LSD: A shortcut to false samadhi

Question 1:

Your experiences were not genuine. They were not in samadhi, they were just chemical changes.

The mind can project anything it wants to project - even an unconscious desire for samadhi. Then, whatever you have known or read about samadhi will be projected through the chemical help of LSD.

LSD or any other chemical drug is nothing but a help in making the mind more projective. All the hindrances, all the ordinary hindrances, are withdrawn. Reason is withdrawn, the conscious mind is withdrawn; you are completely in the grip of the unconscious. But by itself the unconscious will not bring you to samadhi through the use of LSD; an experience like this is only possible if the unconscious has been fed certain preconceptions: colors, particular experiences, this and that.

Everything in the unconscious can be projected, but if you have not known anything about kundalini or samadhi beforehand it is impossible to feel them through LSD.

A person who is suffering from a phobia will project his phobia; a person who has suppressed his fear about something will feel that the very thing he is afraid of is taking place. So LSD will bring different experiences to different people. It can only help you to project what is already inside your unconscious mind in seed form. If it is love, then love will be projected; if it is hatred, then hatred will be projected. LSD is a mind-expanding drug - whatever is inside you in seed form will be expanded into a tree.

You could feel kundalini, you could feel chakras, you could feel a harmony or oneness with the totality, only because these seeds were already in your unconscious mind. If they had not been there then LSD would not have projected these things.

This is not a genuine experience of samadhi. This samadhi comes from your unconscious longing.

LSD can help anything that is unconscious to be realized physically. So what you have experienced is something that you wanted to realize projected on the psychic canvas. It is not a spiritual revelation, it is not samadhi, it is not genuine. It is nothing but a dream; it is just a dreaming phenomenon.

You dream in the night because the barriers of the conscious mind are withdrawn. Whatever is suppressed in your mind, desired, longed for, begins to take shape and form; you begin to imagine it. But while you are dreaming you never know that it is a dream. It is so lifelike, it is so authentically real that you can never conceive that it is only a dream.

LSD is a chemical way of dreaming; it is not a natural way. Through LSD you can see things that you have not known, realize things that you have never realized. But all these realizations are only apparent realizations; they are not real. They are beautiful, they have their own charm, just like a nice dream.

But LSD can project a nightmare also. It depends on you, not the LSD. If your mind is tortured, fragmented, and many untoward images are suppressed in it, that is what will be projected. There are persons who have seen hell on an LSD trip, there are persons who have seen demons. It depends on the person. All that a chemical drug can do is to project whatever is there to be projected.

Do not mistake your experiences on LSD for samadhi. And do not cling to such experiences or they will be an obstacle to meditation. You have felt so much through LSD dreams that when you enter into a real state of meditation it will seem faint in comparison. The experience of meditation is not so vital, you will not feel such a great upsurge of energy. This will then create a mood of depression because you will feel that something is being lost - that you have known something and this something is not coming to you through meditation. Then the mind will say, "LSD is better." And if you go on taking LSD, your mind will become less and less meditative, and meditation and its experiences will go on becoming fainter and fainter.

So don't take LSD again. It may have been just an experiment, but it has made an impact on your mind. That impact is dangerous because you will always be comparing: real meditation will seem unreal to you because the unreal has appeared to you as authentic.

Then, too, your comparison can never be accurate, because you cannot remember exactly what you have seen on your LSD trip once you are out of it just as you cannot remember a dream exactly, once you have awakened. Now you imagine the dream again - you add much to it. In the same way, when you are no longer under the influence of the LSD, you cannot remember it exactly as it was; there will only be a faint feeling of blissfulness. Now you will imagine the whole experience again, but this will not be exactly the experience that you had. It can never be. You have a feeling that you have seen something, that you have known something. That feeling is illusory.

A certain blissfulness can be revealed to you through the use of a chemical drug. Because of the drug you are totally relaxed; your tensions, at that moment, are withdrawn. It is not that they no longer exist - they are waiting to come back to you - but they are not in focus, so you relax totally.

The revelation of bliss which comes when you are absolutely non-tense is so great that you will continue to experience a blissful feeling afterward as a hangover. In this bliss, you will imagine again what you have seen, what you have known, but now ninety percent of it will be imagination.

The greater the distance between the experience and the memory, the more beautiful, the more blissful it will look to you. It will become a cherished remembrance. Now each time you meditate it will be a faint thing in comparison because meditation is real, it is not a dream. Its progress is step by step, it is not so sudden. It will never overtake you. In between, you will be comparing so the progress will be very slow.

Time exists in the real world, but in LSD experiences or in ordinary dreams time does not exist as it does in our waking hours. In a single moment you can dream a dream that would take many years to happen in reality. And it happens so suddenly that it overwhelms you; it shatters your total memory.

For a moment, all tensions are nonexistent. You are relaxed and a cosmic harmony is felt. Barriers are not there: you don't exist as an "I"; you and the world have become one. This is so sudden and blissful that each time you compare the cherished memory of it with reality you will go on adding to it. The memory will become more and more beautiful and the reality will become fainter.

Don't compare meditation to what happens on LSD. First of all, you cannot compare it because they are two different states of mind and the faint remembrance of one state cannot be brought to another.

Secondly, when you compare what has happened retrospectively, it is the same unconscious mind which has projected these experiences that is doing the comparing. You are the one who has taken LSD and you are the one who is meditating: in either case the same unconscious seeds are there.

Another thing to be remembered is, don't have any preformulated, readymade concepts about meditation and don't think about what the result of it is to be. To go into meditation is to go into an uncharted sea: you cannot know beforehand what is going to happen. If you already know what is going to happen it will begin to happen, but it will just be a projection. You can project in LSD and you can project in meditation because the unconscious itself is the projector.

All your knowledge about kundalini, all your knowledge about chakras, all the knowledge that you have of knowing must be thrown out because, even without the help of chemicals, your ordinary mind can project these things. When you are meditating you can project the same thing that you can project with LSD. The process will be slower because there is no chemical help, but the phenomenon is the same.

I am not saying that there is no such thing as kundalini or chakras. I am not saying that no experiences happen; there are experiences but you must not know about them beforehand, otherwise you will project them. You must be completely unknowing, you must be ignorant: that is the basic condition to proceed further. Each thing must be known and experienced directly; it must not be taken for granted. Information should not be confused with knowledge.

So throw away all information. Cease to know things and proceed as if in a vacuum, proceed in ignorance. You don't know, so everything will be a surprise. Everything must be a surprise. If it is not a surprise, if you say, "Yes, I have known this before, it has happened before," then you have not moved into the unknown, you have not moved into meditation.

There is a great possibility of self-delusion. The mind is deceptive and the unconscious goes on playing tricks. And the deception is possible not only on LSD but even in ordinary meditation, because the unconscious mind is the same. If you want to move into meditation, you must change the unconscious. It must become vacant; it must not be a "knowing" unconscious. It must be open, vulnerable, ready to face the unknown, because meditation means going into the unknown.

Before meditation can happen you need first to go through a purging, a cleansing: you need to be completely overhauled. The unconscious must not be burdened, it must not have seeds. Sabeej samadhi is samadhi with seed. Samadhi with seed means a samadhi with all your projections. It is not samadhi at all; it is just a name.

There is another term: Nirbeej samadhi, samadhi which is seedless. Only a seedless samadhi is authentic because there is nothing being projected. You are not projecting; something has come to you, you have encountered something. You come to know something completely new, completely fresh, absolutely unknown before. It is not even imagined, because whatever you can imagine you can project.

Knowledge is a hindrance to samadhi, so a person who "knows" can never reach samadhi. You must not go into meditation burdened with knowledge. You can reach the door of samadhi only if you are completely emptyhanded, naked, vacant. Only then does the authentic thing happen; otherwise, you will be meditating with all your projections.

You have been projecting in meditation and you have been projecting in your LSD experiences; both are projections. You must unburden yourself. Understand that; forget all that you have known; don't conceive of samadhi in any way whatsoever. Don't have any preconceptions, don't conceptualize.

Just move innocently, like a child, into an unknown country where the language is not known, where you are not acquainted with anything, where everything is new, and you have no guidebook with you. Only in this way will things begin to happen that are authentic.

Otherwise it will take a long time before something authentic happens to you in meditation. You will bypass the reality completely and the projections will continue. Then LSD will be more forceful, more vital, and meditation will be faint in comparison. But if you unburden yourself of your knowledge, if you forget these names - kundalini, chakras, everything - if you put it all aside and proceed just like a child, then meditation will happen. Otherwise meditation, too, will be imaginary, a dream.

The difference is very subtle. It is difficult to know what the difference is, but there is a difference.

One thing about it can be understood: if things are happening according to your knowledge, according to what you think should be happening, then you must not take them seriously. They can never happen according to your knowledge. They happen to each individual so differently that no scripture, no guru, can say exactly what will happen. Everything that has been said is just a generalization; it happens to no one in exactly the same way. The experience of the seven chakras or the passage of kundalini is so different for each individual that if things are happening according to a pattern you must not take them seriously; you are imagining them. Things will be different for you; they will never be the same as with anyone else. The happening is individual and there are no generalizations.

Everybody's experiences are different, incomparable. Everything said about these things is a generalization. Generalizations never happen. For example, there are twenty people here. We can calculate the average age of everyone here, but no one may be exactly that age. The average is a myth; it is a generalization. We can determine the average height of everyone here, but no one will correspond to it exactly. We can calculate the average knowledge, but no one may possess it.

All generalizations are myths. They help to formulate things, but they don't help to lead you to the reality of life itself. They help you to make systems, they help you to make scriptures, they help you to make maps, but you should never confuse the map with the country itself. You may have seen a map of India, but nowhere in India will you find what you have seen on the map. When you enter India you will never encounter the map; it is just a generalization. It helps you to formulate an idea of India, but it never helps you to experience the country itself. Rather, it becomes obstructive. The experience is hidden behind the formulation, the preconception.

Knowledge can be gathered without your knowing that knowledge is dangerous. If the knowledge is concerned with outside information that is all right, it makes no difference; but if it is concerned with inner experiences it makes a lot of difference - because the mind projects.

Begin to meditate as if you had never heard anything about kundalini or chakras. Go into meditation without this information. Make it a first condition that when you enter meditation you are not supposed to know anything. You are just to be ready, open to anything that happens. There is nothing to expect, nothing to compare your experience to.

First, your preconceived ideas must go. You must not cling to them. If you don't cling to them they will go, they will die. The seed will burn and die. But if you cling to it, it will seem like knowledge, it will seem to be a help, a guide. Don't cling to your knowledge and it will not remain alive in you.

Then it will not project itself.

Secondly, forget about your LSD experiences as if they were dreams; otherwise they will continue to come between you and your meditation and the comparison will go on. That comparison will be suicidal. If you continue to compare, meditation will cease and you will be more and more disposed toward using LSD. But a chemical help can only create a psychic phenomenon, it can never be an authentic realization. Realization is not something that has happened to you, it is something to which you have happened. It is not that something has penetrated you, it is something that you yourself jump into.

With LSD you go nowhere; you remain just where you were and something happens to you because of the chemical change. Through a chemical agent your ordinary mind, your ordinary reasoning, is no longer functioning; the ordinary restrictions that you place on the unconscious become numb.

They are turned off and the unconscious is turned on. But you are not the controller, the chemical agent is the controller. You are under its influence, you are not a free agent. Now the LSD is free to work inside you. It is not that you are working but that you are being worked upon: something is happening to you, not you that are happening to something.

Realization means that you have happened to something: you have jumped, you have encountered something. You are no longer the same person you were, you have changed. This change is a conscious change, with full awareness. And the change is because of your effort. You have done something, you have traveled, you have gone to some peak.

There are two ways to experience yourself on the peak of Mount Everest. The first is to imagine that you are on Everest but still be lying there in your bed and not really go anywhere. The second way is really to climb to the peak. The very going will create a change in you. The very struggle to climb to the peak will change you so that the peak will not only be the peak of Everest but will also be the peak of your efforts. When you have reached the top of Everest, you will have reached the Everest of your willpower.

In your dreams you have gone nowhere. You exist in the same state, in the same time as you were before. The only thing that happened is that a dream has come to you. The dream can come in two ways: it can come through meditation or you can create it through LSD. That is why the experiences in both look similar - because you can create these experiences in either way. Only if the unconscious is not burdened, only if it is not filled with longings and suppressions that are waiting to be projected is meditation possible.

Another difference is that when you have taken LSD your conscious mind has gone to sleep and your unconscious mind takes charge of you and begins to work. But in meditation your conscious mind does not go to sleep; rather, your conscious mind expands until your unconscious also becomes conscious. The light of the conscious moves deeper and deeper into the unconscious until a time comes when there is no separation between the conscious and the unconscious; your whole mind is one. Then meditation has happened.

Question 2:

There is some meaning to it, but the order is always dif-ferent for different people. Still, it has a meaning. Colors, perfumes, sounds - everything has a meaning.

The first thing to be noted is this: as you go deeply inward, each of your senses has a corresponding inner manifestation. For example, your eyes. They see what is without, but when you close your eyes you are able to see that which is within. The essence of every outward experience is also stored within; all your senses have reservoirs of experience stored in your mind. When you travel inward, these reservoirs will be encountered. When you come to the reservoir of colors you will see beautiful colors such as you have never seen before with your eyes. These are the essence of all your past experience of colors.

It is just as when a painter paints a beautiful woman. It is not any particular woman - he has seen so many women. His painting portrays the essence of them all. All that he has seen, all that he has known, is being depicted in this one figure. Something in the woman is from one source and something else is from another source, but the particular figure itself is nowhere to be found. It is not imaginary and yet it is nowhere to be found. It is authentic because it has been taken from experience, and yet it is just an image: it is both real and unreal.

Our senses have stored all the experiences not only of this life but of all the lives that we have lived.

These essences remain in us. The eyes have stored colors, light, etcetera; the ears have stored sounds, harmonies, silences, etcetera. All the senses have their own storerooms within the brain.

Now even science confirms this: if you touch a particular brain cell with an electrode the brain cell will explode. A person who falls down may see stars if the particular brain cells which store light experiences are affected by the fall. Your memories can be affected by the touch of an electrode.

If I touch a cell in which the memory of your childhood is stored you will again become a child and everything that you experienced as a child will be replayed on the canvas of the mind.

When you go inward, these essences explode within you and you experience many things which are unknown in the outward world in such a pure form. The outward world is always impure, but inward experience is a pure essence; it is just an electrical phenomenon. Because the phenomenon is just energy, it is pure. Nothing obstructs it; it is transparent.

But don't take these experiences seriously. They are only meaningful insofar as they are indications that you are going deep. They are only part of the scenery on the way, they are not the destination itself. When you really reach deep within there will be no experiences - neither of light nor of sound nor of anything else.

Unless all these experiences cease, you cannot transcend the mind. These experiences are just the psyche displaying the accumulation of what it has preserved throughout endless lives. That is why each person will feel different things: each one has a different accumulated past, so each one will have a different orientation as far as his senses are concerned.

Two days ago someone with no sense of taste came to see me. He has never known what taste means so he cannot experience taste deep within himself. There are people who are blind or colorblind - in fact, one person in twelve is colorblind: he sees everything else, but he cannot see one particular color.

Bernard Shaw, for example, could not make any distinction between yellow and green. He was colorblind as far as yellow was concerned, so in his inner experiences he could never see yellow.

There was no reservoir of the color yellow in him; there was no essence of yellow. He had never seen it, so to him it was nonexistent.

We do not see every color. The seven colors that we can see are not all the colors that exist - beyond those seven we are colorblind. Below and beyond these seven colors are infinite ranges of colors. We have not seen them so we will not experience them in our inner journey. All that is felt or experienced is what we have stored within us of the outer world.

If a musician goes into meditation he will experience sounds that a nonmusician can never know.

A painter will experience colors that a nonpainter can never know. If someone like Van Gogh were to go into meditation, we cannot conceive of the colors he would see or what new combinations he would know.

This, too, will differ from individual to individual. Only one thing is certain: when you go deep within on your own inner path, things will begin to happen. You will have experiences of colors, sounds, smells, which are all stored experiences. The whole mind is a storehouse and every cell is a bundle of experiences ready to explode. Go inside, touch the source, and it will explode.

These experiences are meaningful inasmuch as they indicate that you are moving inward. But because the feeling that you have experienced is lovely, the mind will long to cling to it. You will want to repeat it and that will be a hindrance to further progress.

A state of mind is to be reached where there is no experience. Rather than saying a state of mind with no experiences, you can say a state of mind in which one experiences nothingness. Experience itself is the last barrier. One must come to a point where one is, and there is no experience.

Only when experiencing has ceased does duality cease. When you are experiencing something, duality is still there. You are there, so the experience is there - something without is there. Even if you experience oneness with the world, this experience is part of duality.

When meditation comes to a full flowering, there will be no experience at all. You will be, and just being is the experience. Nothing exists - only your being, only your existence. And when there is no experience, the experiencer explodes. He can exist only in opposition to some experience. When the object is not, the subject itself explodes - there is no subject, no object.

Only then is the existential achieved. Only then can you say God is. You are not and the world is not. God is! That very isness is God.

But these experiences will come. They are not meaningful, but they will come.

Question 3:

There can be many reasons. It may be that the medita-tion method you are using is wrong or that the way in which you are practicing it is wrong. Or it may be that neither the method nor the way you are practicing it is wrong, but the unconscious longing behind the method is wrong. Then the unconscious must be changed.

If you have been using a method for many years and only getting shallow results, change the method.

There are so many methods of meditation that one should not cling to only one method. There may be nothing wrong with the method, but as far as you are concerned it may be wrong.

So change the method. Change is always helpful. If one becomes accustomed to a method, the experiences one has through it will be shallow. And when nothing new is happening but you go on repeating the method as a routine you will never achieve anything through it; nothing significant can be achieved.

My method of Dynamic Meditation is such that it can never become a routine. It is so disorderly and chaotic that you can never make a routine out of it. Methods of meditation with a disciplined and orderly system behind them always become routine. You must use a chaotic method so that you are never settled in it. Then it will always remain new with something new to be faced each day.

The method I have been talking to you about, Dynamic Meditation, will help you because it is chaotic.

No disciplined method can be helpful to the modern mind, because the modern mind is basically chaotic, it is constantly changing.

The old mind was an unchanging, fixed mind. A person was always settled. Two centuries ago a person who was born a Christian would die a Christian. Today it is not so - a person born a Christian may become a Hindu. Everything has become chaotic. The childhood mind of a person is one thing, his mind during youth may be something else. One day he may be a communist and at a later date he may go to the Himalayas to meditate.

Today's mind is not fixed; it is in chaos. So all the old methods which were meant for fixed minds are out of date. For the chaotic mind, a chaotic method is needed; only then can you be led into deeper realms; otherwise, the results are bound to be shallow. Once you settle into a technique you become bored with it and if you go on prolonging your practice, it will be suicidal. Don't continue to practice a technique that is not helping you. The method is for you, not you for the method. If something is not working for you, change it.

Practice Dynamic Meditation and awareness of breathing. In a very short time you will feel the change that is happening inside you. But you need a chaotic method - one that will not become routine.