I changed my mind about being done on this blog. There is still some stuff to write about.
Recently a visitor, Andy, asked me a question about smoking and meditation.
My answer to his question is the same answer I would give if someone asked me if they could smoke pot, drink coffee, do hallucinogens or take pysch meds while meditating and what effects would it have on meditation progress. I have been asked those questions before many times since I started vlogging and blogging about it.
I did make a short video about Meditation, spirituality and drug effects. but not everyone gets to my videos and upon consideration I could expound a bit more about the effects because I was one of those folks who tried meditating in my early twenties when I hooked on or experimented with everything from pot and mushrooms and painkillers to caffeine, speed, anxiety, and anger.
None of this is theory but my own personal experiences using substances and chemicals and observing their effects on my internal states.
The question goes something like this.
Can I meditate or begin meditating under the influence of substances X, Y and Z?
The short answer is simply this. It won’t matter at the beginning, it will be a problem later on.
Short winded is something I am rarely accused of and I readily admit to using ten words when two would do. Here is the long answer and it contains meditation spoilers. :)
It won’t matter so much at the beginning, we’ve established that. This is why it will eventually matter quite a bit.
The primary goal of meditation is to create stillness. When you have stillness going on your mind is comfortable at total rest. In that space there is no rumination on things. Especially troubling things like obsessive thinking, dwelling on the past, destructive self critique and all the little voices that tear us down inside in one fashion or another.
Along the way to building stillness you are going to want to resolve in some way all the things that prevent you being still in the first place. To do that you can cultivate awareness of your internal world in two ways. Concentration practice and sensitivity practice.
As you work on one, you will gain greater facility with the other. The longer you concentrate on being aware the more sensitive you will become. The more sensitivity you can develop the greater the accuracy of your concentration will be.
Between the two you will really develop your intuition. Your intuition will inform you as to things inside you that are not quite right. Your intuition sort of processes all the subtle sensations and runs them through the memory chip for correlations and experiential knowledge. In a burst of gut knowledge you will know with fairly good accuracy what is bugging you.
The more practice you give yourself letting intuition guide you the better. Intuition is another faculty and as it’s reliability factor goes up it becomes a resource you can tap into voluntarily. You can just ask yourself what it wrong with you and get an instant and honest answer that might have taken long moments of cogitating and internal self debate to arrive at.
Whether you are meditating for enlightenment, trying to find inner stillness or just using meditation to relax those beginning steps are pretty much the same and the beginning never really ends and is much the same at more advanced levels as it was at the beginning.
You take time to align yourself and sit comfortably. You are mindful of your posture and skull and hips. You engage with your breathing and take a moment to let your mind just spin while you begin to cultivate the intention of your desire to sit still and let everything go.
I did that when I practiced meditation before karate class in my early teens. I do that before I start tai chi while standing. I still do this to this day twenty later when I sit and meditate. The point is the basics are the same no matter what and it’s a work in progress you can keep making refinements to.
When you are first beginning your ability to listen and interpret what is keeping you from being still inside will be fairly general. You will sense blackness or fog inside. You feel different flavors of pain and discomfort. You may space out and drift the minute you try to listen or concentrate.
You will be able to differentiate some things. Some will be really obvious like, gee, I am really angry or really sad right now. You may experience all kinds of mundane stuff like hunger pangs, internal gas moving around, an itch somewhere. Each one of those sensations from the emotional to the physical will be throwing stuff up and the combined noise of your internal world serve as one big mess of stuff inside agitating you all of which is preventing or limiting your stillness.
In terms of substances, everything you put inside yourself can have essentially three basic influences on you. It can add to sum of the noise inside you, it can diminish the noise inside you and it can have more or less no effect at all either way.
In the beginning you are cultivating that concentration and sensitivity. You are working with your breathing and being mindful and you are growing your meditation legs. The processes inherent in successful meditation take time to develop.
The next important factor is how much time you personally devote to cultivating those meditation legs. On that I can say it’s really like any other skill. Whether you are learning a musical instrument or playing tennis or meditating you get out of it what you put into it. If you become freakishly obsessive about meditation you can go thousand miles in one day.
If you are doing it hours a day, six or seven days a week, which is the best way to really change your brain wiring in a continual curve, you will be going thousands of miles a week and you will grow your concentration batteries and sensitivity network (and consequently your intuition as well) considerably faster than a person who meditates one hour a day every other other day.
What ends up happening is you begin to notice exactly how sensation or feelings effect the quality of your internal stillness. You perform an investigation into precisely the nature of your internal stuff that is very much like a science experiment. You begin to notice all that black churning stuff and random sensations isn’t all that random and the black stuff contains things that have definitive qualities we can sense accurately.
Body tension is one of the simplest things that plague us all from achieving stillness. We will find different qualities to that tension as well. You can find yourself holding yourself in a tense way internally. In time you also perceive that hologram-like effect in which the way you hold yourself physically also effects your thoughts and emotions.
Now you are working on three different tensions. Tense muscles and posture, tense emotions, tense thoughts and tense awareness. You resolve all that stuff or bring some measure of relaxation to each of those layers of being and gradually (or suddenly) your internal world is much much quieter.
For awhile you enjoy that quiet. You’ve made real progress. You can stop there. You can maintain a certain meditation hygiene and relax your mind, body and heart and gain great benefit from that.
If you don’t stop there, if you keep on pushing the envelope, you keep growing those meditation legs and make a conscious, deliberate attempt to increase both your concentration and your sensitivity then some thing else is going to happen.
You just grow an affinity for being still and a generalized discomfort with things that detract from that stillness. You will like being still basically and you won’t like the feeling of not being still. Your awareness will begin to nag you about your internal stuff that remains.
Without consciously trying you will be offered up internally, reasons for the sensations and feelings that are still going on inside you. The internal quiet you achieved seems not so quiet anymore. Your sensitivity has grown during the interim and what you sense now is that a new level of stillness could be attained, a deeper level, by resolving the latest batch of unwanted internal sensations.
You are emboldened by your past success so you know you can perceive and remedy the things that are churning you up inside so long as you have the motivation and you are willing to continue to trust your intuition which has also been growing in the interim.
Now we begin to pay ever more attention and mindfulness of our internal world. If we have a weekend in solitude we can spend every waking moment of the day being mindful without the influence of others nearby. We can listen all day acutely to our insides and monitor our internal stillness status. We pay particular attention to when we begin to move away from calm and still towards agitation and our intuition will pop out the answer when you ask,
“What is wrong? Why am I agitated? What is bugging me? How did I just lose my calm and grace?”
The answer will almost always be, something you did or exposed yourself to and put inside you or cultivated that destabilized you from a baseline of calm.
Maybe it was a song on the radio or a movie on cable that you saw. You got into the sensory experience of the movie or the song and by the end you notice you are not calm anymore.
Maybe you got off the phone with a relative or a friend and you noticed you were fine before the phone call, and not fine after it.
Maybe it’s dinner. Maybe you over indulged on spicy foods and you’ve got heartburn or indigestion and sensations are churning you inside somewhere, somehow in some way.
Maybe you slipped on ice or a wet floor and fell hard on butt or on your side or banged your head. You were calm before the fall, after the fall you have all these sensations of injury and insult reporting in. Maybe you are shaking. Making you are self recriminating for falling or getting a good angry going because someone should have cleaned up the water.
Then you sit and meditate you notice all these reactions going off inside you. Spicy food effects your emotions and thoughts. You pay careful attention to what you were thinking and feeling before, during and after consuming one substance or another be it food, music, drugs, vitamins, sex, TV, or a book.
Chocolate for example. A psychoactive substance if there ever was one. You feel and think differently after you eat a good sample of quality chocolate. It can have both a soporific and an innervating effect on me and makes me aware of my body as a sensual thing. ( read that as horny)
Gradually you grow this catalog of stuff that you know knocks you off your meditation pillow. When you really wed your perceptions to your intuition not only will you know what destabilized you but as I hinted earlier, you will also want not to be destabilized. You wonder what you can do to avoid it.
When get to that point you begin to fast. When I mean fast, I don’t just mean abstaining from food. I mean abstaining from everything that represents a possible threat to your internal stillness.
You fast from TV and the internet. Knowing full well they are distractions from being at one with your internal world and being mentally and emotionally still.
You fast from phone calls with relatives and hanging out with that rageholic friend who has so many triggers it’s like walking on eggshells to be around them. You don’t allow someone else’s emotional states to disrupt yours so fast from people too.
One day you will be sitting in your favorite chair and preparing to meditate and you are going to notice that you woke up, calm, centered and still. That’s how you went to bed. If you do that often enough this is what is going to happen.
You will wake up, get up, sit in your chair and take your morning sip of coffee (or tea) and the first puff off your morning cigarette (or cannabis joint) and boom. There it is. Your internal world goes from still and calm to disturbed.
It feels internally like someone threw a rock into your pond of quietude making a big splash and ripples which distort the mirror-like quality of the still water you had about a 30 seconds before the caffeine and nicotine reached your brain.
Then you are going to nod to yourself and say “Fuck”. You will too, because you will know, intuitively and intellectually what destabilized your stillness and you will say “Fuck” out loud because you are going to know immediately what to do about not experiencing that destabilizing again.
Then you will have a little war inside your self that goes something like this.
“No”
“Yes”
“No way”
“You have to”
“No, I don’t”
“Strictly speaking, no one can twist your arm other than yourself. How bad do you want stillness?”
“Fuck”
“I know, you don’t have to do it today though, if you don’t want”
“And how many days that I don’t do it are you going to remind me that I am only impeding my progress by procrastinating?”
“Every damn day that you do it, how’s that?”
“You can shut up now.”
“We will talk again tomorrow morning.”
You will screw around a little longer. You will stop adding sugar or cut yourself down from two cups to one cup. You will switch to the Lights brand of your favorite smoke.
Then you will take only a few sips of coffee and a couple of puffs before putting it out.
Then you will finally get sick of it because while you were putting off the inevitable your evil sensitivity was paying more acute attention to the feelings of the morning ritual of chemicals and you know for a fact that so much as one sip of coffee or one puff can introduce a distorting element inside you.
On that day you will, out of disgust with yourself, finally quit. You will hate every second of it while knowing it has to be done. You are making changes to your habits and behaviors and rituals and that sucks. It’s like losing a good friend.
Then you dissolve that sense of loss. You become a person who does not do those things. Then you find that your evening stillness carries through in the morning. You meditate in the morning and that carries you into the evening.
Eventually, a long ways down the road, you get to a point where that stability is so ingrained that you find you don’t have to meditate as much to keep it going. You can miss an evening or a morning meditation sit and you will be ok.
You will also find yourself, not wanting to miss meditation sessions anymore either. The net effect in the end is that you control for the effects of everything you willingly subject yourself to. When you control enough of those factors you will have much greater stillness and internal perception.
That means in time you must have a biochemistry that is free of substances which agitate, sedate, fog up or inhibit you in any way. Until you free yourself of all the toxic stuff you normally subject yourself to you will be a slave to felt sensation of the distortions of your consciousness. The real You, the >>I<< underneath it all, the source of all intention, the mindstream, the nature of your spirit will all be obscured.
Remember it’s not just foods and drugs. Your sensory experiences create chemical effects. If you watch something offensive, or get yourself riled up reading politics on the internet or you have a codependent relationship with someone who is abusive your resulting thoughts and emotions churn you up inside making stillness difficult if not impossible.
That is what I mean by fasting from everything. Only you know what sets you off and if you studiously avoid those things while trying to develop internal stillness you will progress well.
Otherwise, its like putting one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake especially when meditating and most especially when meditating under the influence of mind altering drugs and chemicals.
Your thoughts are feelings are not your own. They are drug induced. Alternately, your lack of certain thoughts and feelings that are your own can also be drug induced. In the end, if you are serious about hardcore meditation progress all avoidable psycho active, agitating or inhibiting substances must go. You must dissolve your attachment and need for them and if you do you will only benefit.
The ultimate long term benefit and some good news for after.
The ultimate long term payoff for consciously fasting from sensory disruptions is the discovery of your spirit and the source of your mind itself. A great stillness will grow gradually inside you. Within all that emptiness you find both form and formlessness. Something that generates will and intent and awareness.
From there you can do a spiritual investigation, using your awareness of your inner world as the medium, of the nature of the >>I<< itself. If you are very lucky you will discover the mindstream. That takes an extraordinary amount of stillness and relaxed concentration.
The good news is, after a long time of building this core of internal stillness it won’t be dislodged easily. There is scientific evidence that is not just a mental state but a physical development that is real.
If you wanted, if it was practical, you might be able to spend your life in perpetual retreat. Whether you live in ashram or a a hut by yourself deep in the woods you can shield yourself from the bulk of the stresses and distractions of life itself.
The ultimate question becomes, do you really want to? Do you really want to have a life? Do you want to partake of the same things everyone else does? Will it destabilize you?
If the answer is yes, then you are going to be open to hanging out with people, perhaps strangers with all their mysterious inner content. You will read the internets again and watch TV. You will listen to music again. If you really wanted, you could drink a cup of tea or have a beer or smoke a cigar with your friends on New Year’s Eve or move from the country to the city.
You will have a base of inner calm and that calm will persist through things like, being stuck in city traffic. Standing in line at a busy mall. Even going to a bar and having a few drinks and smokes with your coworkers.
Each of those things will add some kind of sensation or agitation or sedation or whatever. You can get irate at the news and it’s ok as long as you don’t make it a habit. If you go back to smoking a pack a day, twenty ounces of coffee, doing different drugs, listening to loud music all the time and gnashing your teeth at the news all day, you will chip away, a bit at a time, all that stillness you won for yourself.
But at this point, hopefully you have a self-harm status indicator in your mind at all times that tells you when you are approaching toxic levels of anything. At that point, you take a break and detox and go back and meditate. You be present and mindful and use the dissolving to smooth the ripples out in your inner pond of stability and bring yourself back to balance.
That way you can still partake of life and keep your calm. You can eat spicy foods and watch an emotional drama and eat some chocolate and wash it down with some alcoholic beverage and you are going to be ok the next day. You are not going to be manic or depressed or agitated so long as the ratio of stillness to stimulus is perpetually slanted in the direction of stillness.
If you can’t moderate yourself to a have a normal amount of stimulation in your life, you need to keep working on stillness and you need to dissolve your attachment to your need to be stimulated. Once you have that core sense of Self and a stable internal world you should try to interact with people and things and enjoy life.
Enjoy that bottle of champagne or that cigar or that joint but be mindful at all times how it effects your stillness meter and your stimulation meter. Keep the former always higher than the latter and you have a formula for being able to enjoy the fullness of life without the ascetic deprivations that were necessary in the intermediate and advanced stages in order to find yourself.
With diligence and continued practice you won’t lose your sense of self amidst a thousand distractions and you have a tool to wash off all the crap that starts to accumulate on your inner clarity. That’s what you do if you want to have a life like everyone else and don’t want to live in a walled fort, unplugged in the middle of nowhere. That’s a path of moderation and balance and it’s one path of the Tao.





Arrgh!











