dragonrider wrote:All psychedelic drugs are material. They do not directly affect counsciousness. They affect the brain.
Regardless of what your religious or spiritual beliefs are, you'd have to admit that counsciousness is (or has become for that matter) rather accustomed to the place it inhabits.
Everybody who takes psychedelic drugs is a materialist. Don't ever be so naive to think that you are above any form of materialism.
You may think that the need for money is superficial. But if people need money to feed their loved ones, is it still such a superficial need? OK, it may not be money itself they're after in this case.
But the point is, you can never detach all the profound and spiritual things, from all the earthly stuff. It is not as if, when maybe one day you'll become enlightened, you won't need food or water anymore.
If we can become so mature that we can see our own material needs in perspective, and realise that we ourselves are not the only one's with needs, that is already quite an achievement.
And actually pretty hard.
There's no escaping the material world entirely as long we live here, and like you said, we have become accustomed to it and the idea of the middle way, or balance is the real challenge, at least in this context. Even Buddha himself had to eat and walk the earth. I don't remember who said it, and I'm paraphrasing from memory but it was a really great point someone made about cultures tending to reflect the intoxicants they use, and for Europe, this was primarily alcohol as it is/was practically devoid of naturally derived tryptamines (aside from the endogenous ones). It's not so much materialism itself that I disdain, but the materialistic mindset or the imbalance that is almost required in order to succeed in the modern models of civilization and it seems we've almost forgotten that there is something inherently supernatural in the fact that we exist at all. There's a great quote by Aldous Huxley that your post made me think of...
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
-Aldous Huxley
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