By Raúl del Pino
Those of us who have embarked on the path of knowledge—or rather, self-knowledge—must fight against an infinity of barriers that make this journey difficult to follow. But those of us who seek self-knowledge through psychoactive substances, and especially entheogens, must carry out a double “crusade.”
On one hand, we must fight against the intolerance derived from the ignorance of certain elements in the society in which we happen to live. Souls enslaved to the system, which undoubtedly gives them what they need and, in exchange, they surrender their freedom. These people, full of ignorance, lash out against everything that sounds like “drugs,” when in all likelihood they have an arsenal of sleeping pills on their nightstands, another to counteract the effects of those, and, of course, pills to stay awake and active all day. And if you tell them that they are also drugging themselves, they will react with a fit of blind rage and argue that those pills were prescribed by their primary care physician. Consequently, it is the ignorance of the system(?) and of these people that we must fight, but not in a dirty war full of subterfuge, but in a “war” of information and understanding, to be able to free their minds in a gradual and effective way. Without a doubt, this type of person who hides behind anti-drug organizations, without really knowing why, is the most dangerous group for those of us who try to approach the Essence of our Soul by taking inner journeys, though not the most harmful.
The most harmful group is the one that, also under the influence of ignorance, runs to take refuge in the most damaging substances to free their minds from the pressure of their environment—an environment, of course, created by the same system that fights against drugs, but which simultaneously generates a multitude of addicts who wander the streets looking for the necessary relief. Unfortunately, they are the ones who make the others—the intransigent ones—exist and coexist.
I myself once fell into the clutches of addiction, a white abyss that envelops you and doesn’t let you see beyond it, but from which I was able to emerge, thanks to finding the freedom of my mind, filling the void in my Soul that I was previously unable to fill on my own.
The search: risk and sacrifice
But let us focus on the “search.” Anyone who says this is a fun and easy path is mistaken. We all know the “bad trips” we sometimes suffer, which torment you and don’t let you rest; they are not fun at all. They are terrifying but necessary. I have been studying the subject of entheogens and other substances for two years. Without a doubt, the field of “other substances” is more recreational, but the one that attracts me most—and I imagine everyone reading this—is that of entheogens. Surely because of the opening of consciousness that occurs, which undoubtedly no other type of substance causes.
We must be careful when conducting experiments, as we often encounter dangers that can be life-threatening. We know of cases of atropine poisoning, an alkaloid contained in hallucinogenic nightshades—though thank God these are the only entheogenic substances that are deadly. However, I will remember for the rest of my life a reckless experiment I once did with the flowers and leaves of an oleander, which caused me gastrointestinal injuries that I still suffer from today.
Nevertheless, I believe that every search entails a risk and a sacrifice. The risk is leaving our life or our sanity on the path. The sacrifice is living while being rejected, misunderstood, and looked at as “weirdos”; which often turns us into solitary beings, but not by imposition, rather by choice. These two issues must be weighed by each person, as not all of us are prepared to assume the risk and the sacrifice.
It amuses me when you acquire LSD from your usual “dealer” and he is amazed by the amount of doses one ends up buying. The man cannot believe that you can take 4, 5, or 6 doses in an instant. The most curious thing is when he asks if you have been laughing all night, and you answer that LSD doesn’t make you laugh, that you take it to explore the fields of your mind. That is the face of a person who is looking at a “weirdo.”
The gaze of orthodox science
What scares me is seeing how orthodox science treats us like suicidal or paranoid lunatics when we take entheogenic substances with total freedom. While studying psychopharmacology, I was able to read absolute nonsense about the consumption of hallucinogens (as they classify them). Specifically, in the book PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY written by M. Rosenzweig and Arnold Leiman, from the publisher McGraw-Hill, on pages 218-219 where it talks about LSD, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The truth is that it literally states that “Albert Hofmann experienced a peculiar state of drowsiness, almost of intoxication” upon accidentally ingesting LSD, and in Jonathan Ott’s Pharmacotheon we can read Dr. Hofmann’s laboratory notes where we can see the modifications in perception he suffered. Later on, where it talks about the effects, the psychology book tells us that entheogens produce paranoid psychosis.
I believe we must demystify this type of assertion that makes our work more difficult. Science is full of dogmas, but what orthodox scientists often forget is that the scientific foundations of today were created by heterodox scientists, by people who were branded as lunatics, revolutionaries, or who even died executed for making their ideas and theories public. One only has to look at how, within the sciences, there are disputes to impose criteria and hypotheses as an integral part of new paradigms that eventually fail when new theories arise. If not, take the example of psychology, a science in continuous evolution that until recently had the “bad habit” of burying old paradigms under a tombstone that read: “obsolete, outdated, and erroneous.” Today, different theories from the past and the present coexist in what we now know as the cognitivist paradigm.
But not everything is obstacles and disappointments. The most beautiful thing about all this is that we find a new way of living. We learn to listen to ourselves, to attend to our spiritual and inner concerns—knowledge that I have called cognimisence—and thanks to that, to free our anxiety. We see the beauty of things where we were previously unable to imagine it. We feel the presence of something eternal, we lose the fear of life and death, and what is more important, we realize that we are children of the same Source.
