Daily Theosophy

So Mustafa concluded that God, Mind and Matter were perfect, and One – and that mistakes and imperfections were unreal appearances, made up by human would-be philosophers with little intelligence.

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(the hallucinating mind)

12. The hallucinating mind

In their effort to transcend the limitations of daily consciousness, people had tried to enter other states of consciousness. Perhaps they were more true, more universal. Mustafa himself had, when he was a young student, tried hashish a few times. It had been amazing, seeing things differently while still measurably the same: deeper colors and sounds, seeing apparently recognizable figures in some unorganized lines or in irregularities in a wall, or a tree, or in a rock structure. But he soon had concluded, even these many years ago (he was about 16) that its was only another illusion, another fantasy. The hallucinary objects of perception had been creations of his own mind. It was just that some lines or clouds or haphazard structures had caught hold of the inherent property of the mind to organize perceptions into expectable and recognizable archetypes. Weirder hallucinations had been mostly form and color distortions of such archetypes. But they could be almost etheric, full of color and silence and change, and that change would sometimes seem to be independent of one’s own mind, but it was not really. It was a beginning of touching the astral world just beyond the physical, and that was convincing enough to convince the user of the existence of other realities and other fields of perception than they were used to in ‘normal’ consciousness. But in reality nothing was added; but the irreality of ‘normal’ or ‘clean’ daily consciousness would be henceforward be understood from a more relativistic point of view. Those experience with hallucinogenic substances – which, if of vegetable origin, could contain a part of the character of the soul of the plant, led most people to be less interested in outer things, like their cloths or money or diplomas. People could become so much caught up in these ‘other worlds’ that they did no longer care to study worldly wisdom of schools and universities, or behave according to the expectations of the ‘clean’ or ‘muggle’ society. In extreme cases people might get some glimpse of beings of the astral world, but usefully only of the lowest kind, very close to physical perception – not real gods. If such hallucinations would speak or ‘teach’ it was usually one’s own acquired conscience or social morality which came to the surface, but the stoned or tripping person might think it was ‘God.’ Sometimes, in the case of stronger drugs, subcutaneous fears would ‘materialize’ into a ‘truly real’ experiences, often like nightmares, while the experiencer would have forgotten that it was ‘only’ an artificially induced state and would be temporary. That would seem hell in such cases. The few experiments with hashish had given Mustafa a few minor but perhaps crucial insights – he had recognized a few structures within objects of perception he would otherwise not have recognized. He had recognized beauty and playfulness in every natural structure – which was ‘normally’ suppressed by an overdose of mental activity and preconceptions. He had also seen the opposite of beauty and playfulness in some man-made structures – especially concrete and plastic objects. He had felt great calm and happiness while stoned. He had heard of rather than experienced (because his mind went in other directions than that of most people) that sexual experiences could be most intense, colorful, delightful, because the senses of touch and smell and the feelings of the body in general became more intense. That is why some people liked to repeat it again and again, not aware that they were being deluded and even lured into a lower state of existence. The beauty could become so intense that the spirit turned away from the real spiritual values of unselfishness and compassion for others. One’s own satisfaction became the only aim. Mustafa see that happen with mainly young people around him, and some would be caught in the repetitions of artificial delight for decades in their lives, thus excluding themselves from real spirituality – which is of the heart and not of the senses – for that life and perhaps the next. Mustafa abhorred the idea and never went into such experiences.

It was only a deformation, not a transcendent reality; it had made him sleepy, and he seemed to have had to pay for his experience afterward by having a temporary loss of his mental clarity. Also he noticed that he could lose control over his mind because of malfunctioning memory power: it happened that at the end of a sentence he had no more idea of what was the beginning: three seconds was too much to recollect. He had found it amazing, but also had become very afraid that he might irreversibly damage his mental clarity and stainless memory power: a price he would have to pay the rest of his life – and that he wanted in no way. The experiences had been enough to see the relativity of conventional reality: things everyone had found ugly were suddenly most beautiful. Things that everyone found normal, suddenly became most ridiculous.

Some of his friends had continued smoking and other things and some had quit their studies (they found it useless as well as boring now). Some had taken to more dangerous drugs and had destroyed themselves. Everyone chooses his own way – no God stops you. So Mustafa had quickly abandoned smoking hashish. But many years later, looking back, he never regretted having done it though. Without it – who knows? – he might have been more ambitious, he might have taking worldly values and wisdoms more serious, more absolute, and he might have been a professor now at his university, or another high function in accepted society – the idea of which he also greatly abhorred.

He read books about other cultures than his own concerning this subject. He read about ayahuasca, psilocybine, mescaline, LSD, fly agarics, etc. and people’s experiences. He had noticed that in some traditional cultures the users of such drugs had been highly esteemed. These had all been shamanic cultures. The shamans had been able to contact ‘spirits’ to get information about how to heal people, they had learned some things about the so-called astral realm, even to the border of death. They could have a deep understanding of the spirits of nature, characters of trees and plants, and thus gained a certain wisdom. Some had combined the taking of drugs, like the soma drink in the aftermath of a great culture, with elaborate rituals and prayers to the higher gods they believed in. The results had been wonderful, and even positively supportive for these cultures. Values thus gained have survived millennia. Drugs had been a means to communicate with gods in these days, but no longer in our time. Modern experiments with drugs seemed to Mustafa to be partly a grasping back to an old cultural memory, an old connection – though it had been rather new to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when intercultural contacts with even remotest tribes became easy through the then developing means of communication. Mostly young people and artists had experimented a few years, sometimes decades, with hallucinogenic drugs, and then abandoned it. It had its use. It was a counterweight against relentless, nature alienated intellectualism. It had shown the relativity of a techno-society as not being essential to real human development. Who knows what would have happened to society without it? After the twentieth century the use of most drugs declined. No real god would advice such means, nor any other ways to hint to or to contact the astral world, and they would even less advice to seek contact with the world of passed away humans – as was quite popular for some time mainly in the nineteenth century. Perhaps ancient magical spirits were involved in these impulses to modern societies. But the effects in our times were psychological, not spiritual. Sometimes drugs would induce some answers and destroy some illusions, to mental breakthroughs even, or lead to some recognitions of invisible life in nature – useful (and risky) in themselves sometimes, but not providing the real answers somebody like Mustafa yearns for. ‘These things seem not to belong to our present society, nor deliver the expected and hoped for wisdom.’ This is all that Mustafa thought about it, and he left the subject.

‘Is what we see and hear ‘normally’ around us really normal? Was it closer to ultimate divine reality than hallucinations? Or is the whole world just one grand hallucination? Or is the modern ‘hallucination’ of clean intellectualism just as unreal and dangerous, besides in a way helpful, as the hallucinations of the ancient shamans?’

13. The subconscious mind

Mustafa had always wanted to keep everything under control. He had always thought that his excellent mind would lead him to understanding of all that could be understood.