by spirits. (WQ Rain Dance)

In Buddhism "spirits" are variously called devas, petas, nagas, suparnas, gandharvas, kumbhandas, yakkhas, narakas, and asuras, or "light beings, ghosts of the dead, dragons, avians, fairies, gnomes, hellions, demons, and titans").

 

Whereas religion concerns the inner life, the spirit world is regarded as an external environment for spirits (Spiritualism - Its History, Phenomena, and Doctrine, Arthur J. Hill 1918, p. 211). Independent from the natural world, both the spirit world and the natural world are in constant interaction.

Through mediumship -- through local shamans, curanderos or healers, medicine women and men -- these worlds can consciously communicate with one other. The spirit world can be described by mediums in trance (Ibid., W.J. Colville, Universal Spiritualism: Spirit Communion in All Ages Among All Nations, 1906, p. 42.

Anyone who does not believe the spirit world is real and right there before on blind third eye, there are three dangerous routes to personally prove that it is: drums, drugs, or trying to get through Finnegans Wake in one sitting.

Journeying to Three Realms in under 30 mins.

(NW) Use headphones. This is a shamanic journey led by Glenn Sullivan (NaturalWisdom.ie) explaining the landscapes and calling in the directions with a 16-min. drumming journey. Come together into a sacred circle and learn to journey into non-ordinary states of consciousness. See the spirits, gain a deeper understanding of the "human" plane and its many inhabitants, cycles, and patterns to problem solve in everyday life and the spiritual path.
 

HISTORY

Mayan shaman, Day of the Dead (IR-M)

By the mid 19th century most Spiritualist writers concurred that the spirit world was of "tangible substance" (ectoplasm) and a place consisting of "spheres" or "zones" (John W. Edmonds, Dr. George T. Dexter, MD, Spiritualism, 1853, p. 262). Although specific details differed, the construct suggested organization and centralization (Bret E. Carrol, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Religion in North America), Indiana Univ. Press, Oct. 1, 1997, p. 62).

 

The 18th century writer Emanuel Swedenborg influenced Spiritualist views about the spirit world. He described a series of concentric spheres each including a hierarchical organization of spirits in a setting more earth-like than theocentric (Ibid., p.17). The spheres become gradually more illuminated and celestial.

 

Spirit travel through astral space

Spiritualists added a concept of limitlessness (Buddhism's "boundlessness") or infinity to these spheres (Edmonds, p. 123).  Furthermore, it was defined that "Laws" initiated by a god apply to Earth as well as the spirit world (Edmonds, p. 136).

Another common Spiritualist conception was that the spirit world is inherently good and is related to truth-seeking as opposed to things that are harmful residing in a "spiritual darkness" (Hill, p. 168; Edmonds, p.143). 

This conception inferred, as in the biblical parable of Lazarus and Dives, that there is considered a greater distance between helpful and harmful spirits than between the dead and the living (Hill, p.208).

Scandinavia: land of the Sami shamans (VN)

For some the spirit world was "The Home of the Soul," as described by Theosophist C.W. Leadbeater, suggesting that for a living human being to experience the spirit world will be a blissful, meaningful, and life altering experience (Colville, pp. 268-270).

Most shamans were women (DA)

Yet, John W. Edmonds states in his 1853 work, Spiritualism, "Man's relation spiritually with the spirit-world is no more wonderful than his connection with the natural world. The two parts of his nature respond to the same affinities in the natural and spiritual worlds" (Edmonds, p. 104). 

Edmonds asserts, quoting Swedenborg through mediumship, that the relationship between humans and the spirit world is reciprocal and thus could contain sorrow. Though ultimately, "wandering through the spheres" on a path of goodness "is received at last by that Spirit whose thought is universal love forever" (Edmonds, p. 345). More

(PD/EOC) What begins as a Christian program branches out with science in an attempt at credibility. Is the spirit world real? Who dwells in it? How did the spirits come into being? What do science and religion say about the spirit realm? Does the spirit realm affect us?

The Buddha: Knower of Worlds

Knower of the Worlds (Amrit Vismay)

The Buddha frequently said, there is this world and the other (or next) world. And a teacher who is enlightened directly knows and directly perceives these worlds. He frequently is shown to be aware of other planes or dimensions as well as worlds in space and underground (the 31 Planes of Existence). A buddha knows all of these worlds and the paths (karma) leading to rebirth there as well as liberation from them. 

Buddha life panels, Jing'an Temple, Shanghai

Four worlds he frequently saw and interacted with are enmeshed in this human plane -- the worlds of devas, yakkhas and maras, animals, and hungry ghosts. But he could see and visit all the manifold realms in this world system and even worlds between world systems (the interstitial hells of desolation and isolation). It is not clear if he visited other "world systems" (galaxies or universes), but it is certain that he knew about them. Buddhist cosmology describes them as having similar qualities and stations occupied by different beings such as each having a Maha Brahma and a Sakka and some having a Buddha from time to time.

• VIDEO: Sandra Ingerman on becoming a shaman (training) First set the intention. Shamanic teacher gets up close and personal with deep training insights on the benefits of a mini healing retreat (thecenterforhealingarts.com).
• VIDEO: Amazon Shamans and Ayahausca (DMT)
• VIDEO: How to see Spirit Realm (biblical "gift of discernment" with Jonathan Welton and fanatic Sid Roth)

"Desert Breath" spiral

Seen from high above, this spiral in the Egyptian desert captured by Google Earth appears to be a mystery. It's actually an enormous environmental art installation called "Desert Breath" created in 1997. The artists Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou, and Stella Constantinides originally designed the 1 million square foot piece with a small lake in the center, which has since dried out. LiveScience.com

Wild Mushroom Fair, Los Angeles (review)

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly; LAmushrooms.org; Arboretum.org; GaryLincoff.com

Author and expert Gary Lincoff, left, led a mushroom-hunting foray at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx (Alan Zale/The New York Times).

Wild Mushroom Fair (LAMS)

It was amazing. Mycologist Gary Lincoff (New York Botanical Gardens, author of The Complete Mushroom Hunter Illustrated and other popular texts) not only led everyone on a wild mushroom hunt that turned up more mushrooms than foragers are finding in Northern California, he made known a view so radical, so unbelievable, so staggering in its implications that botanists will scoff and come around decades from now.

It has long been believed that there were plant producers, plant hunters, and plant decomposers, mushrooms falling into the last category.

It is not the case. Mushrooms "hunt," and they produce. They can lasso a nematode to source their own nitrate. And rotifers, watch out. The secret is in the mycelium and mycorrhizae.

(BBC) "The Secret Life of Plants" mushroom hunting nematodes

That is not the bombshell. Tests were done after Lincoff and others wondered how Douglas fir were getting nitrate, a necessary fertilizer not found in the unfertilized soil when they grew in nature. It turned out to be the mycelium -- the massive mushroom root network, Nature's fist World Wide Web and Internet, as pointed out by Paul Stamets (Fungi Perfecti), who is proving that environmental reclamation using mushrooms is the way to clean up oil spills and radiation hazards.

Gary Lincoff, Shroomfest 2011: The Philosopher's Stone or How Mushrooms Can Save

You Thousands of Dollars in Therapy and Free You from the Prison of Time and Space.

Goddess (Mochiunagi/flickr)

Douglas firs do not stand in isolation from their environment or each other; they are utterly interdependent. If radiactively marked carbon is placed in one, it will also end up in another. How did it get there? They did not share it via their roots; the mycelium did. The mycelium takes care of the entire forest!

Now here's the bombshell: Every expression of green plants we so prize and esteem may just be the external manifestation of mushrooms because plants so depend on mycological support as to not be able to survive and thrive in the absence of the symbiotic relationship. But, botanists will argue, there are plants that are without mycelium vastly expanding and contributing to their root systems. The secret is that there are no plants without mushroom cells inside their tissue. These cells seem to be controlling what is going on more than the plants. We know a great more than we used 30 years ago, yet we know next to nothing about how amazing mushrooms are.

A few Buddhist mushroom references

The Mushroom Matrix (karma4ya.deviantart.com)

 

Wisdom Quarterly asked Lincoff about a little known reference to mushrooms in the Buddhist sutras. Of course, everyone knows the story of the Buddha's passing from eating mushrooms -- which one of our readers suggests were likely Amanita phalloides. (Do pigs eat this deadly variety?)

In Pork? Mushroom? How the Buddha Died we wonder aloud about the Buddha as vegetarian fed bad mushrooms by Cunda the Blacksmith. Some say he was fed pork, others that it was tender mushrooms loved by pork. "What about the more likely cause being Amanita phalloides? So many Amanita muscaria tells left by the ancient Buddhists and Indo-Aryans, and yet your eyes remain closed."

Musha Cay (pinterest.com)

The more amazing reference we asked Lincoff about was whether or not mycelium is edible, because one day the ancient Buddhist monastics in one district in India were starving as a result of a famine. They had to travel far to find a meager alms offerings to sustain themselves. Then the Buddha's chief male disciple, "foremost in psychic powers," offered a solution. Maha Moggallana asked the Buddha if it wouldn't be good for him to use his miraculous powers to either make the long road very short for those traveling on it to go outside the famine area or -- and here's the stunner -- perhaps taking his hand like a giant earth mover and turning over the earth to reveal a great wealth of food growing underground.

What could this be a reference to other than mycelium? Gary Lincoff concurred that mycelium is not only edible and nutritious, it tastes good. To illustrate this, Lincoff pointed out that during a time when mushrooms were not coming up, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup was made almost entirely of mycelium with a few bits of the fruiting body tossed in so no one would question it. The taste was great, and no one noticed. (Another apparent and more amazing reference to mushrooms and mycelium is found in the "Origins of Human Life on Earth Sutra," the Aganna Sutta.