It would be good if psychedelics were re-introduced to Buddhist and Vedic practices in the west. That aspect has been forgotten for too long. Initiation into the deeper mystical traditions and psychedelics belong together. This silly notion of psychedelic practice vs non psychedelic practice is silly and so reductionist. Without one the other is lacking, for myself.
I don't agree with everything said in that article..
For instance..
"In an early chapter of my book, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, I say that after you have a major experience, if within the first six weeks after it you feel you have the need to get back there, what you are doing is avoiding working with something in yourself that has come up. [sigh from the audience] The advice is wait another six weeks."I see this as another attempt to label and categorize a personal, subjective experience, that happens often in a non-dual mystical state of consciousness. It is another projection. What happens in non-dual mystical states is outside of time and dualism...and I think the best mythological paradigm for understanding dualism comes from the Gnostics and Manichaeans..both of which have striking similarities to Buddhists..I see any attempt to rationalize anything within duality is another projection of the archontic paradigm of consciousness..and that would include any attempt to rationalize the relevance of a mystical experience, with conclusions of unresolved issues, and set periods of time one must adhere to between such experiences etc. Such ideas are only true in as far as you are willing to believe they are. This is not a conventional opinion, I know..and to be honest it is the polarization over such issues that has made me want to keep my distance from Buddhist ideas, even though I resonate with most of them.
It's difficult to portray a mystical experience with language in the first place, we struggle with it, and confuse ourselves..and then in that struggle we finally submit to the only translatable concepts graspable, and ultimately, we confuse the experience itself, with mere symbols of the experience. Such symbols eventually incarnate as archetypes in our personal mythos, and we build our paradigms of existence around them...but those paradigms are like shadows we dance around on the walls of consciousness. They are not the experience itself, as it exists unhinged from the parameters of categorization.
The experience IS the experience, regardless of what you do before, or after. Everything else matters, but it only matters to the extent that it can be expressed, and that extent caps out as polarity falls away into the mystical states of non-dual transcendent awareness.
Some people have real problems with this, because they assume I am dismissing daily yogic or meditation practices. I am not. Yoga is essential for myself..however rationalizing my experiences, and reducing them down to fit as concepts within a dualist model of reality, and then placing rules and regulations around them, has always seemed somewhat appropriate at times, until I end up returning from a non-dual mystical state, and then I laugh at the delusions my mind constantly projects in the wake of everything, including psychedelic experiences.
The mystical experience, is a biological function..as well as an artifact of language. To move through, to the source of perceived emanations, is to fall into a place where calling the state something, is the anti-thesis of the state itself. In that sense, any attempt to fit that back into linear consciousness and build up models of reality around it, while perhaps useful in daily life, does not represent a true reflection of that experience.
I am very weary of anyone who attempts to tell me that the world is simply okay enough, that something must be off within me, when I yearn to be back in a mystical state of union with the clear light of my being. This is where I become a Gnostic. It is the same drive that perpetuates the artist to create, as they grasp out towards the divine, trying desperately over and over to bring back just a spark of that light..like Rumi, whirling and whirling his own broken heart back to the center...yearning for the divine is a common thread among all the mythicists and mystics that I find to have been the most honest, and authentic. It is that sense of dislocation, when one looks around at the world and intuits that there must be something more that defines the mystical idealist. This is where my own ideas diverge from those of the devout realists. I think the world really is okay enough, still, what I see around me does not always match my ideal..and so still, I yearn to be back in divine awareness. Once there, the realization is, that it always was..yet still, here I am..the divine my ideal.
Long live the unwoke.