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

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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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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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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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"A soul in tension that's learning to fly
Condition grounded but determined to try
Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit"
- Pink Floyd -

Just say KNOW!

Logos

Sorry SL, I had to skip to the end because my time is very limited, but when I have more time I'll definatly read the rest of what you said.

I just wanted to add that I have felt exactly the same thing. I felt that I could control the snesation of rotation, or movement, but I honestly wondered the first time I felt it if it wasn't the movement of the earth through the heavens that I was feeling. The earth is rotating, and moving in relation to the sun, and moving in relation to the galaxy and in relation to the universe. I sometimes wonder just how fast this little blue space ship is moving through space.

Maybe that is the movement you were sensing.

I can't wait to get more in depth with this forum. So much spiritual understanding has come to me through my use of cannabis. THere are religions out there that treat it as sacrement. Mine is one of them, and it didn't come from any book, but a great number of books.

I have gotten so into spirituality in fact, that I became ordained yesterday.

I have some very interesting thoughts to share here when more time becomes available to me.

I have to wonder though that if it weren't for marijuana, would I even be interested in this subject...

What an ironic thought...

Rev. Logos

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Brother Logos
The more I learn, the less I know. | Truth doesn't change, only our perception of it does.
THC Ministry | The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ | The Reluctant Messenger of Science and Religion
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iGame3D

Cannabis produces the same exact beta wave brain patterns as meditation. Therefore according to "mr guru", meditation destroys the astral body. Right?

My advice, don't follow anyone, find your own way.

Arise -SWS-

I am also of the camp that believes that marijuana has helped their spiritual development. I frequently meditate while high, and I have developed a deeper sense of spirituality and knowledge of my true self (soul). Ironically, the spirtual beliefs I have developed while stoned are the very same ones that Buddhists developed thousands of years ago. I even experience closed-eye visuals that bear a remarkable resemblance to Buddhist symbols, art, architecture and iconography.

Seven Leafs, I feel you on the whole rotation feeling while high. I know exactly what you're talking about. In my first state of meditation, it feels like rotation, but on a deeper state, it feels like oscillations or vibrations. I also get a feeling that my physical body is being "piloted" by a force or energy coming down through the crown of my head and into my body.

After reading up on Buddhist theory I firmly believe that their appraisal of psychoactive drugs is limiting and unrightfully prohibitive to spiritual development. Because a process whether it be thought, or any other activity is changed, does not necessarily mean that it is hindered. CHANGE IS THE ONLY PERMANENT THING IN THIS UNIVERSE. Everything is in a constant state of change. Energies and objects are constantly moving and interacting, evolving with and changing with each other. If you constantly approach life from the same viewpoints, unchanging and inflexible, you always arrive in the situations. If you seek to know the unknown, as is the purpose of enlightenment, you have to throw away all the preconcieved notions and mind-sets, and become fluid in your thoughts and environments, you must change. Everyone knows that psychoactive drugs alter your thought-process, causing you to CHANGE your approach and reactions to internal and external stimuli. It is this precise reason that they are powerful aids to spiritual development, because you experience reality in an entirely different way, sometimes developing an expanded sense of reality.

I'm gonna cut it off at this point, because it will turn into a spiritual rant... My point is, drugs can be used as aids to spiritual development, and in most cases will not inhibit/damage your astral self. For those of you wondering... I believe the order goes: Astral, Spirit/Soul, Mind, Body, Aura. Correct me if I'm wrong, the astral realm is basically home to every spirit/soul.

Higher Logic

Fallacy of logic, that doesn't mean anything

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