RITZ ASK YOUR GURU

you calm'- well, it does definitely keep you calm, there

is no question about that. But it calms you, and calms
you, and calms you. After sometime you become way
too calm. Without any fire in you, without any burst of
inspiration and creativity to keep you going, you will
see your mental capabilities just shrink and diminish.

Can junkies
be spiritual?
Question: Sadhguru, it is said that drugs
assist one to reach higher planes of
awareness. Now, can I boost my spiritual
experiences and reach the ultimate sooner
if I am on drugs?
Sadhguru: Recently I came upon a very interesting piece in
the newspaper elaborating on information that was amazing
and shocking. The article declared that the biggest cash crop
in the United States is Marijuana! Americans produce only
17 billion dollars worth of corn, 12 billion dollars worth of
soya bean, but 38 billion dollars worth of Marijuana. And we
always thought Afghanistan is producing all the Marijuana
on the planet... So it figures that there are a lot of people
around us who believe that drugs can deliver them to the
Ultimate.
Let us understand a basic fact about spiritual experiences.
The very nature of the spiritual experience is such that
whenever you explode into a different dimension of energy,
the first thing that happens to you is a sudden enhancement
of capabilities. You feel unchained to the morbidity of
everyday life, you are able to rise above normally experienced
concerns and look at your own life, replete with its own
share of troubles and happiness and minor miracles with
objectivity, interest and happiness. In short, you feel elevated,
like you are on another plane of existence altogether.

But why do people correlate drugs with

spirituality? Let us discuss it now.
First things first. What does the drug do? It is known that
most drugs are extremely harsh and destructive to the system,
while some like Marijuana are considered milder. LSD (lysergic
and diethylamide) was even thought to be spiritual. In fact in
the 60's, people considered LSD as a boon from heaven!
And it is this drug wave of the 60's and 70's which took the
lives of so many youth. By the time they realised that these
LSDs gave them an intoxicating high, only to bring them
crashing down to shameful reality after a while, they had
graduated beyond the point of no return. And it was then
that India, with all our sanyasis and spiritual philosophies
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started looking attractive. And soon enough,

there was a mass exodus- tens of thousands of
hippies from the US landed in India. Before long,
the police started cracking down on the junkies
and they migrated to nearby Nepal, a land that
had virtually no police system! To this day, you
can find remnants of those die hard hippies
hanging around in Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Nepal
and the borders of the Himalayas, peddling and
living on drugs.

Can junkies be spiritual?

But what is the real spiritual possibility of a
chemical making you experience an explosion
of energies within yourself, taking you across
reality and into the spiritual realm? The answer is
that there is no such possibility, regardless of what
the chemical is. Right then, can it at least give
you a taste of something out of this world? Well,
it is with great hesitation and the deepest sense
of concern that I give you my answer - 'possible.'
And it is precisely this possibility which is
dangerous. If a thousand people take to drugs in
pursuit of a genuine, out the world experience,
one guy may just feel he has indeed got what he
was looking for. The remaining 999 invariably
go down the drain. Just to be the one person
who gets a taste of a surrealistic experience,
thousands experiment and end up dead or totally
loose, crime ridden, out of control, diseased and
broken- and all of this proves that the act is just
not worth it.

So, to all those people who are on to drugs just to get in

the spiritual realm- you are dead wrong. Spirituality is
not about suffusing reality to latch on to another
externally-induced state of mind that blurs your selfawareness. It is actually just the opposite- spirituality is
about an unbelievably heightened awareness of your
self (you may want to notice the way I have detached
'your' from 'self'), enjoying and celebrating life and
seeking the ultimate. The effect of drugs though is just
the reverse; whenever it gives you a surreal experience it
reduces your mental capability.

Here is an interesting anecdote:

Once Ramdas travelled to India and visited Neem Karoli
Baba who is a mystic, a worshipper of Hanuman and a
tantric of enormous capabilities. (Now Ramdas is a
famous researcher as also a hard core LSD seeker- he
can pop two, three LSDs in a day!). So he came to this
yogi and said, 'I got some real stuff from heaven. You
take this, and everything that is worth knowing opens
up. Do you already know something about it?' Neem
Karoli Baba said, 'What is this LSD that you are talking
about? Show me.' And Ramdas gave him a small
quantity. Baba was not satisfied. He insisted: 'How many
do you have? Show me.' Ramdas had enough to last
him a couple of months at a stretch and he showed a
whole handful to Baba. The all-knowing tantric just
popped all the pills and then went about continuing
with whatever he was doing! Ramdas was
thunderstruck. He thought that Baba would explode and
die any moment, given the amount of drugs he had just
swallowed. But Neem Karoli Baba did not show any
signs of LSD in him and resumed his work as usual just
to demonstrate to Ramdas that the man was just wasting
his life on some stupid stuff that would never take him
to where he wanted to reach.

I have discussed this in RITZ before and would like to

recall it again: all the stuff that you need to remain
calm or peaceful is available in your own body. A recent
study of the human brain has yielded some incredible
results. After 18 years of research, an Israeli scientist
has found that there are millions of cannabis receptors
in the human brain. Cannabis is another name for
Marijuana. So what are these receptors doing in our
brain? Are we all into smoking pot? No, the fact is that
at different times of the day and especially in times of
stress, the body develops its own cannabis to calm the
system. So believe me, there is a whole Marijuana
garden inside you.
Now if you cultivate it properly and keep it on, you can
be stoned all the time without harming your system,
without shrinking your brains. All you need to remain
calm and to stay in an extreme sense of pleasure all the
time is available to every human being. You only have
to explore your own system a little more, that is all.
Coming to our scientist who discovered this fact, the
man wished to name what he had discovered and
wanted a term that was totally relevant. So he went
through several scriptures but sadly, drew a blank
everywhere. Another round of extensive research
brought him to India and he found that Indian scriptures
are the only ones that talk about blissfulness. No other
religion on the planet talks about bliss. Yes, they all talk
about sin, fear, guilt, punishment but no religion talks
about total blissfulness. So he called this chemical in
the brain which moves towards the cannabis receptor
as 'Anandamoid.'
Well then, all you have to do to stay happy is produce a
little bit of Anandamoid. Want to know how? Wait for
the next issue of RITZ.
Visit www.ishafoundation.org
Isha Foundation, 2005. All Rights Reserved.
Isha Yoga Centre, Velliangiri Foothills,
Coimbatore 641114, India Ph: 91-422-2615345
Email: yogacenter@ishafoundation.org

Next and most important- can this

surrealism be spirituality? No way.
Now about getting on to something mild like
Marijuana which people are propagating with
assurances of 'it is harmless, it is nice, it keeps
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