Drugs and Spiritual Derailment
by Ron Puhek
[Excerpt from his book ‘Spiritual Deraillments in the Modern Age,’ available elsewhere at this webpage.]
The use of mind-altering drugs presents spiritual development with a special problem. While to a limited degree they can advance spiritual growth, drugs also can endanger and stifle it in a particularly noxious way. Ironically, it may be the drugs commonly considered least harmful that pose the greatest threat to the spirit. While still illegal, marijuana meets with general popular toleration if not acceptance. A president of the United States can admit to using it in his youth and still get elected. Marijuana, therefore, stands as a good example of the paradox of the spiritual benefits and dangers of mind-altering drugs.
Marijuana need not interfere with your ordinary life. Most people who use it find they can live in a thoroughly normal way. Like alcohol, however, it can upset the normalcy of life for a minority and cause them serious difficulties adjusting to the real world. Their “breakdown,” however, is not necessarily bad. From a spiritual standpoint, the inability to live a normal life can be a blessing. This is because the drug induces the upheaval by interfering with the false spiritual investments that dominate ordinary life.
How it does it do this so that it affects some but not all who take it? In a pure form, the drug does not use up the mental and physical energy you need to live normally. To that extent, it would not interfere with normalcy. However, it may turn your will away from normal concerns so you choose to put more energy into what normal society finds useless and dangerous. Since major spiritual derailments arise from inordinate investments of energy into the objects the world values (everything from acquiring fancy automobiles to having a beautiful body), the drug turns you temporarily or permanently away from “having” and “getting” these things and toward sensuously enjoying the natural beauties that surround you.
Young people are particularly vulnerable to both benefits and curses in this effect. Because most of them have automatically absorbed definitions of what is good and bad (or normal “values”) from others, the energy they use in focusing on and for acquiring these good things and avoiding the bad reflects two defects. First, it is directed at goods and bads other than those they themselves know as good and bad. And, second, it steals spiritual energy that does not belong to these objects and displaces it from the realm of spiritual development to the material world.
Normally, when you are aware of it you can deal with this misdirection and theft in two ways. The first — more common in the past — is to keep a portion of your spiritual energy free from the world of things and to use it to grow in your knowledge of the immaterial standard of good. Thus, gradually, you could take over the direction of your life and invest attention and energy only of a kind and to a degree appropriate to the things. The second — more common today — is to let yourself get drawn more and more into the world of things. When you find things empty and oppressive to the spirit, instead of abandoning them, you respond by going after them all the harder under the illusion that your feelings of emptiness and oppression mean only that you had not yet got enough of them.
A drug like marijuana could stimulate your spiritual growth if you were either already reserving spiritual energy from the world or were willing to pay more attention to the meaning of your unhappiness with things. It could allow you a quicker liberation from the false normal investment of energy in the world of things. However, you could turn even the quick release from the world’s illusions into something bad. You could use the drugs as a means to escape from the need to grow spiritually and a crutch supporting a life of mad acquisitions. It would help you break out of the illusions of the world of things but only for brief periods and in a way that did not demand spiritual development.
The chance that this might happen leads us to consider the most serious problem with the use of mind-altering drugs. It is that the experience consumes spiritual energy that you would not, and maybe could not use in normal life. This energy bubbles up and looks superfluous because you cannot use it for any normal purpose. It reserves itself naturally for spiritual growth but drugs give it a way of dissipating itself without contributing to spiritual growth. It takes this pure spiritual energy and invests it, not in things, but in the surface of things and illusions you attach to them. This appearance lacks the substance of things. Moreover, it has a unique quality. It can give you the illusion that it is no-thing or the genuinely pure spirit that the spiritual energy craves. Therefore, instead of advancing your consciousness and conscience, it retards and undermines them both.
Normally when you look at the face of your parent or your friend, you see not just the organized form of a face but, recognizing it, you also see the many meanings that are not visible to your senses but dwell in spirit. You see, for example, also the goodness and care they lavished upon you, your mutual love, and the general relationship you have. All these spiritual meanings and more you developed through, and now hold within, your three spiritual faculties, memory, reason, and will. You gain access to them in the act of recognition. Thus, every specific normal perception you experience — such as the face of a parent — encompasses the whole breadth and range of your spiritual knowledge and not just what is in your eyes and the simple form your mind uses to organize the data they gather. The state of this wholeness is what we call “consciousness.” Your consciousness is as developed and as deep as the quantity, quality, and depth of what you recognize in every act of perception. Of course, your consciousness is always partly false and limited. You may not have seen in the past a dark side to your parents or your friend. Thus, you see them only in love.
The drug experience shatters the crystal of consciousness. it rips apart the fabric of consciousness where it is weakest. You see only the shape of a face and, instead of holding a firm and faithful pattern of meanings along with it, your mind can attach any other meaning. It may suddenly reveal to you the falseness of your former consciousness and attach ugly meanings to the face, ones that repel you with fear or hate. The benefit in this is the chance it gives you to repair false, and reduce limitations on, consciousness. However, it also spontaneously — often prompted by the panic of falling through its holes — stitches together patches of fabric without regard to their proper place. Therefore, it can lead you into greater lies because it gets you to connect to the face meanings that have nothing to do with these people and are utterly divorced from who they are and are to you in actual life.
In any case, the drug draws your spirit to focus on the surface, the face, and on the play of varying meanings your mind can attach to it. To that extent, it drains the specific kind of energy that you need if you are to do the work necessary for actual spiritual growth. Spiritual growth in consciousness would require you, for example, to harmonize all your knowledge of people and be at peace with your actual relationship to them. The complexity of the meanings you now associate with them, however, may overwhelm you and your spiritual capacity. But even worse, whatever special spiritual capacity you have you invest in the amazing experience of the drug. The surface play of masks, instead of growth in consciousness and conscience, attracts your spirit. You stop seeking the higher good that unifies your understanding and your life and you dwell in continuing fascination with what you see under the influence of the drug.
If you are young, you are particularly at risk when you use the drug experience to escape the banalities and falseness of normal life and to adventure into free floating imagery long enough. This is because of two things. First, you are unlikely as a youth to have developed the spiritual capacity and methods you need if you are to deal with unifying the complexity of the valid information that is flowing in at you. Even if you have a naturally brilliant mind, you can capture only part of it and you have only the distorted categories of rationalist theories modern psychology and science have provided to rely on. Second, regular and heavy use of the drug actually causes spiritual energy to increase. It develops your spiritual energy without developing your spiritual abilities. Thus, you get into a bind of increasing spiritual energy that has nowhere to go except into deeper escape or into the frustrating and suffocating channels of scientific-psychological theories. Moreover, you may actually impress others with “insights” you connect with these theories and with the “depths” of your understanding of them. You are likely to fall into pursuing more intense but empty worldly activities when off the drugs along with further refinement of the highs you experience when on the drug. Once this happens, you are on the road to disaster. Only intervention from above and outside can save you. A grace or a gift will come, but the chances that you will accept it are not good.
The upshot of all this is that mind-altering drugs are very dangerous, particularly to those who would otherwise have the best chance for spiritual development. These include those who are most emotionally, sensuously, and intellectually alert. None are in greater danger than those who are awake in all three ways. Those who are primarily visually sensitive, minor artists, for example, might use the drug to loosen the hold of old images and to stimulate and enrich the ones they then portray in their artistic medium. A film director might endlessly praise marijuana for stimulating his “creative” powers. It gives him, he says, a gold mind of visual images to re-produce on the screen. When the critics praise as a masterpiece the film he thus creates, it is not because it is an example of great art but only because of the novelty of the images to them. In this way the drug panders to the ego of the director as well as to the hunger for spiritual diversion in his audience. In both cases the drug not only perpetuates spiritual derailment but also enhances it. The greater the natural genius the individual and the more all three of their sensitivities are in balance, the more the world can appropriate them for its purposes. The flattery of the world for this kind of prostitution of the spirit is one of the hardest temptations for anyone, especially the young and innocent, to survive.
In an age where the young lack spiritual guides, it becomes more important than ever to help them understand, not that drugs are bad and must be avoided, but the paradox of why they can be valuable and dangerous and why they need to avoid indulging in them lightly. Only views that balance the spiritual benefits and dangers can help the young understand the seriousness of drug use. They need to know why drugs can be humanly bad even though they feel that they free them from a normal society they find suffocating to the mind and frustrating to the soul.
