Greg Z:
It seems to me that under the right circumstances, certain substances really can be a path to insight. Of course, I know this is a longstanding debate. What do people think?
Hi,
Psychotropic substances such as THC, Psilocybin, and LSD (to name a few) can produce interesting shifts in one's perception by altering the brain's biochemical composition. Because these alter the brain's function itself, psychotropic substances can produce a wide variety (no effect to startling effects) of changes (some long term, some short term) to the various faculties of the mind, which can roughly broken down into: the intellect, the affective, and sense perception.
Each "trip" will generally alter one or more of these three at any given time during the duration of the chemical's effective duration. There may be a session where the affective faculties (imagination, intuition, emotion, etc) are highly influenced and thus typically fit the description of many "spiritual" insights. Spiritual insights are very similar to these (or are the same), because spiritual insight is also highly affective in nature; dealing with one's "soul," or "psyche," (imagination, intuition, emotion, etc). Some sessions may yield changes which bring one's focus to the senses, allowing the affective faculties to recede into the background, which also can bring about experiences that show one something new about the world. Some sessions may be intellectual in nature, where one is focused on thinking about something in a rational way that may also ignore one's otherwise self-interested line of thought (the ignorance of self interest is often a byproduct of these substances). In these instances, a person could simply solve a "mundane" problem, or it could lead to breakthroughs in other areas of one's consciousness. Often, all three of these are happening at various times during one's intoxication, or even at the same time.
Which faculty is influenced is often highly subject to the user's current preoccupations, recent influences, emotional moods, and general intentions. So if a person has been reading about Buddhism and contemplating their life decides to partake in a mind-altering drug, they might wind up experiencing something they decide fits the descriptions of what they were reading, and hey bingo, another spiritual seeker is born. This creates a general fallacy: that of incorrect interpretation due to lacking informational resources. In other words, if you only know of one explanation for what you've experienced, you'll likely use that as the explanation for your experience, because you have no other way of representing it. And from there, the first interpretation serves as an anchor for the rest of one's pursuits regardless of the validity of the initial interpretation. (This is, essentially, what has allowed ridiculous mystical interpretations of certain experiential-events to have been passed down for thousands of years without much question).
Thus, a drug trip experience may not be spiritual insight (though it might fall into the "spiritual" classification, depending on the event), but might seem to be that way because it's the only description a person has found that sounds similar to their experience. (Note that non-spiritual descriptions of other-wise spiritually labeled experiences are extremely rare, meaning this error probably happens a great deal). Also bare in mind that many spiritual insights, even if correctly "diagnosed," may also be load of crapola in terms of practical wisdom into matters concerning one's own life. Quite a predicament, eh?
Notice that I am not drawing a hard line / demonstrating a strict stance on this topic, but instead I am saying that interpretation in general is severely erroneous. And so, the entire topic ("... certain substances really can be a path to insight") becomes null since the premise of "what is and is not insight" is not clearly defined (nor can it be defined strictly enough, given the context, to serve as a premise for such a discussion). The practical importance of this is to say that one would likely find it beneficial not to worry about "getting some insights" (whatever those may be)-- drug induced or sober-- but perhaps should instead focus on what will lead one to experiencing a happy and harmless life, regardless of what everyone else is squawking about.
With that said, some specific knowledge-- some of which is often labeled as being "spiritual"-- can be very useful in this endeavor of being happy and harmless, and sometimes arriving at these realizations (and thus also the knowledge derived from the realizations) can be aided by a direct chemical alteration of the mind via a psychotropic substance. That is to say, quite simply, that the chemical alteration allows (or supplements the ability for) a person to temporarily experience a new perspective, which can help them to figure out something potentially useful, which can then carry over to (or fundamentally alter) their sober life.
Regards,
Trent