Follow your inner guru?
At their best, meditation and psychedelics help you discover the universe by washing out the guff from your mind and senses. Once the barriers come down, you can see and appreciate what’s been there all along.
Forty years ago, I assumed that this experience was an end in itself. Now I understand that everything depends on what you do with it.
For example, when I was a student at Maharishi University, I spent years meditating my buns off. So did hundreds of others, many of whom had vivid experiences of enlightenment. But what did they do with it? Mainly what Maharishi told them to do, which boiled down to fundraising and real estate speculation.
That’s one of the hazards of the path. Gurus like Maharishi and L. Ron Hubbard know that their followers are in a delicate stage of transition. They’re happy to step in and fill the void with their own agendas.
I recently had a conversation on this subject with a friend who is familiar with the worlds of meditation, gurus, and psychedelics. It went like this:
Me: “The advantage of psychedelics is that there isn’t any guru.”
My friend: “No, the advantage of psychedelics is that you are your own guru.”
At the end of this conversation, I felt like we’d scored a decisive victory for psychedelics. Follow your inner guru!
Now I’m not so sure if that’s a good idea. I think we missed the elephant in the room:
Your inner guru may not be any more trustworthy than L. Ron Hubbard.
Posted in: Reason and Magic
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+So Geoff, now, given the changes you’ve made in the last 40 years, what do you see yourself doing with enlightenment? What with unintended consequences, it seems that one course is often no better than another.
I think the first thing to do with enlightenment, especially your own, is to be suspicious. “A person who claims to be enlightened probably isn’t.”
Aside from that, I feel a little uncomfortable offering opinions. I’ve had glimpses of something I might call enlightenment, but I’m still not sure it’s a useful concept.
As for unintended consequences, a Buddhist might say that a person in the state of enlightenment isn’t generating consequences. Is it even meaningful to talk that way? I don’t know. The one time I felt like I understood that concept was in the post-Daime empty state when I was perfectly content to sit and look at flowers. I was suddenly aware that I was producing little if any karma. Of course, the same would be true any time anybody sits and looks at flowers. They say that people who become enlightened realize how mundane it is.
I always figured that my grandfather was enlightened. He spent a lot of time working on his compost pile.
Chop wood, carry water?