If i was serious about learning Buddhism, i would not do anything that seemed out of the Buddhist traditions.

Red squirrel, it's almost like you are trying to justify your past actions. You have tried certain substances and are asking if they have a place in Buddhism, etc. Well Buddhism has rules doesn't it?, and either you follow them and be a Buddhist, or you fail them. Right? Whatever, 'lighten up' springs to mind. Seriousness can be a stumbling block.

Maybe you prefer to be a 1\2 Buddhist?!

I'm not trying to justify anything, nor do I need to. At one point in my Buddhist career I took the 5th precept, which is the vow against taking intoxicants. After three years of strictly observing this vow, I decided to formally give it back. So now I occasionally use drugs, although as mindfully as possible. Does that make me half a Buddhist? Maybe, but I could care less so I would say that I'm in the clear.

Everybody is going to have their own interpretation of what I say, I try to be as clear as possible but I really can't escape this. I didn't intend this thread to focus on me and what I happen to believe, but it kind of has steered in that direction. You say something, people challenge it, and you try to clarify or defend your point.

I was really hoping that this would spark more of a conversation about why people do or do not think that psychedelics are a viable form of meditation or a tool for enlightenment. I am much more interested in other people's experiences, after all, I already know what I believe.

I admit that I go off on tangents. I am on standby from work at the moment, and not feeling my best, so this has been a fun way for me to pass the time. If you knew me, you would know that I am about as serious as a drunk prarie dog. Nonetheless, I think this is an interesting topic and worth exploring.

Buddhism really isn't about pass/fail. Some of the traditions, like the Hinayana, rely more on rules. As a Vajrayana Buddhist, it is more about the amount of awareness you bring to the situation. Nothing is really accepted as good/bad or accept/reject, it is more about if your actions stem from deluded thinking or not. After all, its not Roman Catholicism.

I'm afraid its time for me to go lightheadedly skipping down the street while picking daisies and whistling children's tunes. Maybe after that I will do some half-Buddhist meditation. Just kidding, dude.

I think, then, that the crux of the matter is whether psychedelic use causes deluded thinking, or the opposite. The answer is probably that both are possible.

why be anything other than what you are?

why take vows?

If I could be completely honest, I find such things silly.

You can gleem all the knowledge you need by simply observing the geometric libraray of cosmic knowledge in the blooming of a single flower.

Flowers are just flowers, and they dont take vows.

Once you begin to see that the human vessel is too like a flower bud waiting to blossom everything else but what comes natural seems silly.

I dont think there is anything more natural than walking through the grass on an early spring morning and eating a mushroom while blossoming in the sun. Humans find ways to overcomplicate everything and seem extremely skilled at collecting, categorizing and disconnecting. They even design spiritual systems that way.

Beautiful post, Jamie.

Let me answer by giving you a little slice of my story.

When I was 21 I wanted to become a monk. I mean I really wanted to become a monk. When most normal, healthy kids my age were dreaming about sex and becoming rock stars, I was fantasizing about shaving my head and muttering some arcane verses in an obscure language. A cup of steaming yak's milk sitting contently in my hand...

I went to my lama and told him my plans. In his wisdom, he did not say no, for I am sure he knew that he would not curb my over-zealous ambition. He did not say yes, either (it would have ended in disaster, I'm sure). What he did was give me another option. He told me he would let me take the five core monk's vows, and if I uphold those vows, away from the monastery, I could return in a few years and he would make me a monk.

So for the next three years I was completely sober, abstained from sex, and did my best no t to swat mosquitos. What I learned from that experience is that I really didn't want to become a monk, and recognized it as just another impulse. It was actually a great teaching on his part, one that did not need words or the authority of scripture. He just did a simple action and let me figure it out on my own.

When I was staying in the monastery there were many young western monks and nuns. Many, if not most of them, had achieved no greater peace of mind or realization than the kid on the street glued to their cell phone.

It is the ego that feels the need to "be" something, or someone. There are so many masks that we can wear throughout our lives. Of course, these are just labels, but they reveal the almost desperate attempt that we make to reify ourselves. We need to feel comforted knowing that we don't merely exist, but we exist as someone, as something special.

As you said, it is much better to simply be. It is also more challenging... and elusive. I think most people will run into much more resistance trying to simplify, and find much more resistance trying not to try.

I think we are running up against another paradox here. I could write a thousand pages about it... and I wouldn't come any closer to it. It- that which isn't an it at all, but at the same time is everything.

As somebody who did write a thousand pages on It, (Okay, 2,849 KBs in a Notepad File, perhaps not a thousand pages, totally irrelevant.) and also one'a them subscribers to the new-age HIPPIE (Highly Intelligent People Pursuing Infinite Enlightenment) dippie stew of amalgamated philosophy, I believe that through mindfully being one with the one that one chooses to be one with, whatever the multiplicitous definitions of one and oneness may subjectively be, entheogens can be a powerful tool for attaining enlightenment.

I mean, to rip something straight from previously mentioned Notepad file:

"...Gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble... ...I allow my thoughts to wander to realms of the mundane, allow my attention to be unfocused from the goal of enlightenment. To define enlightened for myself, I'd break it down into its parts, en - lighten - ed, to lighten oneself of ones burdens, to become unattached from the illusion and become one with the Æther, to be one with spirit, one with Existence, Krsna, one with God! One with oneself.

Ah yes, the duality of sense and nonsense, both equal portions of this absurd soup."

I empathize with what somebody (Apologies all around, I'm terrible with names!) posted earlier, I think it was page 2 of this thread? "The more I meditate on it, the deeper I see it. The deeper I see it, the more grounded I become in this realization. The more grounded I become in this realization, the more faith I have in the other aspects of the path." I remember a couple years ago, it was 12/20/12, I was sittin' in a lovely little family-run restaurant at a truck-stop in Lebanon, TN, hitchhiking through to see family for the holidays, the folks in there were cool as could be, they made me some of the best biscuits'n'gravy I've ever had! Anyway, through the wonderful synchronous nature of Existence, I managed to sit down and read A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's The Perfection of Yoga in which Prabhupada explains that yoga is essentially the act of being totally immersed in every action that one finds oneself in, as a tea leaf is immersed in the hot water, so, we too, must immerse ourselves in our highest spiritual virtues at all times, and then we awaken from our dreams and find ourselves in the abode of the Gods.

Hooray for metaphors!

Then last year, I had the good fortune to have a friend of mine lend me the Principia Discordia, which, well. Here's my two favorite pages from it. http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/12.php and http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/81.php (4th paragraph down on the 2nd link.)

Moral of the wall of text: Mindful concentration upon ones own intentions are key.

Hare Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krsna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare!
Gobble gobble gobble gobble, GOBBLE!
Love, light and gratitude! I really appreciate this thread and the views I've read, wow! Y'all're great!

Hello all!

Sorry to resurrect an old topic, I just wanted to chime in on Jox's thread about S/M and meditation. I cannot post to the tread directly, so I figured I would start here.

I don't really understand what you mean by saying that meditation is realization through bodily pain. For me, realization is discovering the nature of mind, and discovering the true nature of all phenomena. With enough practice and insight, one can hfave these discoveries and realization through any experience.

I do think that pain can be a useful object of meditation, but before I get into that...

Since you mentioned Buddhsim, I would like to point out that hard-core asceticism has never been part of Buddhism, although I don't think that what you are describing would even be considered asceticism, which is the deliberate inflicting of pain or the deliberate deprivation of food or physical comfort in the pursuit of spiritual realization.

Before Buddha's enlightenment he took many different teachers and practiced asceticism, inflicting himself with constant pain and subsiding on only a grain of rice a day (so the story goes). This practice nearly killed him- there are actually statues of Buddha that shows him meditating, his body wasted away and little more than a skeleton. He later denounced these practices as damaging and spoke about his famous middle path after his enlightenment. In general, Buddhism adopted his stance on this and shunned these practices. There are still Hindu sadhus in India who practice asceticism, who refuse to cut their nails, walk on nails, pierce themselves, and hand themselves from hooks among other things.

Anywhoo...

Pain can be a useful object of meditation for the simple fact that nearly everybody wants to avoid pain. It is a universal reaction, one shared amongst all forms of life.

If we take pain as our object of meditation and just sit with it, we can see how it is not so much the pain that causes us suffering, but our mind reacting to the pain, projecting layer upon layer of concepts and fears. If you sit with this, and break through the conceptual mind, you can see through both the pain and the mind's reaction to it. It is all just a phantom play, made solid by our minds.

The Buddhist meditation practices that I know of that deal with pain involve simply giving yourself a hard pinch during meditation, so I would say don't go to extremes with this, or at least start small. You can see how this could help develop some very useful skills for our daily lives, because most of us have so much aversion to pain, and because pain is simply unavoidable in this life.

Now I really don't have knowledge of the paths that you are describing, but what I find interesting is that you are proposing throwing sex into the picture. Sex, or more generally pleasure or happiness, is something that we all want. To put it simply we want to avoid pain and suffering and encounter pleasure or happiness. Attachment and aversion. Either way it is the mind that is at the root of these reactions, and if we can cut through our attachment and aversion then we can all learn to be free.

Oh, snap! Looks like I have to run, but I have some more thoughts about this. Hopefully Jox sees this because I would love to discuss this with him.

I hope everybody is having a wonderful time involved in whatever sort of pleasure or pain they may find themselves in! Peace and love my fellow wanderers!

Does buddhism not teach loving kindness, for all words to be truthful, necessary and kind? Look from within before turning to the external, for otherwise your mind will begin to race, the focus not fully aware and you shall still suffer

Yes, i agree squirrel. And i believe that nature provided man with the right foods for a healthy mind. I think Buddha learnt pretty soon that practicing an ascetic life wasn't going to be beneficial for HIS path.



It seems obvious that Buddha had his own agenda, to transcend the physical body and 'forget it', and go deeper. These Sadhu's look as if their liberation requires testing the boundaries of their bodies, unlike Buddha's practices. Perhaps this is another example of different peoples finding their 'own' path to enlightenment?

It's quite interesting because i know someone at my work who is obviously 'anti drugs', and preaches about the benefits of meditation. As much as i try to explain that psychoactive plants have been used my many people who meditate, he still refuses to believe that it is right or even normal. Yet Buddha tried different methods along 'his' own path to enlightenment, and was even shunned for drinking cows milk: Seen by his fellow aecetics as a 'sign of weakness'!
Maybe people need to remember to do as Buddha suggested, and 'find their own path', and maybe not be so self righteous. Because who knows, this 'self righteousness', may be their own self made 'stumbling block', preventing them from achieving enlightenment.

Good morning, all!

To wrap up I wanted to say that these meditation practices that I described above have to do with training or taming the mind. In Buddhist Tantra, the practice is not so much mind training, but transforming ignorance and emotion into wisdom. Since sexual desire is such a strong emotion, it is brought onto the path and transformed into wisdom. This doesn't mean that everybody is practicing esoteric sexual practices, but that they are working with the energy of their desire.

Of course, there are sexual practices in Tantric Buddhism. These are generally advasnced practices and requires much stability of the mind and certain transmissions and empowerments. You are not actually having sex in the form of your normal body, but in the form of a wisdom deity (yidam). In tantra everything gets transformed into the mandala of the deity, so I supposed if you can uphold this view, and you have all of the transmissions, then S and M practice could be used in this regard.

I don't know if this even remotely touched what you were getting at. Obviously, my view is fairly limited to Buddhism. If you are interested in Buddhist sexual practices, and you are in India, perhaps you could meet up with my teacher who is in Tso Pema. I could give you his contact info. He is a lot more open to teaching people about this kind of stuff than most lamas, who tend to remain rather guarded about this.

I should mention that Buddhist Tantra is considered highly effective, but also very risky, so it isn't about just doing whatever. The teachers say that it is like putting a snake in a tube, once you enter you either go straight up or straight down. In summing up, from a Buddhist perspective you can certainly bring sex onto the path, but without the right view it can easily just become another source for ego gratification.

As always, these are just the opinions of a poor, uneducated little rodent, and have nothing to do with anything.