Muktananda on Drugs
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before Jun 03, 2017
MiBeloved 5 years ago
Swami Muktananda came this morning on the astral side while I did breath infusion practice. He was reminiscing on the initial years when he first came to America. The main thing he said was the yogically-unprepared persons who came to him. He said this,
Fate has a sense of humor, obviously, because when I first got here, I was surrounded by all these free love people, the hippies. These were people with absolutely no background in yoga, at least in the present life. Perhaps these persons did yoga in previous lives or were in association with yogis in India in previous lives.
You can imagine that yoga begins with yama and niyama which are don’ts and dos. These people had no idea about that. They were in the process of deleting the don’ts and dos which were imposed on them in the culture of their birth.
Yoga begins with: ”Do not do this, Do this.” These persons had become completely callous to any sort of cultural restraint. So how was I to turn them into yogis?
You can see what my predicament was. If you are born Christian and reject all of that, then what is the possibility that you will accept rules from any other religious system? Yoga of course as Patanjali defined it does mention Ishwar, the Mahapurusha but he does not stipulate that as a religion. Still, yoga functioned in India alongside religion. In fact yoga was assisted by religious system. Religion assisted yoga.
But here providence threw me into a situation where I was challenged to make yogis out of bhogis. What is a bhogi? That is a person who is hedonistic, who is a pleasure seeker.
That is on the social side. Now on the transcendental side, we gain spiritual experiences through austerity in higher yoga, but there is a group of yogis who smoke ganja. That is how they get transcendental experiences. This method of using aushadi is mentioned in Patanjali and also by Krishna to Uddhava, even though neither of them recommended it.
Aushadi is Sanskrit for drugs.
So yes, these people were into aushadyananda or bliss (ananda) acquired through taking drugs (aushadi). I was kriyananda or bliss (ananda) acquired through mystic process (kriya). How does the teacher move these students from drug-induced transit consciousness to meditation-caused transit consciousness?
Once you attain spiritual happiness and supernatural perception though drugs, you will be disinclined to follow through with Patanjali ashtanga yoga. Why do those austerities, sitting in weird poses, breathing in special and unnatural ways for something which you can get by popping acid and injecting cocaine?
