Integrating Entheogenic Experiences
Dec 9, 2002
I think that one of the main hurdles for mystics or entheogen users is trying to learn to remember or integrate experiences. I think it is the nature of non-ordinary experiences to fade quickly as the pressures and concerns of daily life encroach.
If, for instance, you have a very strong experience of 'god is love' or that you should 'love everyone without reproach' (seems to be a non-unique experience type)... how do you reconcile that feeling with the feelings that you normally have about people at work, on the highway, on TV?
Many people who have the 'Unconditional Love' experience "integrate" it by deciding it was a flight of fancy and do not attempt to make it part of their normal lives. Others think that 'Love Others' is a wonderful way to be and to see the world, but also believe it's impractical or impossible to achieve in this world... Still others (a minority?) believe that the mystical experience can become part of their normal world, that through certain practices or modes of thought that they can approach Mystical Love in their baseline consciousness.
My first couple of (what I think of) as Mystical Experiences were not entheogen inspired, but they were spurious events that I had no intention or ability to try to understand. They were just 'weird' or 'interesting' and didnt contain any great Universal Truths.
When I decided to try to encorporate entheogens into my 'spiritual' / personal path, I already had a framework in mind for how to change myself. I believe it is possible to change even the most deep seated aspects of my behaviour, reactions, personality. I have a few techniques that I like to use to try to affect these changes and I think they tend to work with mystical experience as well.
One of them is to go to a quiet place and actively try to Remember the feeling that I would like to save. Its a bit like trying to remember a dream, if you follow the dream through in your mind just after waking up it is easier to remember later, writing things down can be a very good mnemonic tool, if you then run through it again several times that day, it can become fairly well rooted. Most of the depth of the images and feelings starts to fade and start to become 2D, but Ive found it possible to recapture fleeting full-feelings by trying.
I think that most memories work this way and its not necessarily special to mystical memories, but what is special about mystical experiences is that they are extremely difficult to recreate and difficult to find people who share them, whereas we can go to work each day and suffer very similarly until this work-mode of existence becomes so concrete there is no way to escape the 'reality' of it.
If, for instance, you have a very strong experience of 'god is love' or that you should 'love everyone without reproach' (seems to be a non-unique experience type)... how do you reconcile that feeling with the feelings that you normally have about people at work, on the highway, on TV?
Many people who have the 'Unconditional Love' experience "integrate" it by deciding it was a flight of fancy and do not attempt to make it part of their normal lives. Others think that 'Love Others' is a wonderful way to be and to see the world, but also believe it's impractical or impossible to achieve in this world... Still others (a minority?) believe that the mystical experience can become part of their normal world, that through certain practices or modes of thought that they can approach Mystical Love in their baseline consciousness.
My first couple of (what I think of) as Mystical Experiences were not entheogen inspired, but they were spurious events that I had no intention or ability to try to understand. They were just 'weird' or 'interesting' and didnt contain any great Universal Truths.
When I decided to try to encorporate entheogens into my 'spiritual' / personal path, I already had a framework in mind for how to change myself. I believe it is possible to change even the most deep seated aspects of my behaviour, reactions, personality. I have a few techniques that I like to use to try to affect these changes and I think they tend to work with mystical experience as well.
One of them is to go to a quiet place and actively try to Remember the feeling that I would like to save. Its a bit like trying to remember a dream, if you follow the dream through in your mind just after waking up it is easier to remember later, writing things down can be a very good mnemonic tool, if you then run through it again several times that day, it can become fairly well rooted. Most of the depth of the images and feelings starts to fade and start to become 2D, but Ive found it possible to recapture fleeting full-feelings by trying.
I think that most memories work this way and its not necessarily special to mystical memories, but what is special about mystical experiences is that they are extremely difficult to recreate and difficult to find people who share them, whereas we can go to work each day and suffer very similarly until this work-mode of existence becomes so concrete there is no way to escape the 'reality' of it.