Page 165 — Consider this:

1. Would you ride a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding “entheogenic” drug LSD?

And here’s a bonus question:

2. Why does an “expanded consciousness” include the inability to operate a motor vehicle? […]

Now, just why is it that people at higher levels of consciousness can’t seem to survive without one of us low-level folks there to help them out?

Page 171 — Buddhism isn’t about anything so diminutive as any of your mental states at all. It’s much deeper than that.
There is no optimal state of consciousness. Optimal is just an idea, another manifestation of the Great Somewhere Else. Consciousness is just an idea […]
Incredibly the belief that a lifetime–hundreds of thousands lifetimes, since our consciousness includes the [172] acquired cultural and social knowledge of our entire species’ history–of bad thinking habits can be altered in a single evening high on LSD continues to be talked about seriously by people who really ought to know better.

Are the visions you can experience on LSD “real” religious visions? Sure they are. And as such they are worse than useless. Religious visions and acid experiences are both fantasies, delusions, projections of your own hidden [ 173] desires. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, nothing to do with reality.

So that should clear up what Brad Warner said versus what I said, in case there was any confusion.

You know you guys, I like y’all. Tim, I friggin’ love your website here. Earlier today, after I had posted that last comment, I realized I was getting real worked up over this discussion. How silly, to get worked up over a metaphysical argument with people I’ve never met! I thought about it, and I decided I was getting angry at least partly because I was afraid that the endorsement (however partial) of drugs as a mystical tool on this site meant that I could no longer trust this site as a valid source of metaphysical mind-fodder or mystical “nudgings”. And I would not like that to happen. So I was angry in part because I like this site and the conversations on it so much. Sorry if I was a jerk.

I believe that although I don’t think drugs are a valid source of enlightenment experiences and are definitely not for me for a number of reasons, there’s really nothing ethically wrong with their use in general. I don’t look down my nose at you, Tim, for recreational marijuana use, and therefore — I guess I may not, from that position, be able to fault anyone for drug use that is more than recreational. I still believe what Brad Warner says about not clinging too tightly to one’s mental experiences, whether drug-induced or not, and that the true goal of any good spirituality is a more ethical lifestyle, rather than any given type of spiritual orgasm. I hope that even if you all do decide that you like to pursue “mind-blowing” mental states, you may think of this.

Religious visions and acid experiences are both fantasies, delusions, projections of your own hidden desires.

It seems you’re implying that your hidden desires are a bad thing. They are not, unless they remain hidden, from which point they will drive your life without you being the wiser. On that logic, it seems sound to me to consciously interact with your projected fantasies, so that you may overcome them, that they may no longer be hidden and thus have no power over you. A truly ethical system, I think, would demand that awareness - though drugs aren’t the only method to achieve such projection

They have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, nothing to do with reality.

The truth and reality is that we all have hidden desires and that they rule us. So they do in fact have quite a lot to do with truth and reality.

I figure now I’ll be hounded for blindly quoting a master instead of “thinking for myself”, like if I got bombed I would somehow see the light.

I don’t think anybody is here to hound anyone else. I think we’re just here to share our experiences and bounce them off one another. It only makes sense to look at maps drawn by others before and during your own expedition.

In any event, I’m also confused by your change of heart. As someone else pointed out above, your initial response was a dismissive one. You wrote, “Weed makes you think stupid sh*t. End of story, man.” And now here you are seeming to say that drugs can and do provide such experiences, but that for moral reasons, we should not use them. Am I interpreting you wrong?

Sorry for not being more clear, Tim. I do not think drugs can lead to real mystical experiences; what I think is wrongheaded is the attempt to use drugs in this manner instead of long, dedicated practice. I don’t think it’s evil, I just think it’s a little misguided.

Response to Ronin:

Yea, maybe the ones with no damn concentration. I’m certainly no Buddhist monk (though i think zac is, so definitely ask him about it), but from personal experience I can tell you that it takes about 3 months of (somewhat) dedicated meditation to have some experiences that will blow your mind. And i’m fucking slow.

Maybe you and I disagree on what spirituality means, Ronin, but I believe real spiritual growth (which I admit I have not had in the slightest) means becoming a more ethical person — not having a mind-blowing mental experience.

Allow me to quote someone who I think, unlike myself, actually has achieved some measure of mystical attainment of some sort: Zen Buddhist Brad Warner, from his book Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality. In this chapter excerpt, he mainly talks about LSD, but I think it’s relevant to any drug:

Page 165 — Consider this:

1. Would you ride a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding “entheogenic” drug LSD?

And here’s a bonus question:

2. Why does an “expanded consciousness” include the inability to operate a motor vehicle? [...]

Now, just why is it that people at higher levels of consciousness can’t seem to survive without one of us low-level folks there to help them out?

Page 171 — Buddhism isn’t about anything so diminutive as any of your mental states at all. It’s much deeper than that.
There is no optimal state of consciousness. Optimal is just an idea, another manifestation of the Great Somewhere Else. Consciousness is just an idea [...]
Incredibly the belief that a lifetime–hundreds of thousands lifetimes, since our consciousness includes the [172] acquired cultural and social knowledge of our entire species’ history–of bad thinking habits can be altered in a single evening high on LSD continues to be talked about seriously by people who really ought to know better.

Are the visions you can experience on LSD “real” religious visions? Sure they are. And as such they are worse than useless. Religious visions and acid experiences are both fantasies, delusions, projections of your own hidden [ 173] desires. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, nothing to do with reality.

There’s also another chapter where Warner even has dismissing things to say about the mystical experiences derived from meditation instead of drugs:

Page 181– but my big experience of merging with God, however profound and moving it was at the time, was in the past. [...]
This kind of thing is a common problem among zazen practitioners. They have these really cool experiences, or really cutting insights, and then they latch onto them forever, like a pitbull on a postman’s ass–effectively missing [182] out on the rest of their lives.

I figure now I’ll be hounded for blindly quoting a master instead of “thinking for myself”, like if I got bombed I would somehow see the light.

So here’s what I’ve decided for myself: I can’t pretend to have let go of anger, greed, ignorance, or ego. The rare times I try to meditate, I do so in order to help develop my concentration and maybe someday begin to give myself a long-lasting feeling of interconnection with others. In turn, I hope that developing these qualities may help me be a better, more ethical person. I figure that meditating long enough might give one neat-feeling experiences, and that maybe, just maybe, some of these experiences gained under long practice may serve as guideposts along a neverending path of personal development. However, I believe that none of these probable experiences should be the goal of the mystical/spiritual path — nothing but ethics should be. I believe that attempted shortcuts through drugs are nothing more than smoke and mirrors before one’s mind, obscuring true clarity — like any quick fix, they don’t have any lasting effect and may even push one in the wrong direction. Whether drug experiences have any chemical similarities with experiences achieved through meditation practices is not really important to me. I know that they are dangerous for one’s mind and body — something I’d decided for years before reading Warner — and that any possible similarity between drug experiences and meditation experiences (which aren’t the point anyway) don’t make much difference in anything other than a negative way.

I want.

where they could ‘feel’ language, and read through touch, and language had all these extra dimensions of meaning that people in later times who would come across these old texts written on stones, would not be able to decipher because they had lost those deeper perceptual capacities. They could only read the ’surface’ meanings of the language, which were like the tip of the iceberg.

Holy shit! Yeah, that’s it. That’s a very succint way of saying what I was trying to say. Thank you!

This talk of actual energy structures behind the words in the bible, which are what actually change people, reminded me of that.

[quote]To reformulate my experience in these terms, I was able to directly perceive the underlying “substance” which caused the “accidents” of words, images, and physical things to be perceived by us in ordinary reality. I was also able to see that multiple “accidents” can and do spring from the same underlying “substance”…[/quote]

i use the ‘accidental’ method to discover the power in words all the time. it’s one of the ways i communicate directly with the divine, or implicit order. i have been spending a lot of time teaching myself how to gain useful information from the fractals one finds in nature; clouds, the arrangement of leaves on a tree and the way in which they move in the wind, correlating patterns that emerge in traffic and in chaotic places in cities (i was a bicycle messenger for over ten years) and learning how to put this information to use. it’s a highly idiosyncratic process but it can be immensely useful if you use it sparingly and don’t take it too seriously. it’s part of the method i use to see around things.

i don’t remember where i got this idea from, which makes me sad ‘cos i’d like to give credit where credit is definitely due, but for a long time i’ve been of the opinion that all the spacetime events in our perceivable universe happen simultaneously; the universe, it seems, turns out to be merely a big hologram which our bodies arrange into a linear timeline. linear time appears to be merely an artifact of our sensate apparatus. the big bang and the big crush and everything in between seem to occur in a linear timeframe only because our brains edit the information they recieve in a linear fashion.

thanks again for sharing, i must sleep. i’ll keep reading your blog, i really enjoy it. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

-k

Sorry, but statements like this really get on my nerves. Was it cheating for Peruvian “shamans” to use ayahuasca to commune with the jungle? Was it cheating for Hindu Saivites to use marijuana to commune with Mahavira? Was it cheating for North American Indians to use peyote to commune with their ancestors? Was it cheating for the shamans of Siberia to use fly agaric mushrooms to…well, I don’t actually know what they used it for…but cheating? What game are you playing? Do you have a rule book, cause if so, I’d love to see it.

“Buddhist monks take decades of meditation practice before they have experiences like that.”

Yea, maybe the ones with no damn concentration. I’m certainly no Buddhist monk (though i think zac is, so definitely ask him about it), but from personal experience I can tell you that it takes about 3 months of (somewhat) dedicated meditation to have some experiences that will blow your mind. And i’m fucking slow.

“Decades of training and cultivating virtues are the only way, I have heard, that one can reach mystical states.”

I got my father to join a yoga school partly to help him deal with his diabetes. After a few months of practice he attended a weekend seminar where they ended up “playing” with kundalini chakras. No real meditation experience, and in one weekend he was able to feel the chakras and have some interesting experiences. Not on par with the intensity of Tim’s experience, but nevertheless it took one…1…one weekend to get started. Certainly not decades of training.

“Weed makes you think stupid sh*t. End of story, man.”

And yea, you missed the whole point with this comment. I’m with Mickey,”Dumbest comment ever…”

Ronin

But isn’t using chemical substances to try to induce mystical states kind of, well, cheating?

What? Where in this article did I say that I smoked pot in order to induce a mystical state? That certainly was not the case. I smoked it in order to enjoy myself, to “party” with a group of people as I have done on scattered occasions in the past. I was actually plunged unwillingly into something far in excess of my expectations and outside of anything that I had consciously wanted to do.

Buddhist monks take decades of meditation practice before they have experiences like that.

Are you a Buddhist monk? For that matter, am I? Why should I or anyone else use them as my model? Some people would argue that they are simply going too slow or that their techniques were better suited to a specific part of the world and a specific culture and point in history.

Decades of training and cultivating virtues are the only way, I have heard, that one can reach mystical states.

Notice you qualify this statement with an “I have heard” rather than a “from my own experience” - which is the spirit in which I offered this story to others to learn from. People are free to see it as a positive or negative example (what to do or what not to do) or neither. It’s up to them.

Ultimately, I have gone back and forth on this subject of whether or not drugs and other “shortcuts” are an effective method, if they are dangerous, or whatever. I have come to no conclusions. If anything, I have become less certain of the things that I thought I knew.

In any event, I’m also confused by your change of heart. As someone else pointed out above, your initial response was a dismissive one. You wrote, “Weed makes you think stupid sh*t. End of story, man.” And now here you are seeming to say that drugs can and do provide such experiences, but that for moral reasons, we should not use them. Am I interpreting you wrong?

very fascinating stuff. i also had a weird chakra experience when i was really high, except i just got scared and paranoid and thought i was going to die.

“Thought cannot restore wholeness because by definition thought is also fragmented.”

“…the outer appearance of the Bible, the actual language and stories with which we are all familiar is NOT the actual real substance of the Bible.

Heh heh…that’s what the angel told John Dee.

BTW, Tim- if you’re interested, Satyananda’s “Kundalini Tantra” is an excellent introduction. Aryeh Kaplan’s commentary of the SY also has some very interesting ideas in it.

Don’t burn out by going too fast though… You wouldn’t be the first one.

Thanks! Yeah, I am becoming very conscious of that. You can only expand so fast without exploding. At least all the groundwork that I have done for these past few years is really coming in handy now though…

Well, actually…going by what others have mentioned, if we’re going to say that the drug doesn’t bring out anything that isn’t already there, then maybe it SEEMS like there’s “stupid shit” that kind of occurs in your mental process and it SEEMS like it was created by the drug…but maybe what’s really happening is that it’s just stupid shit that was aching to get out of the dark recesses of your brain and the drug just made it easier for that to happen. Sort of like taking an ex-lax. you know…for “stupid shit”.

BUT… how is what Tim described “stupid”? That’s not stupid, that’s fucking awesome! Even if he had just read a bunch of stuff about chakras and all that, why does that diminish the experience? what’s the difference between “really” experiencing the chakras and the “stupid shit” experience of the chakras? Wouldn’t that whole mess about the experience being “legit” be in the mind of the beholder?

Well, actually…going by what others have mentioned, if we’re going to say that the drug doesn’t bring out anything that isn’t already there, then maybe it SEEMS like there’s “stupid shit” that kind of occurs in your mental process and it SEEMS like it was created by the drug…but maybe what’s really happening is that it’s just stupid shit that was aching to get out of the dark recesses of your brain and the drug just made it easier for that to happen. Sort of like taking an ex-lax. you know…for “stupid shit”.

BUT… how is what Tim described “stupid”? That’s not stupid, that’s fucking awesome! Even if he had just read a bunch of stuff about chakras and all that, why does that diminish the experience? what’s the difference between “really” experiencing the chakras and the “stupid shit” experience of the chakras? Wouldn’t that whole mess about the experience being “legit” be in the mind of the beholder?

Did the founding of America take place in linear time or mythic time?

That’s a really interesting question which I am going to think deeply about

I believe the saying ‘As above, so below’ sheds a lot of light on the experiences you describe in both yourself and schizophrenics. I’ve been there too, and it feels quite different from “normal” consciousness. It feels like everything, including yourself, is *being* and *doing* by itself. The result is that everything is synchronized/resonant, meaning that thought, word, feeling, deed, and environment are operating together harmoniously as one.

Yes! I totally get what you are saying. Being in that state reminds me of a few different things: (1) that everything is animated by itself (animism) and everything is equally alive; (2) which leads to this sort of automatic feeling of everything - like events are unfolding as they must, as though they only have one way they can unfold - but it’s not like your choice is restricted. It’s not like you don’t have Free Will. It’s a weird paradox; (3) something like what they describe experiencing being at one with the Tao of nature must be like…

Some Reiki practitioners use this symbol, not as a Reiki symbol, but as a sacrad symbol, that enhances overall healing energies. Does it look or feel anything like what you were seeing?

I don’t know that it “looked” like that, but I also realized during that experience that symbols work the same way as language that I described above. The part of it that we see or reproduce through a drawing is really just the “tip of the iceberg”. And the way that a symbol we create “looks” is not necessarily indicative of how it would look were you to experience it directly. So I think you do have to go through this other channel of feeling it and I would say that there is definitely something similar in this symbol to what I experienced.

Ya know, you’re right. That is an excellent point: the Mythic and the Historical need not be opposed to one another, or they, in fact, go hand in hand in many instances. I do tend to fall into that trap myself many times- either-or instead of either-or/both-and/neither.

But I guess I should clarify one point. In the context of Paul, it doesn’t seem that he saw the life of Jesus in Historical terms at all. What I was trying to say very poorly above was that, even though you can read many different angles in Paul, the most accurate reading seems to be Jesus in the Mythic- his actions, deeds, and trials occuring purely in the Absolute. For Paul, there may truly have been a Jesus the man, but He was completely irrelevent. Jesus the Risen, Jesus the Mythic, Jesus the God- this is what Paul was all about, and this was the Jesus that he referred to.

On the ther hand, the writer of, say, Luke would have a viewpoint of Christ’s historical life and Christ’s mythology exactly as you describe, as going hand in hand with each other: with angels dropping in, devils cast out, demons showing up, as well as a pretty linear description of the events in Christ’s life.

Your point is excellent, though. I need to go back and read “Don Quixote” again…

Ronin

Yea, its certainly quite possible that Paul thought the Crucifiction “literally” occured.

We hypostatize information into objects.

Linear history correpsonds with the ‘accidental’ or ‘empty’ literal objects of day-to-day reality. Just as every word of letters and phonemes is the after-image of the primal substance, so the events of linear history (accessible only in concrete words and pictures) and quantitative science (events hypostasized into quantitative concepts, expressed with symbol manipulation) are the images “seen in a glass [mirror] darkly”.

There is no dilemma in choosing to situate events in either historical or super-historical time. One is the image of the other, through and by which the other is known. The tendency to arbitrarily pick one over the other is espescially prevalent in Christianity; Christian culture tends towards choosing one “true” explanation of any particular holy text. Meister Eckhart is a notable counter-example.

Did the founding of America take place in linear time or mythic time? The mythic overtones of the Israel-centered conflicts cannot be overlooked. What about when Cortez discovered the New World?

Borges explores this idea with The Quixote in “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote”.

Also about chakras: I’m in a similar place, just beginning to see and experience them as somehow real and not just metaphorical ‘things’. I just picked up a brilliant book by Judith Anodea called ‘Eastern Body, Western Mind’. It is an excellent consolidation of chakra and Jungian psychology, highly recommended for both healing and understanding.

Finally, a comment about language and meaning. I believe the saying ‘As above, so below’ sheds a lot of light on the experiences you describe in both yourself and schizophrenics. I’ve been there too, and it feels quite different from “normal” consciousness. It feels like everything, including yourself, is *being* and *doing* by itself. The result is that everything is synchronized/resonant, meaning that thought, word, feeling, deed, and environment are operating together harmoniously as one. There is one rhythm, expressed on all levels of consciousness, including the Rational, the Mythic, the Magical, and the Archaic. As above, so below. It is dancing the dance. Playing your part. Singing your song. Synchronicity. Etc etc etc… great stuff!

Thanks for sharing.

Some Reiki practitioners use this symbol, not as a Reiki symbol, but as a sacrad symbol, that enhances overall healing energies. Does it look or feel anything like what you were seeing?

F.

Dude, you were stoned. You’ve read about chakras, and under the influence of a bunch of weed, you thought you really knew the existence of chakras. Weed makes you think stupid sh*t. End of story, man.

Dumbest comment ever! Remind me never to tell this guy any of my cool stories!

regarding the spinning rectangles:
personally, i consider Ezekiel’s Vision to be the most authentic visionary experience recorded in the bible, a throwback to more ancient Hekhalot/Merkavah cosmologies.
the Chariot spins through itself like a higher dimensional mobius strip. each bearer Archangel of the Quarters is itself a four-part vortex through the four qabalistic worlds.

what the hell does that have to do with your damn rectangles?
well, consider the theory that John Dee’s Enochian system was an attempt to reconstruct, or build something similar to, this Chariot mysticism.
take a look at his Great Table: each quarter is an Archangel, each quarter’s quarter holds a number of rectangular angelic names. from the smallest level of division up, picture each set spinning around the next: a giant hypercubic vortex of rectangles.

not necessarily the same thing, but that’s what i saw when i read your description.

Yea, its certainly quite possible that Paul thought the Crucifiction “literally” occured. There are many permutations of this historical vs. mythical Jesus game we can psossibly see in Paul: The Crucifiction occurred on Earth & the Resurrection occurred in the Absolute (Mythic); the whole thing occured in the Absolute; Jesus lived and taught, but everything after that was Mythic; Paul spun the whole Jesus yarn wholesale; Jesus may have died and Resurrected just as orthodoxy states…

Like I said, “there is evidence to suggest.” I am certainly not Biblical scholar so I’m not gonna come down emphatically for one angle or another, but the evidence does lean stronger towards a mostly Mythic interp than a Literal interp for Paul.

Of course my favorite version is where Jesus punk’d Simon, hence Cruci-Fiction.

And yea, Pythogoras seems to get the short end of the stick in the occult. I mean his cult seems to be the originator of a lot of genius-god, super-man, divine-man mythology…yet he always gets left out. I’ll bet he gets pissed off about that (he was supposed to be immortal, too…wasn’t he?)

Ronin

“…the outer appearance of the Bible, the actual language and stories with which we are all familiar is NOT the actual real substance of the Bible. It is simply an after-effect of the MUCH deeper, more meaningful and powerful structures or impulses which underly our reality.”

This reminded me of something Colin Wilson wrote. Forgive me for just copying it, but it explained to me the role of sacred scripture in religion very well:

“In speaking of them, it is necessary to remember that what they left recorded on paper was the least important part of their lives. It is the lesson that is expressed in the Chauang Tzu book in the story of the Duke of Ch’i and his wheelwright. It tells how the wheelwright saw the Duke reading, and called to ask him what the book was about. ‘The words of sages,’ the Duke explained. ‘The lees and scum of bygone men,’ the wheelwright said; and when the irritated Duke asked him what the devil he meant by this, the wheelwright told him: ‘There is an art in wheel-makeing that I cannot explain even to my son. It cannot be put into words. That is why I cannot let him take over my work, and I am still making wheels myself at seventy. It must have been the same with the sages: all that was worth handing on died with them. The rest they put into their books. That is why I said you are reading the lees and scum of dead men.’”

Now that doesn’t mean you can’t use “the lees and scum” as a pointer towards the Vision, just that taking the “scum” as an end-all is ultimately a dead-end.

Oh, and to add a thought to the Bible as “mythic time,” there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that St. Paul viewed the story of Christ as occuring on the Mythic plane. As one example, you can note that in none of the letters or writings attributed to Paul did he ever mention the “historical” events of Christ’s life…even though he lived closer to the time of Christ than any other writer in the Bible and would have been uniquely able to reference first-hand accounts of Christ if he chose to. Instead ALL his references to Christ come in the (exact) forms of the ressurected god myths of the Roman empire, myths he was intimately familiar with.

You’re a bastard, by the way. I gotta get some work done today and you keep distracting me…keep it up, though…

Ronin

When you realize that it is your thinking itself, as in a PROCESS, that must change.

You experienced mentation-by-form.

Can that be invoked in your daily life?

Castaneda (that old showman, may he rest in peace) also maintained that drugs were a temporary shortcut to what should be rightfully ours. Gurdjieff also indicated that Eastern schools used them sometimes to prove to students of their own potential which they had to work for.

Also, Andrew Weil points out something similar in his old books about drugs: that they don’t put anything in you, they just help you trigger naturally existing states. And he says the point of using drugs is that you learn to do these things without them…

Your crown chakra opened up. It was either closed or partially closed and you experienced the big hook up with God, Higher Power, whatever you want to call it.

Kind of sounds like the image you are describing is similar to the lotus flower opening, which is a symbol of the crown chakra and was incorporated as part of the picture you posted. I would imagine there are lots of ways to feel a connection or hook up with The Source.

Putting your crown chakra at brown clears other beings from your space which is helpful to do before shifting colors. If you want easy access to God/Higher Power try imagining your crown chakra at gold, white, or violet…all of which have been associated with the crown chakra. But quite frankly I have a feeling that lots of colors would bring similar sensations depending upon what works for the individual. Gold and white seem to be the colors must discussed by people that I’ve heard. (Lately, I’ve been hearing about platinum but in a different sense…must experiment more….)

Anyhow, ror more ideas, etc, on the grid/matrix, take a look at…
Channeled Kryon who likes to talk about the grid
EMF Balancing with the Grid

The drug puts nothing in you that is not already there. It simply rearranges.

Your subjective experience is possible because you are a meaning-making creature.

By rights, we should be able to mentate both by thought and by form. And without extra chemical assistance.

Tim, I know you’re not a jukebox, but can you put together a post on something called “metacognition”, if that interests you?

It’s been a particular concern of mine recently as I reach the limits of what I call “my mind.”

When you close your eyes, look steadily into your inner field of vision until light, color and patterns begin to appear. (This is looking with your attention and not with the physical eyes which should remain relaxed.) When most people close their eyes, initially they see a black void, but by looking steadily into this void, various colors and patterns will begin to appear. When this happens, simply observe them with your full, undivided attention as if you were intently watching a movie. Then periodically focus all of your attention within the smallest point that you can see in the center of your field of vision, and pierce through that point. After you have done this, the light will again blaze forth from the point in a new burst of energy, and you will find yourself at a higher rate of vibration or plane of energy. With continued practice of this form of meditation, you will become immersed in a blazing sea of light; and you will become a center from which that spiritual power is radiated.

By concentrating the attention in the Sahasraram Chakra or Thousand-Petalled Lotus, located at the top of the head, an experienced meditator can release an even more powerful radiation of light and spiritual energy. (It may take more work to activate this chakra; the beginner can get more immediate results by looking through the Agna Chakra or Third Eye Center.) The Sahasraram Wheel is the highest chakra; called the “Doorway to the Infinite” and the Brahmarandra or Hole of Brahma, it is the most powerful and spiritual of all the centers that can be awakened in man (with the possible exception of the Heart Chakra which is considered by some yogis to be of equal importance). When the Sahasraram Chakra is fully activated in a perfected yogin or saint, the white fire of Cosmic Kundalini descends upon him and blends with his own rising kundalini force, and the white light of spirituality radiates for miles around.

http://www.erowid.org/spirit/yoga/yoga_info1.shtml

You mean like the phrase, “human body”? We create both the common image that goes with these words and the detailed scientific model of reality in order to explain experience.

http://www.tracesfrombeyond.com/

There’s a saying which is quoted by Lon Milo Duquette, but I forget who said it originally: “It’s all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is.”

I’ve had this experience myself. We did a summoning of Gabriel, the archangel, and I didn’t understand the rules. I became violently ill, because although I heard the angel telling me what to do, I was attempting not to do it or say anything, because it was someone else who was the focus of the ritual.

Big mistake. Threw up all over the place. Listen to the spirits. And don’t eat before rituals. there’s a reason for fasting.

That was one of the weirder experiences I’ve had so far. It shook me, and kind of proved that this stuff I’m messing with is real, if not necessarily scientifically verifiable.