Sobriety is a wonderful thing—though of course one must understand that it’s a rather erroneous notion of one interprets it naively. After all, your whole entire perception of reality is constituted by a cocktail of different neurotransmitters working in unison to enable you to be alive as well as be aware of being alive. When you intake intoxicants, you simply affect the way that some of these neurotransmitters behave, causing you to momentarily feel different from how you ordinarily feel.
Thus, when people think about sobriety, it is generally not intended to mean an entirely blank state of mind, pure from any affectations originating directly or indirectly through interplay with the external world. Instead it refers to the practice of abstinence from certain kinds of intoxicants, deemed to be intoxicants by the culture one is in—in our particular culture, most often things like alcohol, cannabis or other “drugs” that momentarily significantly alter your baseline level of consciousness. The whole notion of what is deemed a drug and what is not is extremely relative and whimsy.
The Fifth Precept
The fifth precept in Buddhism, which its practitioners vow to follow as a part of their path towards their liberation, encourages its followers to abstain from intoxicating substances. Alan Watts once said that this does not simply refer to abstinence from intoxicants; but more broadly from intoxication. Indeed, he was notorious for his drinking of alcohol, which undoubtedly accelerated his demise at the age of 59. When he was asked about this habit and about how could such a person whose whole life revolves around the explication of these spiritual ideas maintain such a degenerating habit, his answer was: “I always drink in an enlightened way.” I took this to mean that he was practicing his own interpretation of the fifth precept: drinking not to be drunk, but just for the sake of simply enjoying alcohol as one enjoys anything else; understanding that the baseline level of the consciousness of each of us is already a balance of profound intoxication we simply aren’t aware of because we are so used to it. When one really understands this, one becomes free to indulge in all manner of ephemeral states of intoxication without being quite intoxicated, or rather without being pushed off-center by states of intoxication.
Another interesting thing related to the paragraph above is that, as noted by Terence McKenna, the most potent psychedelics—such as DMT or psilocybin—are also neurochemically the closest to compounds already present in our brain. Indeed, DMT itself is present within many animals and plants already; it is very similar to the neurotransmitter serotonin, and psychedelics such as LSD, DMT and psilocybin interact with certain serotonin receptors, to whom they owe their psychoactive and perceptual effects.
Thus: if the most potent psychoactive substances are actually only slightly different from the neurotransmitters already present within all of us, what if the case is that our baseline level of consciousness indeed actually is the most weirdly psychedelic one of all? What if we just aren’t aware of it as such because we are so close to it, because it’s such a constituent part of our being; much as we aren’t aware of our brains since we owe our whole ability to be aware of things to them?
This understanding helps one see why so many practitioners of different spiritual paths advocate abstinence from intoxicating agents—they are simply so deeply aware of how weird life is in its own right. They don’t need to take periodical hallucinogenic trips to remind themselves of this; apprehending it as such comes to them naturally, because that’s the way that they are. Contemplative practices can also help one become aware of this true way of things. Regardless, it is quite a shame if one adopts the attitude that awareness of the psychedelic nature of reality is “pure” only when achieved through intrinsic practices, and holds that external agents are somehow impure or insufficient.
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In general, it is such a central feature of human beings to seek altered states of consciousness that it makes no sense to shun it, or to avoid examining it. Realizing also that everything we do is more or less a variation of this, it’s quite a shame how much this tendency is avoided or stigmatized in our culture. It could perhaps help us understand ourselves a lot more—though then again, most of our culture is exactly centered around making this as difficult as possible (certain drugs and psychedelics are indeed outlawed and heavily stigmatized; and it’s not to keep you safe).
Thank you for reading my thoughts.