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).

Why we love the LORD who hates (video)

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly; Lorde; Clevver.com, Clevver News; Shalom Auslander

What do Justin Bieber, Lana Del Rey, Britney Spears, and Amanda Bynes have in common? Aside from losing their childhood innocence to fame, money, illegal drugs, and the Illuminati? They have all been bashed by pop superstar Lorde! 

G-d d-mn, I hate filthy sinners!

You think Lorde is bad? What about "the Lord"? The Lord is a name for the many Gods of the Judeo-Christian Bible -- Yahweh, El, Elohim, Adonai, and many other titles and personal names, many of them plural, even as we all pretend it's a monotheistic "there's only one God" faith that somehow emerged from a rich polytheistic history.

Hope you're not tracking my sins, God.

The Bible was not rewritten to make it monotheistic, just translated in ways to cover up its polytheism. But no one covers up how angry their "angry God" is. So more honest readers, or those familiar with more than one biblical language -- Greek, Coptic (Egyptian), Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, and so on -- say, "There's only one true God" as if all the other ones in the Bible are fake. And "God is love...but don't read the Old Testament because that was the old deal; here's the new deal."

Who's even keeping score? - Come on, dad.

Why does this angry, jealous, proud God, this GROUP of Gods, constantly referring to themselves in chapter after chapter of their bestseller in the plural, HATE so much?

"God is love"? Many Christian fundamentalists and Jews say different: Who can argue with Shalom Auslander's many points? Has any Christian read the Book of Judges (Sefer Shoftim, ספר שופטים, is the seventh book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible), the Old Testament where the Christian Gods (the Lord) revel in war, command killings, and order other atrocities?

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander on reading the Bible as history and realizing what it means to be a punishing God's "chosen people."

The Bible is dangerous reading.

Is it any wonder that Christians may be the world's most formidable terrorists, crusaders, invaders, rapists, conquistadors, (hypocrites?), enslavers, sexists, patriarchs... The God(s) of the Bible revel in cruelty, revenge, destruction, punishment, smiting, scaring, threatening. And yet we love it/him/them. It must be Stockholm Syndrome at work deep in our earthling psyches.

Christian forgeries?

"The Old Testament doesn't count!" Come on, we're modern people. God only became love in the New Testament? Angry dad, happy son, no mother, mysterious dove -- this is the "Holy Family"? What about giving Asherah, prana (the real "holy spirit," the subtle-breath full of chi), Mary, and direct mystical experience their due? The Catholics (and Buddhists) give Mary (as Guan Yin) plenty of attention, and we don't know who Asherah is.

God wants us to stone, kill, rampage

• [God's wife] Asherah, Tree of Life, Snakes Tree of Life (date palm), Asherah [wife], and the God of the Bible. The snake eats the plant of eternal life, from the Huluppu Tree, in the Gilgamesh Epic...
• God's wife "Asherah" edited out of the Bible Was God's wife edited out of the Bible? Atheist claims the Almighty had partner known as Asherah (Daily Mail, March 19, 2011).
• God's Wife Edited Out of the Bible - Almost

Cosmic winds, light, echoes (video)

Amber Larson (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly; Nadia Drake (Phenomena, NatGeo, May 5, 2014)

Light echoes act as astronomical time machines or portals to the past.

On Earth, echoes are produced when sound waves bounce around like pinballs. In space, echoes are produced when light does the bouncing.

Just as sounds can echo -- so, too, can cosmic light. But instead of ricocheting off damp cavern walls, light traveling through the universe bounces off soft, dusty clouds.

 

Sometimes, this happens after an explosive event such a supernova. On Earth, most of the light we’d see from one of these exploding stars would have come directly here. But supernovas explode in three dimensions, sending light in all directions. Not all of that light is aimed toward Earth. If the geometry is right, some of the light... More
 

SUTRA: In the Sky

Nyanaponika Thera (trans.) Akasa Sutta (1) (SN 36.12); Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

"In the sky, O meditators, various kinds of [solar, cosmic, magnetic] winds are blowing: winds from the east, west, north and south, winds carrying dust and winds without dust, winds hot and cold, gentle and fierce.

• ["Wind" or vayo (prana, chi, spiritus) is regarded as the source of movement, the invisible animating principle as it were, in the body.]

"Similarly, meditators, there arise in this body various kinds of feelings: pleasant feelings arise, painful feelings arise, and neutral feelings arise."

 

Illusion of expanding dust cloud (NASA/ESA/H.E.Bond)

Just as in the sky above winds of various kinds are blowing:

Coming from the east or west, moving from the north or south,

Some carry dust and others not, cold are some and others hot,

Some are fierce and others mild -- their varied moving style.

So also in this body here, feelings of different kind arise:

The pleasant feelings and the painful and the neutral ones.

But if a meditator is vigilant and persistent

To practice mindfulness and comprehension clear,

The nature of all feelings will one understand,

And having penetrated them, one will be taint-free in this very life.

Mature in knowledge, firm in Dharma's ways,

Then once one's lifespan ends, this body breaks,

 

And all measure and concept one has transcended.

[This last line is an allusion to nirvana.]

Drake is a science journalist. Phenomena is her space to talk about space -- from other worlds to exploding stars to the fabric of time and the universe. Her work has also appeared in Science News, Nature, New Scientist, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and WIRED. She lives in beautiful, foggy San Francisco.

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• 
  Prāna (प्राण) is the Sanskrit word for "life force." In yoga, Oriental medicine, and martial arts, the term refers to a cosmic energy believed to come from the Sun (solar cosmic rays) and connecting the elements of the universe. The universal principle of energy or force, responsible for the body's movement, heat, life, and maintenance, prāna is the sum total of all [active] energy that is manifest in the universe. This life energy has been vividly invoked and described in Vedas. In Ayurveda, tantra, and Tibetan medicine "praṇā vāyu" is the basic vāyu (wind, air) from which all the other vāyus arise. It is analogous to qi or chi. More
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