Psychedelics and Spiritual Cultivation

 

I have often been asked whether there is any utility or value in the use of psychedelic drugs while engaging in spiritual practices, and specifically cultivation practice like that found in Yi Fa Qi Gong and other authentic Qi Gong cultivation systems.

 My answer has always been that one has to be very cautious and prudent in how to approach the question of psychedelics. And in fact, people who are already engaging in or have previously used psychedelics will probably have very little benefit, and potentially drawbacks, from any attempt to use them in the context of cultivation practice.

Not because "drugs are bad" or anything like that, but because in the context of just WHAT they're useful for in terms of spiritual development.  Psychedelic drugs need to be used ideally only at very carefully selected moments and in very specially selected contexts. The ancient shamanic cultures throughout the world understood this, as did some of the hermetics and some of the eastern sects.

The central feature of the psychedelic experience is twofold: it temporarily breaks down the ego, and it opens the doors of perception (to paraphrase Huxley).

The latter means that suddenly you're having a sensory experience different to anything you experienced before.

This is what leads to the effect of breaking down the ego: the mind's ability to lock-in to personality is based largely on imprinted behaviors from memory... what you could call "conditioning". Basically, ways you've programmed yourself, some of which is essential for daily living but a lot of which is also highly limiting, including in the spiritual context.

When you use a psychedelic for the first time, it makes your brain unable to refer back to any past experience that was sufficiently similar to allow the ego to assert itself (in the sense of "I know what's happening here, I know what to do") and so you have the potential to have an experience that can break some barriers the Ego has created that could be very hard to break otherwise. It is the inability to put what you're experiencing into some comfortable box of context that makes the experience so potentially charged with the opportunity to make serious Change.

But by the second time you use a psychedelic, you already have a context by which the brain can compare it to in memory; namely, the first time you used it! So even just the second use of a psychedelic will be, spiritually speaking, enormously less useful than the first time.

I would say that generally speaking, the real spiritual utility of psychedelics for transformation (in cultivation practice) is limited to the first two or at most three times you use a drug. Any use after that will, at best, only be useful for attaining a kind of trance state (but that can be done in a lot of ways, including meditation). It's no longer useful as an ego-overwhelming tool. It is just re-creating a former experience.

That means that if you had wasted the first time you used a psychedelic (say, at a party or something), you would wasted a big potential tool that you could never use again.

So you want to think carefully about when you use psychedelics. If you do use them, it should be at a carefully planned moment and in a carefully prepared context so as to make the best use of the power of the ego-overwhelming experience.
 

What is the Nature of the Superior Individual?

In the philosophy of the I Ching,  there is a basic truth that in every moment, we have a choice between manifesting the Superior Individual or the inferior person. 

Among those who practice cultivation, however, there may be some question as to just what the "Superior Individual" is.  In the course of cultivation, one might get a sense of the Superior Individual being some outside entity, the "higher self" sending them messages or guiding their life. 

So some have developed a conception where the Superior Individual is some kind of outside spiritual, angelic or divine entity.

But in fact, the Superior Individual is basic part of ourselves. It is not a separate being at all, it is us. The best of us. 

 This sense of differentness, of the Superior Individual seeming like another being with its own intelligence and communicating with us is a product of people's primary identification with the 'inferior person', which is also a part of us. Thus, we have become separate from the 'higher self'.

Why are we separated from our higher self?

We aren't, but it seems this way.

The issue is this: we are a species in the process of evolution. Our consciousness has multiple layers, which can be generally divided into two parts. In the context of I Ching studies (including the Yi Fa work) these are described as "World" and "Heaven". To Nietzche it was "last man" and "super-man". In others, it could be called "animal" and "divine".

 

The Chinese actually say that there are two parts to the human soul: Po and Hung. The Po is the part of us that is animal instinct plus conditioned behavior. The Hung is the part of us that is our fullest potential and true Individuality (as opposed to the 'persona' of our inferior po-soul).

We can, at every moment, choose to associate with one or the other. But on account of our intermediary condition and because of our social conditioning we tend to more directly identify ourselves as the "Inferior Person". So much so, that the Superior Individual can sometimes feel like it's a separate entity, some kind of guiding spirit.

You will find, if you engage with discipline in a sincere long-term course of spiritual cultivation, that over time, you will become more and more identified as one with the Superior Individual. At that point, the 'ideas' of the Superior Individual will be identical to your own, and the notions of the inferior person, which will still be present, will instead be the ones that appear to be foreign.