[hackingthelema]

You don't entirely 'hang up'. You -- as Alan Watts said -- mature and deepen that communication with a different form of communication: meditation. It's like hanging up the phone and meeting with your teacher in person, not hanging up and never talking to them again.

You don't need psychoactive drugs to have deep, earth-shattering mystical experiences, and I don't understand why one would want to rely on drugs to get them.

[pmoriarty]

"You don't need psychoactive drugs to have deep, earth-shattering mystical experiences"

Maybe not.. but psychedelics seem to be the most reliable, easiest, and quickest way there.

[hackingthelema]

'Reliable and quick', in the sense that they will almost certainly have a psychoactive effect, sure, but reliable in the sense of 'I can tap into those mystical feelings any time, any where, and turn it off if I need to'? Not even a little. You are not the 'captain of the ship' during a psychedelic trip. Meditation is more reliable in those senses, but you have to learn how to do it and engage with it.

Edit: to respond to your 'easiest' edit in -- it's only easy in the sense that the barrier for entry is lower, but 'lower barrier for entry' is optimising for quantity, not quality.

[pmoriarty]

I'm not convinced that meditation can get one even remotely close to the spaces that powerful doses of psychedelics can get you to... and I'm not willing to invest 20 years of heavy meditation practice to find out.

As for "quality", who's to say? Many meditators have never been heavy psychedelic users, so if they claim that meditation can get them to the same place they don't know what they're talking about.

That's not to mention that psychedelic experiences vary widely from person to person, and often even from trip to trip taken by the same person, so it's really hard to make generalizations that apply to all people, all substances, and all circumstances.

Also, some people dismiss psychedelic experiences as illusory, which to me just signals that they have nothing interesting to contribute to the conversation. I'm interested in exploring these substances and spaces, not in trying to sweep them under the rug or wishing they would go away.

[dr_dshiv]

For me, a good mushroom trip plus a good dose of ket (about 3 hours in) will, in a reliable manner, give me a powerful and mind blowing spiritual experience.

Good luck trying to extract any words to describe it. Not that it can’t be done, but when you have a glimpse of more profound realities, who would expect it to be easy to articulate or execute upon?

But, in combination with weeks and months of effortful meditation and writing, outcomes can be had: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001