los drugas

Orsi makes a great point about drugs and how they are not neccesarily needed. The evidence that shaman/ vision seekers and mystics from each and every spiritual tradition have messed with whatever it was around that could introduce their minds to another state of being, often perceived as a different 'realm.' The Arabs ate hash, the Scythians smoked pot, avinida muscaria for everybody in Europe (there is even a picture of this mushroom on a fresco from Rome titled, 'the tree of life', so yea, maybe even Jesus was a shroom-head)... search for images on google.
But some Buddhist sects purport similar states of conciousnes just from sitting still for hours on end, and when the Lakota Suoix wanted to talk to the spirits they deprived themselves of sleep and sweated intensely, and when the Celts wanted to divine their next king they ate pounds of raw meat! Im sure, sleep deprivation and food poisoning can make you trip balls, probably the same state Mohamad was in (drug induced or not) when he ascended to heaven on the dome of the rock.
BUt what about just staying still and meditating? Could it be that when we merely stop distracting ourselves that we emerge into a kind of conciousnes not bound by normal rational rules of nature, but ones of symbolism, like those of the spirit world?
I think it is so, that we can all reach the prophetic state that Blake was so fond of, and, like Dorothy, we only need what we have to get us there -but dont make a drug your only ticket, that leads to a kind of spiritually justified dependence. And none of the ancients thought increased dependence on corporeal things was any good.
Instead, we ought to see stressed importance on drugs in spirituality as a kind of bastardization of a revolutionary state of mind, a castration of spirituality into the eunuch of blind consumerism. Borring. Dull. Predictable. But most importantly, and in the style of the water genie: sterile, impotent, degenerate, non-creative, lacking in: rigor, virility, potency, vitality, vigor, semen/vaginal fluid.
Hippies...
;)just kidding, not all of you.