Years ago on my old computer a buddy of mine sent me a link, could have been from here not quite sure, It was a chart that starts off with basic drugs like caffeine etc and it goes up showing what diffrent drugs can do to you spiritually goes up to like a total of 6 or 8 steps with drugs like lsd and ketamine etc being towards the top. im stressing out because i really want to find it and i am having no luck GC help me
There are obviously good and better drugs to help access spiritual states, but avoid reading the likes of Timothy Leary (who came up with the idea of the steps you mention) to understand in what way you can use it. He has more wrong and plain daft ideas on spiritual traditions than just about anyone you could read. Better to go to Erowid and just troll around the experiences section and work out from there and form your own ideas on it all. MelT
Erm, I highly advise reading any and all of Timothy's stuff. Some of it is a bit out there, but at the time he was a philosopher just coming up with new ideas. Not all of it makes perfect sense, but the ideas are still interesting to read, in my opinion at least. I think you may be talking about his 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness. It originally was only 7, and first appeared in The Psychedelic Review as "The Seven Tongues of God".
thank you. I have been searching for this recently, took a lil break from spirituality you can say. Had some fun mushroom trips that have inspired me to continue my education into this as well as reading the Electric Kool aid acid test. And you are right, Leary has very good material which i am in the process of looking into. Good day fellas
This is exactly where his worst work is. He tries to infer that the model above is connected in some way to tibetan beliefs and thus by using it as a basis you're making your way towards enlightenment. I'm a tibetan buddhist, hardly anything he says in the text is any way relevant to tibetan thought or practices and are just his assumptions. Certainly I'd agree that it's an interesting read, but I worry that anyone reading it is going to assume that Leary is offering some kind of real working model with antecedents rather than something that's just a personal shot at what he thinks it's all about. Conjecture is fine, but don't place too much faith in it as a working model. MelT
Just for anybody who wants to furtherly research the 8 circuit model, Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson really puts it in perspective and changed the way I look at life.
In my opinion there isn't any written document in the world that can be taken 'as is', you must always find personal relation to the written words before they mean anything. So to me anybody that is doing anything more than taking a personal shot at what they think is right, is spewing out bullshit.
Check out his autobiography Flashbacks. It's really awesome and interesting, always has me wanting to read more.
Not the problem here. Leary claimed that what he wrote was linked to and based upon Tibetan Buddhism, it isn't, and its not anywhere in other forms either. If he'd just stuck at saying, 'This is what I think', I'd be quite happy. But claiming that it was a real model and something that the eastern traditions know of and use is a lie. Read him by all means, as long as you understand that this particular piece of writing was his own theory and has no antecedents where he claims. MelT
