 Originally Posted by Woodstock
What makes psychedelics cause spiritual experiences, enlightenment, ego death, etc? What about meditation?
There are a few reasons.
1) synesthesia. That is when one sense appaers to be precieved using another sense. The classic example is seeing sound. Now think about the lesson where you sit and listen for sounds that your brain had been filtering out. We erase input that does not seem relevent, and there are 'spiritual senses' that most have decided are not relevent, so they get treated like so much back ground noise. Drugs like LSD can cause any input to become amplified and experienced regardless of what the brains normal function would be. In this case awareness that had been discarded and trained to stay quite can be experienced. The drug allows a fresh look at some of the things you have never noticed, including your connection to a spiritual world. It is of course going to be a confused version of these senses, but allows someone set in thier ways to experinece new feelings.
2) Euphoria. Often the spiritual feelings induced by chemicals are just a release of neurotransmitters that cause your emotions to become exaggerated and you can experience 'over whelming bliss.' This is not truely all that spiritual, but when someone feels more alive than ever before and experiences overwhelming positive sensations and emotions, it can cause a 'spiritual experience.'
3) Most people go about thier lives only slightly aware. It often happens that a drug like LSD can bring them to truely take in the awesome amazingness of, say, a pencil (lol). the world is a verry amazing and intense place, but most are stumbling around on auto-pilot. The drug can force them to truely notice just how intense life and things are. Often someone who takes LSD stares into the sky and notice the sky for the first time.
There are probably more reasons, but those 3 are deffinately part of it.
On meditation. One thing is it allows people to sit quitely and not worry about the stress of life. It can also lead to a deeper insight into our on thinking process and emotional process. People can learn to generate strong positive emotional feelings, so it can be pleasent and create feelings of well-being.
On a more intense level meditation is the root of many mystical practices. It is through learning meditation that many branch out into other spiritual things, such as being able to feel and manipulate subtle energies like kundalini.
|
|
Bookmarks