I have three themes in this and tomorrow’s post: life reviews, experiential space, and the value of an LSD experience. This post is by way of an introduction, and tomorrow I’ll share story about the LSD experience.
A life review can be approached from a number of angles. I’ve done several over the years. At some point, I did a life review examining how experiences of the subject-object division in perception had unfolded throughout my life. In that review I looked at the development (and the distortions) of my sense of what I call ‘experiential space,’ and how that interacted with my sense of ‘self.’
I included in that review the effect of taking LSD in my late teens, which produced a profound union of ‘experiential space,’ expansive experience of clarity, and the presence of blissful well-being.
I took LSD twice in the late sixties; or, as we said then, “dropped acid.” Only twice, because, as I was a greenhorn Buddhist meditator at the time, I was starting to take care of my body (after the alcohol abuse of my mid-to-late teens). I began a life of non-violence, in a society waging a vicious war in Vietnam; and so, I decided that non-violence included non-violence to my brain. (Despite the sweet experiences, LSD isn’t good for brains. I don’t recommend it, for health reasons.)
I basically have no remorse about taking LSD, though. Recently, I mentioned it in social conversation, when offering an instance of something relevant to our conversation, but the mention of LSD as a source of a positive experience threw my host momentarily off-centre. It seemed that my friend was confusing two things: the value of an experience, and the value of the means to the experience. That set me thinking about the value of that experience, and I went back to read the particular life review.
I’m sharing this, also, because it has been, for me, a life-long difficulty, to convey subtle-energy experiences without sounding merely intellectual. ‘Experiential space,’ for instance, isn’t something the average person has named for themselves. So, as a concrete instance of Bliss and Space (the basis of Deva-realms), and Death, I thought this anecdote would be useful.
At the same time, it’s a tale about confirming what the meditation masters have been saying for millennia, that the mind is like space. In fact, the ‘space’ element in the Nikayas is not about external space. It’s about experiential space – about proportion and interaction. (See Sue Hamilton, Early Buddhism: A New Approach)
Sue Hamilton writes: “One needs to bear in mind here that according to the early Buddhist texts, form is understood to range through a wide range of degrees of density and subtlety; it need not be visible.”
Tomorrow: A Story about the Mind as Non-Localised Space