Ikkyu wrote: Ogyen wrote:"What do you want? To grow down into truth and clear yourSelf of all grasping and be a non-returner (and yes, you probably need as much time as life will give you for this) or to duck your head in the sand for the sake of your notions and desires to smoke a lil this and do a lil that? Like I said, ultimately, there is no one looking over your shoulder, no judge, no jury, just your choices and the consequences in your karma of how you invested cultivating your mind (and towards what)."
... Who is to say that entheogens don't accelerate the process of "clearing one's Self"? Ego death is a very common effect of psychotropic rituals, especially for the shamans of Peru, for instance.
My belief is that, despite my Buddhist leaning, the Dharma is not the ONLY way. (This would be exclusivistic.) It is simply one way, one path, and a very good one at that. However we know of people who have become enlightened spontaneously. While meditation and Dharma practice cultivate a mind more susceptible to enlightenment, we cannot exclude examples of individuals who achieved it when, for instance, simply washing the dishes (as a Zen priest once pointed out to me), or Pratekyabuddhas.
Nor did I ever mention Dharma was the 'only way' either. Who is to say indeed entheogens don't accelerate the process of "clearing one's Self" - but unless you have proof of what the effects of entheogens are on the Self, or even what the Self is, OR a cultural context within which to believe that method and process of clearing it, who's to say Santa Clause won't just give me full Buddhahood for Christmas? It's about the same magical thinking and holds about just as much water, as far as reasoning goes. Which is why I stressed practicality. We make a lot of decisions on half-informed opinions and a lot of desires to believe something specifically. What's your brand of ego?
And for that matter - What IS the ego? Is it a thing? Is it a process? Where in the mind does it reside? And is its death your goal? Note, I never used that phrase or inferred the death of anything. I simply said clear yourSelf of grasping. In whatever form, Buddhist or not, we have to reduce our self-importance in some way to become 'bigger' human beings - historically, this is the archetypal Hero's Journey. Death of the Ego might be the death of You, maybe it's something to strive for, maybe it's totally wrong... And when I see people pulling other cultural practices out of context in relation to substance utilization, my question is usually why does what Peruvian shamans practice matter to you? Are you following THAT path? Are you culturally tied into the Peruvian creeds, beliefs, and entire context that composes those rites of passage? If the answer is no, and that you have no connection to that 'lineage' of practices, then the usage of other cultural contexts is paramount to spiritual materialism practiced by Westerners who like to pick and choose and adopt a mix of this and hodgepodge of that, but end up really really confused. Which is why, I again stressed practicality, not morality.
Where are YOU from, where do YOU come from, what is your cultural matrix? Those are more important questions to ask yourself. How do you become a better whatever you are already? That is the key to growing down into your own reality, Buddhist or not. I think it's important to stay within the parameters of that which most speaks to you, and to know WHY it speaks to you.
I am by all definitions a Buddhist, and I'm not "narrow" on the dharma, not on method, not on lineage, not on manifestation. Truth comes in many many forms. I've lived all over the world, grew up as a 'third culture kid' (and fourth and fifth), I grew up in the east and the west, in the diverse cultural contexts with many languages to speak the same truths. The diversity of methods in the world is extremely wide and varied. The questions I pose are not to make you uncomfortable, simply to perhaps look at underlying assumptions they pivot on that you might be taking for granted. I see grasping for a specific ideal, that of the drunken monk Ikkyu, but what was HIS cultural context and what do you share with it? Important questions, we can't take people's methods out of the contexts of their lives as a whole.
You
could tweak yourself out into awakening like a Peruvian Shaman, or you could screw yourself up completely into this life beyond the point of being able to cognitively come back, who's to say, I'm certainly not going to go there, I don't know. That's neither here nor there. The point is, the real question is
where and in what do you take refuge as the method that will get you from suffering to happiness? Buddhists use the dharma. Others
-ists and
-ians use other methods. Many paths, many answers, one goal: Happiness and freedom from suffering. Practically speaking, brain cells might help the journey move along a bit quicker... but that might be my own experiential bias speaking.. most cultures advocate health of mind and spirit, and all substances are always within a cultural context of ritual that is key to their passages from one state into another...
Westerners have only the pursuits of pleasure or self-destructiveness as their context for drugs. The primal rites of passage have been long lost, and to take them out of context is plain dangerous. I could just as soon pick up Amazonian cannibal rites of passage to support some desire to try to eat human flesh telling myself there's a notion that I would gain better insight into primeval rites of passage and how to transcend my own ego (which many cannibalistic cultures used flesh-eating to do)... BUT as the saying goes lipstick on a pig still is just lipstick on a pig. I would be no more an Amazonian cannibal or have insights into that way of life than the Pope sitting in the Vatican. I'd just be a really ignorant human trying to find something to substantiate and justify my own ill-conceived desires.
NOTE: I have no cannibal interest whatsoever, that's just an EXTREME example of adopting some primal ancient practice from a far off culture remote from my own to justify how maybe doing something might give me better insight into myself. A dangerous line of thought, something too many 1st worlders are good at taking too far because of their own cultural matrix of consumerism...
a very good dharma friend told me when i asked him, what if I know eating the piece of chocolate may not be the best thing for me, but I want to anyway? His answer was, "Do it and watch yourself doing it." A profound lesson.
If you use substances, simply be present with yourself when you make your choices. That is all. Don't use or draw upon anything outside yourself to justify, validate, that is just grasping. The urge comes from within, the answer to transcending its impulse also comes from within - the discipline emerges from within. The path is noticing it and being there when it happens within. Just pay attention, and your questions on this will be answered by the most important authority on the matter - you.
Feel free to disagree.
Then you come up with some piss weak comments on ethnogens and Peruvian shaman and ego death, etc... Are you a practicing Peruvian shaman? Do you want to pracitce Peruvian shamanism? Do you want to practice Zen? It's not that one is good and the other is bad, but it's like pressing the brake and the accelerator at the same time. It just doesn't work. So make a choice.
) and transparent attempt attempt to justify using alcohol and drugs recreationally based on the fact that Peruvian shaman use specific drugs in religious ritual contexts.