There is talk in the spiritual community of pharmacological shortcuts to Awakening. In a few cases, this has even been encouraged by self-proclaimed Awakened teachers. Seekers are being encouraged to consider Iowaska, LSD, or psychedelic mushrooms as a way to experience finer states of reality as a technique to speed their progress on the path to Freedom. Even a cursory look at this reasoning reveals the gaping flaws.
Awakening is recognition as that which is timeless. Drugs provide time-bound experiences.
Awakening is recognition as the unchanging. Drugs provide transient experiences of that which is always changing.
Awakening is waking up from the individual. Drugs provide experiences bound by the individual experiencer.
Drugs provide a sensory experience. Every sensory experience is an interpretation of reality. The experience may be substantially different from one’s daily interpretation of reality, but in the end, it is still just another mind-based interpretation of a sensory experience.
Awakening is the recognition of Consciousness as Consciousness. Awakening is not an interpretation of an external reality, because to Consciousness, there is nothing external.
In the end, what can be shorter than “Be still.”
The purpose of this is not to make a moral judgement on those seeking altered states of consciousness pharmacologically, only to point out it is not a viable shortcut to Awakening. We are sympathetic to the transient condition that can make us feel trapped in an identified story of Life, desperate to try anything to be in a state of Awakening. But as long as there is a someone looking for a state, it will not happen by any means.
Awakening is not a state of consciousness, it is Consciousness.
Namaste, Bec and Steve