Marijuana.com

Bongzilla

... Is your friend a Buddhist monk?

In the Buddhist scriptures, intoxicants are a strict no-no. Here is a little story which made me 'Just Say No' to alcohol (I wasn't responsible with it last year, so...):

A Tibetan monk was travelling and needed a place to spend the night. He came across a home owned by a women. She said that she would let him stay, but only if he did one of three things: Kill a goat, have sex with her, or drink alcohol.

He thought about each one. Killing a goat was out of the question, and when he joined his monastery he had sworn to abstinence. He decided that the best of the three choices to drink - because he wouldn't hurt anyone.

He drank a lot that night and became very intoxicated. The goats constant bleating made him angry so he killed it. When he woke up in the morning, he was in the same bed as the women.

However, whether or not intoxicants includes drugs is personal interpretation. I personally believe that if you have to ponder something such as 'Will taking Marijuana as a Buddhist be wrong?' so much, that you are only trying to trick yourself: we all know what is right inside.

Your friend doesn't seem to have thought about it that much. If he is a Buddhist monk, he will know that like all decisions in life, Buddhism even states that you should not just jump into being a Buddhist and not question it. He should do the same with drugs, how else will he be enlightened?

I suggest he (and everyone else for that matter) take a gander at this article, which pertains to 'Are Psychadelics Useful in Practicing Buddhism?'.

http://pears2.lib.ohio-state.edu/FUL...ADM/stolar.htm

 

TheCleric

Hehe tell him i challenge him to a game of astral ultimate frisbee and we can see who's astral body is in tact and whos isnt. If anything the high that marijuana has would increase ones ability to gain control over their astral body, because it is an easier goal once your mind is altered to a certain degree, get what im saying?

Last time i took a stroll in my mind, i came back fine, and my astral body isnt damaged one bit.

Ahh well to each his/her own.

Cleric

Nasarius

ROFL! This is a joke, right? It's absolutely ludicrous to invent a "spiritual self" to explain away the complexities of the way our brains work.

Shaba Zero

Agreed.

My thoughts don't seem out of control while high, it's more as if the links connecting habitual thoughts break down. For instance, instead of leaping from worry about my car getting stolen to that time that I think my sister's friends broke into my car and stole my stereo to that jerk that parks next to me in the apartment complex to how silly people are with their lowered cars (like that jerk). I might get high and worry about my car getting stolen might leap immediately to "I would like a bath." The chain has broken.

It's not that my thought process has broken down, it's more as if our common thoughts are like a well-traveled trail, as we continue over the same line of logic again and again, the trail gets worn into the dirt by the thousands of passing feet. Eventually, you never leave the trail. It's habitual.

Smoking MJ is my catalyst for recognizing the futility in always following trails.

My thought process is just fine, I just suddenly went from an automatic transmission to a manual. Sure, an automatic transmission is easy to drive and goes from gear 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and back down, sequentially, but if you're zipping down a windy coastal road with the top down, I bet you'd want a stick shift.

MJ is my stick shift. And I don't find it incompatible with Buddhism at all as long as the smoking is kept within reason.

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"My ignorance pains me."

Bongwater19

marijuana doesn't destroy the "astral body". it causes slightly altered state of perception, it temporarily interferes with portions of the physical brain responsible for subconscious behaviour allowing your true self to be identified more easily.

i put up a post in this section called "the mental world, the brain, and spirituality. you'll like this". i think it explains the whole thing more clearly and sheds light on drugs and the world.

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remember team, surrender the mead for the weed!

 

Debaser

No offense, but your friend sounds like a New Age prohibitionist. As far as my personal experience goes, I was spiritually devoid before I started smoking marijuana. Smoking has opened me up to so much more, and now I am at peace with my inner self, that doesn't seem very destructive to me. If anything, smoking has made me MORE aware of my astral self.

-Debaser

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Real eyes realize real lies.

suede

I was also DeVoid of "spiritual-ality"before I started toking.That is to say,the reality I've come to know sinceb.s.

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End World Hunger

SmokeyDaBear

Here, he just sent me this excerpt:

"Drugs, similarly, affect the psyche of the individual - not only do they ruin physical health, they also reverse1 the individual’s process of universal evolution. At the same time as they induce states of euphoria or artificial paradise, they are also directly attacking the Astral body. I will elaborate on this, for it is of great importance.
The Astral body can only be harmed by two things: drugs and the vibrations occasioned by certain kinds of noise. Considering only drugs, it must be understood that they have an influence that is totally against Nature. They ‘remove’ the Astral body to another sphere where it should not be. The Astral body should be either in a physical body or with its Higher Self, of which it is a part. When drugged, an individual’s Astral body is as though ‘asleep’ experiencing artificial sensations that completely distort his or her judgement. It is in the same situation as a physical body is during an important surgical operation. If you like, it’s like a tool that we bend or break by using it incorrectly or for a task for which it was not intended. According to the length of time that a person is under the influence of drugs, his or her Astral body is going to decline or, more exactly, it is going to become saturated with false data. ‘Recovery’ for the Astral body can take several lifetimes: for this reason, drugs should be avoided at all costs."

cwallis88

I am a very religious and spiritual person. I can honestly say marijuana really opens my mind and enriches my life and marijuana DOSNT make everyone lazy and lsoe inhibitians or however you spell it. I get VERY motivated when i get high. My mind gets very motivated. I also believe the times when I was younger and would eat acid and shrooms opened my mind and was definately a life altering experience. and as guy said in one post the marijuana helped him find his true self. I agree.

SevenLeafs

Crap! I had a whole thing written... hit the back button... puff!

Bear with me, I'll try to explain everything again...

I can relate to what Smokey tells us in this thread, but I have a somewhat opposite view about it. I do not think mary destroys the astral, or true, self, but I don't think that it enhances it either.

For me, marijuana just gets you into a state of great perception, making you "feel", or get in touch, to some degree, with your being's different "levels", as Smokey describes in the chart. I first began noticing that I had a true self when I began smoking marijuana, I could feel things that I hadn't felt before and I was certainly aware that there was something just out of my reach, which still is. I can't quite explain it, but I guess that it would fall into that astral/true self category.

I really understand where Smokey's friend is coming from with the "loss of thought control" explanation, but I don't think that many of you here quite understand what he (she?) is trying to say. I do believe that a certain "change" occurs in thought when one is under the influence of mary, and, in my opinion, it can get to that loss of control. Let me explain myself.

I'm sure many of you experience the "thought rush", as I like to call it, when using marijuana, that great flow of ideas, or thoughts, that simply burst into your head. Be them new ideas, getting creative, creating impressive theories about almost anything, or as Shaba Zero puts it, developing a great afinity for association, getting from thinking about the color of your car to how you first went to school. The ideas just simply seem to flow through your head, and as our friend Smokey wrote, the true self "state" comes before the thought state, and is achieved, or you get close to it, by meditation, by clearing your mind of any thought.

So, when you have that "thought rush", you are in loss of control, and you would not achieve the true self state. This, at least to me, makes a lot of sense, but lets get to what I believe.

As I said before, marijuana kind of "helped" me become aware of these "states of mind", but it also made me think (thought) about lots of things. I came to realize one thing, there are certain levels, or categories, of thought (remember, this is all my opinion, as someone said in another post, I cannot prove any of this).

We learn to think in words after we learn the words, so we find ourselves constantly kind of "talking" to ourselves in our minds. We don't actually go into a dialogue with ourselves, we simply formulate our thoughts in words, and to me, this is the lowest kind of thought. The other, higher kind, is when you simply think, which can be sometimes viewed as reaction. (bear with me, this may get long)

When you react, you simply, well, react. You make a movement in a split second without actually "thinking" about it, but the thing is that you do think about it. You have moved in that way before, and you don't need much processing to perform the movement again, but thought is involved. The same applies sometimes when you use your intuition.

When intuition takes place, you just know things without processing much information, at least consciously or, like I said before, actually thinking about it; "hmm... this seems weird, maybe there's somehting wrong going on here, I think this guy is lying to me!". You just know the guys lying to you, get my point? (I hope so).

This is the "destruction" that Smokey's friend was commenting about, I think. When you use marijuana, you get all these ideas and you get really focused and introspective about them, at least sometimes, or most of the times for some people. You start to really think about the ideas you have, you question them, you analyze them, you associate them, etc., etc., and most of this is done by "talking" about them, be it to yourself in your mind ("wow, so if I get this piece of wood, and tape it to this side of the ... then I can make a lever that will lift this thing up ..."), or with friends (A: "hey dood, did you know that this and that?" B: "no way man!? what if you got to making this and that, and then this and that, blah blah" etc...). This way, you get stuck in the "thought" level and never reach that true/astral self.

But in my case, I have achieved thinking about things without putting the ideas into words, at least most of the ideas (note: this is sometimes troublesome for me, because I like to write, and when I have this great idea, I can't really express it exactly in words, it's frustrating). To portray an example, I smoke some weed and sit down in front of the TV and watch some great movie, like "Born The Fourth Of July", for example (movie which I love), and analyze the crap out of it, but I kind of "feel" the ideas instead of thinking about them. If I were to put the ideas into words, then my thoughts would diminish dramatically, mostly because putting ideas into words takes much energy, you need to process your ideas extensively, moreso if the idea is really deep, to express them in any form of language (this is another subject, but I think that language, written or spoken, really impairs the mind).

I'm beginning to see that this is getting a little long, so I will cut it short and wait for comments before continuing, so, to finish, I would like to get to my meditation experiences.

After realizing all that I have expressed here, I began to meditate, to see if I can control my thoughts and canalize them in some way. I love the Tao, and have practice meditation, so I decided to try meditating while under mary's influence.

I had an amazing feeling the times I did this, it was somewhat disorienting, but the sensation was extreme. The way I know how to meditate, you do not close your eyes, as most people would think you should do, you just stare forward, let's say like 2 meters (about 6 feet) in front of where your legs are, but you don't focus on anything. You relax totaly and you put your mind in blank, concentrating only on your breath and the flow of energy through your body.

I started doing this, and it resulted real easy, but then, because I felt like it, I closed my eyes, so I was in complete darkness. I immediately began to feel my body kind of swaying adn I felt a little as if the room was beginning to spin, slowly. Then I began to feel it more and more, and then I felt like if my mind was under some intense inertia (yes, the force), almost the same feeling you have when you start spinning your arm straight in circles, this is the extreme sensation I was talking about before.

I openned my eyes immediately, because I couldn't handle it, but as I expected, I hadn't moved an inch. I was still in the same position, sitting there, with my legs crossed, my body completely relaxed.

What I felt was like many different forces pushing and pulling me, tearing into me. It was really weird...

I haven't experienced this just one time, I have done it about 4 times, because I really want to controll it, and until now I hadn't really understood it, but after I read Smokey's post I guess I can realte it to that "astral self", becaue it really is an intense sensation.

Thanks for reading... thoughts?

Peace.7L

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Condition grounded but determined to try
Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit"
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