"...Psychedelics were how I got my start in this whole journey. I perturbed the heck out of consciousness for about a year, you know? After about a year of pretty serious perturbing I was a mess. I dropped out of high school. I couldn’t stay at home with my father; he was kicking me out of the house all the time. Basically I’d messed myself up both subjectively and in terms of my outer life.
What I realized from the whole experience was that a lot depends on how you perceive the world. Most people just take for granted that the world they perceive is the world that is, and psychedelics blew that out of the water for me. But if I’d been continuing on that path all these years I probably would be dead by now.
So I found for me something (Transcendental Meditation) that was much more wholesome and constructive. Within weeks of practicing it, it had transformed my life. I had gotten back into school; got a job; reconciled with my father. It had all kinds of practical significance but at the same time was opening me up to deeper levels of experience in a way that was much more gratifying than drugs because it was natural and much more stable. You take an acid trip or something and you come down after 12 hours and it’s gone but genuine spiritual development is an integrative process which grows by degrees and you don’t lose it.
People sometimes say, “What good is meditation because you have an experience while you’re doing it and then you’ve got to go back to your regular life?” That’s like saying, “What good is eating a meal because you’ve got to stop eating after a while?” The meal stays with you. It goes to build tissue in your body and so on. The same with a spiritual practice. It has a cumulative influence over time...
TM was invaluable for me. It transformed my life. It saved my life...The TM movement booted me out about a dozen years ago because I was becoming too independent in my thinking, really...I still meditate...TM style... I have nothing but appreciation for everything I derived from it and for all the wonderful people that are still involved in it..."
~ Rick Archer, Interviewed by Alex Tsakiris, skeptico.com
Images ~ Albert Hoffman, LSD – Alex Grey
~ Transcendental Meditation
~ Rick Archer
No comments:
Post a Comment