When you don’t need the experience, then you are totally free to enjoy it. As long as you think you need it, you have work to do.
Life after life: birth, death, birth, death. Each life you enter through the womb, build an ego structure that tells you you are a separate entity, and spend your life trying to gain through your own personal power the re-experiencing of that perfect harmony that you once knew before you became separate. Achievement, orgasm, adventure—all of it—designed for that moment of merging, that moment of transcendence. Trying to create through your control your own heaven on Earth with you as God. Mastery and control. Trying to optimize the strategy of your life so you gain as many of those moments that feel like how it used to be, that feel like you’re back at the source, as possible.
You’re in the middle of dinner, and you’re wondering about what you’ll have for dessert. During dessert you’re already anticipating coffee. After coffee, while you’re in the dessert, you’re not only thinking about the coffee, but what you’ll do afterwards. “And then we’ll go bowling? And then maybe a movie? How about an ice cream soda? A ride? Home. Music? Let’s make love. What’s in the refrigerator?” And on and on it goes, rush after rush. Because between every rush in which you are lost in the rush—and you have lost your self-consciousness into the experience, and you are back in the source—between every one of those rushes is that little panic of separation, and there’s the seeking of the next rush.
All forms have inherent within them suffering, because they are in time and space and they are subject to change and decay. It is just the way of things, and there is suffering.
Who you truly are is the universe. Who you think you are is far less. For the thinking mind cannot comprehend that which is beyond itself.
Around you is an ocean of opportunity to relieve the suffering of all beings.
And you realize that as long as you live in a paranoid world where you’re afraid of being caught for this or that, you’re spending so much energy keeping the world away you’re cutting yourself off from God. Because ultimately the process is to get into this flow with the universe.
This is a process of tuning yourself as a receiver to hear yourself, right? And many times you’ll hear the wrong voice, you’ll act on it wrongly, and it won’t click, and you’ll stop, and you’ll say, “I blew it again.” Because if you had it down perfectly and could hear that voice perfectly and always did the right thing, you’d be enlightened. There’d be nothing to do. So the journey to enlightenment is the journey of error, right? So don’t worry about making mistakes.
Can drugs be used as a vehicle to enlightenment? I don’t think there is much doubt about it for you and me, for many of us, that at least psychedelic chemicals—not all drugs, but psychedelic chemicals—have a capacity to cut through places where you are attached and clinging; to set them aside and show you a possibility. The problem is that they don’t allow you to become the possibility, they only show you the possibility.
Maharaj-ji, my guru, when he took LSD—he asked me for that yogi medicine I used—and he swallowed a huge amount that would have freaked anybody in this room, and nothing happened to him at all. And then he said: “Well, these are known about, these chemicals. And it will allow you come in and have a visit with Christ, but you can only stay two hours and then you’ve got to leave.” He said, “It would be better to become Christ than to visit Christ. But this medicine won’t do that for you because it’s not the true samādhi.” He said, “Love is a much stronger medicine than this, because love is that flow with the mother. That’s the thing that brings you to God.” “But,” he said, “it’s good to visit a saint. It’s nice to visit a Christ.”
Getting on with it means cleaning out the places that you have the attachments, not overriding them. And what chemicals do is they override them. They leave them there, they just push them aside for a moment. And finally you get so greedy to be done that you just start to want to deal with your shit rather than pushing it under the rug all the time. No matter how bad it smells, you just want to get on with it and deal with stuff. And at that point you start to not try to get high, but work with your lows, and then drugs lose their savor or their pull.
