Psychedelics and insanity
Buddhist master Padmasambhava:
At this time, powerfully imagine that your environment, city, house, companions, conversation, and all activities are a dream; and even say out loud, ‘This is a dream.’ Continually imagine that this is just a dream.
Depersonalization-derealization disorder … can be very disturbing and may feel like you’re living in a dream.
When you see yourself as a Buddha, you do not simply consider yourself as Buddha and the rest of the world as ordinary, but everything is transformed into that state, both subject and object, the universe and all sentient beings, everyone is in that Buddha field together. This is known as true visualization.
Grandiose delusions: Wikipedia
Grandiose delusions… are a subtype of delusion that occur in patients suffering from a wide range of psychiatric diseases…. Other common grandiose delusions in schizophrenia include religious delusions such as the belief that one is Jesus Christ.
True understanding is to see the events of life in this way: ‘You are here for my benefit, though rumor paints you otherwise.’ And everything is turned to one’s advantage when he greets a situation like this: You are the very thing I was looking for. Truly whatever arises in life is the right material to bring about your growth and the growth of those around you. This, in a word, is art– and this art called ‘life’ is a practice suitable to both men and gods. Everything contains some special purpose and a hidden blessing; what then could be strange or arduous when all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend?
Delusions of reference: Wikipedia
Ideas of reference and delusions of reference describe the [psychotic] phenomenon of an individual’s experiencing innocuous events or mere coincidences and believing they have strong personal significance. It is “the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to one’s own destiny”.
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Examples
- Believing that events (even world events) have been deliberately contrived for them, or have special personal significance for them
- Seeing objects or events as being set up deliberately to convey a special or particular meaning to themselves
- …
What is it that prevents methods of wisdom from leading to insanity?
A reasonable first guess is that techniques for wisdom are not meant to be taken literally. This is not really a dream; you are not really the Buddha; events don’t really have anything to do with you. These are just tools meant figuratively.
But there’s another possibility. Wisdom traditions exist to prepare your mind for insights that it otherwise could not handle. The reason that psychedelic trips sometimes result in intractable symptoms isn’t because “some neurotransmitters something something” (though that may indeed be the best explanation from within the dream). The real reason is that we are encountering genuine dream-transcending insights that we may not be ready for. They get lost in translation into our unprepared minds, and nothing could be scarier.
I heard ‘Well, [he] finally did it, he broke through, I knew he would find the truth at some point. It was good being in his movie, let’s all say goodbye to him, he’s about to leave us, but watch out, you don’t want to go with him now!’ The realization that my friends were cardboard cutouts just killed me, I mean I would have been less shocked if my friends had pulled out a pistol right then and there and shot me. It felt like that, but so much worse. I can deal with pain & injury, but not the Ultimate Vision. Damnit, Lady Salvia, why did you have to go and show me that? God, that wasn’t cool at all!!
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Oh god, I almost get sick to my stomach recalling this, it was worse than any torture, any kind of bad thing I can imagine, from anal rape to being drawn & quartered to having your fingernails pulled out by the roots. It was beyond the catagories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, like I said it was the Real Deal. I know this is part of the bad shit that happens when you die … you realize that is was all just a dream.
This one is called the Truman Show delusion.
There is a sense in which this is your dream; you really are the Buddha; and everything in this dream is related to you. It’s just that “you” doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Rather than try to communicate this myself, I’d like to share a beautiful piece.
G – Everything is connected, but some things lie closer together on the infinite mesh of interconnectedness than others. This is the case with schizophrenia and what is called enlightenment. They are two manifestations of the same phenomenon. In both cases the mind has come to the end of conventional thought. There are two possible reactions to this. The first is to let go of the mind and the ego. The other is to try to maintain the mind and ego in the face of the infinite, which is dangerous.
S - Can you explain what you mean by “to the end of conventional thought”?
G – Thought is limited. What the mind can know is limited. What can be known is infinite. When something limited comes up against something infinite, it reveals itself as being infinitely small. Some people, for whatever reason, have an experience of this infinity, this nothingness out of which all manifestation springs. When that happens, their consciousness undergoes a revolution. This is what happened to Jesus, to the Buddha, and to a great many more people who we have never heard of. This is also what happens to what we call schizophrenics, although their consciousnesses are prevented from undergoing the same revolution due mainly to fear. They are afraid—and this is not a judgement of them—of letting go of their egos, of their thoughts, and of falling back into that infinite nothingness that they have become aware of. Of course, it is impossible to try to figure out infinity, and to carry the ego into infinity.
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You can put down the bag of stones and swim, or you can hold onto it and flounder. The bag is your identity, your thoughts, everything that you believe makes you who you are. The bag is your separateness. You cannot keep it, yet many try to.
S – So what happens if you let go of the bag? You become Jesus I suppose.
G – No, you become what you are in essence, which is what Jesus was in essence—pure love. You are that which has always been aware of your thoughts, of your ego. You become the swimmer instead of the bag of stones.
And while we’re sharing weird ideas, I might as well toss in part of a poetic trip report from someone who smoked the powerful hallucinogen DMT. The italicized parts are from the DMT “spirits,” who you might prefer to think of as deep aspects of your own mind.
… it is really our self in the ether, the one that dreams, our consciousness that creates it all, this is what creates your reality, this is you, your own creator, you are here, always, you always have been and always will be, this is how it is all safe and good, this is how you do it, they showed me how and it was like my reality that I’d left behind was a picture being projected from me, myself, in this dimension. I said to myself, just like a hologram, and they danced again, yes, yes, but you knew that already…
Its all your creation, it’s all your choice, it’s all your projection, it’s where you take yourself… But remember… you knew that already.
But why don’t we get to know this, think how beautiful it would be for everyone, But no, they quickly showed me, but you know why, look, and I saw the reasons why it couldn’t be, it just wouldn’t work, the dimensions have to be this way, the hologram has to work that way, this is the way it was and always has and continues to be. And some people’s reality have become too real, it’s too dangerous for them to know.
What does it look like when “your reality has become too real?” Well, consider people whose life mission is to convince the world that our modern Western worldview is basically correct. Would it surprise you to learn that various famous science popularizers are known to be deeply unpersonable? This is not a dig at them (and I won’t share any evidence here, out of respect). Taking your reality too literally has its own profound psychological effects, though they are usually much more manageable (and socially acceptable) than schizophrenia.
There is a way to take your experience very seriously, yet not literally, but this can only be discovered through practice.